As of press time, more than 1500 IT decision-makers have already participated in ETR's January 2024 Technology Spending Intentions Survey (TSIS), including 258 representing Fortune 500 and 361 representing Global 2000 organizations. ETR's Research and Analytics Team has published the Early Takeaways report, leveraging preliminary data to examine sectors with improving/declining 2024 spending intent, forecasts for 2024 IT spending growth, and inflections captured at the vendor level. The article below will highlight a few key trends, but the entire report and underlying data are available exclusively on the ETR platform. Log in here, or get your own free trial started.
We begin this analysis by looking at overall IT budget growth. Leveraging the data visualization below, we see that Small and Midsize subsamples indicate the highest increase in year-over-year (y/y) spending for Total 2024 vs. Total 2023, at 6.5% and 5.2%, respectively, while the average spend increase for 2024 among All Respondents rose to 4.3% y/y. Fortune 500 respondents indicate a 3.2% growth in spend y/y, showing nominal improvement since the last survey, though still below the mean average. Meanwhile, the spending outlook among Global 2000 respondents remains grim, falling to an expected annual growth rate of 2.2%, down from the expectations of 2.6% growth that was captured during the prior survey period.
Moving on to some highlights of the sector-level data. In this chart, sectors above (or below) the dotted line are those whose Net Scores have increased (or decreased) significantly compared to their Net Score in the previous year. In this survey period, most sectors exhibit a year-over-year improvement in spending intentions, most notably within the Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence sector. Some other important sector movements include the rise in Cloud Computing, potentially signaling that the extended period of cloud spending audits is tapering off. The ETR data also captured a rise in both Outsourced IT and IT Services, a potentially positive early indicator for IT spending as organizations are indicating a willingness to engage third parties for long-delayed IT projects (a notion also supported by ETR's recent Macro Trends survey). ETR data also suggests a possible hardware refresh cycle as supply chain issues and spending cuts have slowed the normal cyclical nature of hardware spending, and pandemic-era devices are aging out of optimal performance. From a data perspective, we captured increases in the PC/Laptop and Storage sectors to corroborate this theme. Inversely, Data Colocation Centers and Robotic Process Automation are the only two sectors to register significant year-over-year declines in spending.
Stay tuned for the next newsletter release, where we will dig into some of the vendor-level data, highlighting which technology companies captured the most significant increase (and declines) in spending intentions and overall market pervasion. And remember, data from ETR's January 2024 Technology Spending Intentions Survey is tentatively scheduled to finalize on January 5th, at which point the ETR Research Team will prepare to publish related vendor, sector, and macro-level reports, as well as two webinars, Macro Views Findings Webinar on January 12th and the full January TSIS Findings Webinar on January 19th. Reach out to the service team if you haven't yet scheduled time to run through the most recent data with us. If you're not yet a subscriber, please contact us, and we can grant you access via a free trial to get you started on the ETR research and data journey.
Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) is a technology market research firm that leverages proprietary data from our targeted IT decision maker (ITDM) community to provide actionable insights about spending intentions and industry trends. Since 2010, we have worked diligently at achieving one goal: eliminating the need for opinions in enterprise research, which are often formed from incomplete, biased, and statistically insignificant data. Our community of ITDMs represents $1+ trillion in annual IT spend and is positioned to provide best-in-class customer/evaluator perspectives. ETR’s proprietary data and insights from this community empower institutional investors, technology companies, and ITDMs to navigate the complex enterprise technology landscape amid an expanding marketplace. Discover what ETR can do for you at www.etr.ai