Emerging Technology Survey (ETS) Highlights

ETR Examines Evaluation and Utilization Rates for Leading Private Tech Vendors

ETR Research | Erik Bradley 

| June 17, 2022

This year, ETR transitioned our Emerging Technology Survey the ETS from a biannual to a quarterly survey in order to provide more frequent data on enterprise customers' sentiment on 450+ private emerging tech vendors. The most recent iteration of this survey saw participation from more than 930 IT decision makers, representing over $500 billion in annual IT spend. Following each survey, our research team analyzes evaluation, utilization, and churn metrics to determine outperforming and underperforming vendors, as well as present a sector-by-sector view of performance relative to each company's raised capital.

A full webinar presenting all of the data was released last week and can be accessed on the ETR data platform HERE. In addition, vendor and sector reports based on the ETS data are also now live on the platform and available to clients. Some of these reports include: Customer Relationship Management, DataStax, Data Management, Druva, Cloud Security, Design, Governance (ESG Enterprise Apps), Information Security, Infrastructure Software, Networking SD-WAN, and Project Management 

While this article is going to generously offer a glimpse into some of the highlights from that webinar, the only way to access ALL of our research is by checking it out for yourself with a FREE TRIAL; no strings attached!

Let's start by explaining the overall survey structure and what type of information is designed to capture. The ETS currently tracks over 450 private technology vendors by prompting survey respondents with the following answer options in order to gauge awareness, evaluation, utilization, and churn metrics for those:

  • First, we have our two evaluation metrics, which are ‘Plan to Evaluate’ and ‘Currently Evaluating’
  • Second, we have our two utilization metrics, which are ‘Evaluated, Plan to Utilize’ and ‘Allocating Further’
  • Next, we have our awareness metric, which is being ‘aware of the vendor, but have no plans to evaluate’
  • And lastly, we have our two churn metrics, which are ‘evaluated, no plan to utilize’ and ‘replaced or in containment’

All those words are neatly conveyed in this handy infographic below.

Hang tight, we're almost at the good part. In the following slides, we’ll be presenting a proprietary Net Sentiment metric that helps aggregate the aforementioned metrics into a single number. In its simplest form, we are aggregating the positive metrics and then subtracting that from the negative metrics. In addition, our mind share metric represents overall enterprise pervasion and awareness within our sample. That metric is calculated by aggregating the evaluation, utilization, and the evaluated, no plan to utilize citations, and then dividing by the unique sector respondents. OK, now on to the data.

In the slide below, we start with a broad look across our survey universe for outperformers by the various sentiment metrics. This slide shows Mind Share of the respective sector on the x-axis and Net Sentiment on the y-axis. The highlighted vendors here will have Net Sentiment scores at least one standard deviation away from the mean. This slide focuses on those vendors and technologies with higher mind share, and then we’ll take a look at the smaller mind share vendors in the following slide.

In this analysis, several open-source technologies continue their reign of dominance, including Kubernetes in container orchestration, Postgres in Data warehousing, Jenkins in Automation, and Apache Kafka in Stream Processing. All of these are mind share leaders within their respective sectors while maintaining some of the highest Net Sentiment scores of the survey. Repeating from the last two surveys in November21 and February, we see Databricks, Grafana, and OneTrust as top Net Sentiment performers in their respective sectors again.

Moving onto the smaller mind share end of the spectrum. We first have Collibra leading Net Sentiment. Next is Istio, where the open source technology has continually softened over the past 6 months but still remains an outperformer and a technology to watch. Right below that we see SonarSource in Infrastructure Automation and several Enterprise Application vendors like BenchmarkESG and ProductBoard outperforming within the survey. Salt Security also represents the smaller mind share standouts for the API security subsector. On the negative side, AtScale takes the dubious prize for lowest Net Sentiment, approaching a negative 10% score.

Ok, that's enough free research for now. Watch out for next week's newsletter when we will get into the private tech companies with the highest Evaluation and Utilization rates, and also share data from two of the hottest areas in this quarter's ETS universe, Security and Data.

Don't feel like waiting around till next week? That's ok, you can start your FREE TRIAL right now and access all of the ETR Research, including our proprietary survey data, hundreds of sector and vendor-specific reports, and a full library of end-user interviews and panels.

Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) is a technology market research firm that leverages proprietary data from our targeted IT decision maker (ITDM) community to bring you 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