ETR's JUL24 Macro Views Findings Report

ETR recently conducted and published the findings from its quarterly Macro Views survey. The July 2024 Macro Views Survey captured responses from 1,768 IT decision makers (ITDMs), with nearly a quarter of respondents from Global 2000 organizations and 75% holding C-suite or Director-level titles. IT spend estimates for the full-year 2024 spend are more cautious than January levels of 4.3% but ticked higher this survey from 3.4% to 3.7%. Since the January polling window, the downward revision in full-year IT spending growth is less prevalent among large enterprises (-0.5 percentage points), while small organizations (-1.8 percentage points) indicate a much larger decline.

As seen below, a notable divergence is seen when parsing the spending estimates by job title. While C-suite respondents have tempered their initial year-start estimates, VP / Director-level respondents have lowered their revised spending projections to a greater degree. Meanwhile, practitioner-level estimates have rebounded considerably compared to weaker data captured three months ago. While all regional subsamples now estimate slower growth than the January estimates, APAC, EMEA, and North American respondents revised projections above the prior survey levels.

In gauging pricing increases across enterprise technology, Cloud has seen the smallest average change in pricing over the past six months compared to Hardware, Outsourced Services, and Software. On average, respondents indicated Cloud (IaaS, PaaS) pricing had increased +2.5% in the past six months, with 54% indicating that cloud vendors have raised pricing and 16% citing a magnitude of 6% or greater. On average, respondents indicated Hardware pricing has increased +2.9% in the past six months, consistent with the prior survey. Software saw the highest average pricing change rate at 3.6% (shown below), slower than three months ago. Meanwhile, Outsourced Services saw the sharpest decline of the four groups.

ETR rotates technology subsectors on a quarterly basis to gauge priorities across different areas. In the JUL24 Macro Views Survey, we reviewed Enterprise Applications (below), where CRM captured the highest average priority rating, with Financial Management following closely behind. Similarly, we conducted that analysis within the greater Database / Data Warehousing subsector in the full report.

Transitioning to a sneak peek of our State of Generative AI quarterly survey, only 25% of respondents say that their organization is NOT currently leveraging a generative AI / LLMs use case in a production environment, a number that has consistently fallen over five consecutive survey periods. Text and data summarization and Writing copy remain the two most-cited use cases at 29% and 25%, respectively. A debut use case also had a strong showing, with Collaboration improvement coming in third with 26% of respondents.

The full report, which is available on the ETR platform here, also examines both Increasing and Decreasing spend methods that were most often cited, a more detailed analysis of pricing trends across IT areas, highest priorities within Data Warehousing use cases, more State of Gen AI trends, and vendor correlations with increasing and/or decreasing budgets. The Macro Views Findings report should not be missed; request the full report in this article pop-up window. If you would like to access the full ETR Research platform, let us know here.

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