Following last week's review of the Macro Views Survey data, this week, we dive into a high-level overview of the recently concluded October 2023 Technology Spending Intentions Survey (TSIS), ETR's core syndicated survey that has been conducted quarterly for more than 12 years. This data set is the original foundation on which ETR was built, and in this article, we will examine the high-level stats, sector-level trends, and overall vendor leaders and laggards that emerged from this survey period.
Let's begin with the statistics and demographics around the survey itself. The October 2023 iteration of the TSIS collected data from September 5th to October 5th and saw participation from more than 1,700 IT Decision-Makers within ETR's community, including 306 Fortune 500 and 426 Global 2000 organizations. Of the total survey respondents, approximately one-quarter hold C-suite titles, and more than half of the respondents are at the VP / Director level. By industry, IT/TelCo, Services/Consulting, and Financials/Insurance are the three most represented verticals, collectively accounting for 50% of respondents. Regarding enterprise size, 64% of respondents are from Large organizations, and 36% are from Mid & Small organizations.
Now that we know the population that comprises our survey, let's take a look at the overall survey-level performance. Overall spending remains far below levels seen in 2021 and early 2022. In the most recent quarter, survey-wide Net Score has landed at 20%, down considerably from early 2021 levels of 33%. Since Jan21, the survey Net Score has been negatively impacted by Increased spending dwindling over time from 37% to 29%, while those respondents have shifted to Flattening spend reflecting the more cautious environment, with that metric growing from 45% to 49% over the same time period.
Next, we take a look at the sector-level trends, as depicted by the chart below. Here we view all technology sectors that ETR tracks ranked by their Net Scores, a measure that tracks positive spending rates on a forward-looking basis. After a long run of holding the highest sector Net Score, the Container Orchestration sector caught a six percentage-point decline and was surpassed by the ML/AI sector for the second consecutive survey period, despite a slight decline in Net Score from that sector from 53% to 52%. Third and fourth place remains a virtual tie between the Cloud Computing and Container Platforms sectors, with Net Scores of 37% and 38%, respectively. Robotics Process Automation (RPA) rounds out the top 5 with a 30% Net Score for the sector., despite a seven percentage point decline from the previous survey. Inversely, Outsourced IT, IT Consulting, and the Syndicated Research sectors hold the bottom three spots, each registering Net Scores of 3% or lower.
After reviewing the survey-wide and sector-level trends, ETR digs deeper into the individual vendor-level performance of the more than 400+ public companies tracked in the TSIS. The ETR platform has way too many data visualization and analysis models to touch upon in this article, but if you would like to see them all for yourself, you can gain access with a 100% free trial whenever you're ready. In the meantime, we will highlight one of the fastest and easiest ways to compare vendor-level data, which is by using our proprietary custom data filtering model. This model sorts the entire vendor universe by every answer option, metric, and respondent cut that ETR allows. The permutations are seemingly endless, so here we chose one metric as an example.
The image below ranks all vendors by Adoption rates and shows that all the buzz around OpenAI is translating to continuing enterprise expenditure. The ML/AI vendor leads all vendors (with at least 50 citations) in Adoption rates, with an exalted 29% of its unique survey respondents citing plans to adopt the vendor (which incidentally has contributed to the material gain in spending seen within the ML/AI sector). Although that number is lower than prior survey levels captured at an historic 36%, it still leads the second place vendor by seven percentage points.
The second highest Adoption rate comes from Abnormal Security, with 22% of respondents intending to Adopt the vendor. Information Security vendors had a very strong showing in this metric, with Wiz (18%) and Darktrace (17%) also cracking the top ten list. In all, 8 of the top 20 Adoptions came from Information Security vendors. Other names of note across this metric ranking include Atos in Consulting (20%), Palantir (19%) in Analytics/Big Data, Cohesity (18%), and Rubrik (17%), representing the Storage sector. Never to be outdone, Microsoft also shows up twice in the top ten, with a 15% Adoption rate in in the ML/AI and RPA sectors.
The data visualization above is just one of the hundreds of customizable analysis tools available on the ETR research platform, tracking more than 700 technology vendors. Following each TSIS survey, the ETR Analytics & Research team reviews the entire survey-wide data sets to create more than 75 sector and vendor-level reports, including the highest conviction data sets for the best (and worst) performing vendors. In addition, our Analytics team auto-generates hundreds of data reports on specific technology vendors. Since that information is reserved for ETR Community members and clients, we will not be delving into those topics in this article; however, all of those reports, along with the 12 years of historical data and visualization models, are available within the ETR Platform. If you would like to check it out, get started today, or reach out to us at service@etr.ai to schedule a demo.
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