Expected 2022 IT spending growth among Retail/Consumer organizations declined the most of all sectors tracked in ETR's December 2021 and March 2022 Macro Surveys, possibly foreshadowing or confirming some of the challenges the industry is facing, exemplified by Walmart and Target's earnings.
In our March 2022 Macro Drill down, we again asked IT decision-makers about the change in organization level IT spend in 2022 vs 2021. While IT spending growth declines were broad based across industry cohorts compared to prior surveys, Retail/Consumer organizations estimated the largest declines in overall spend compared to previous iterations. Respondents estimated 6.6% growth in IT spend for 2022. While this is inline with expectations captured across All Respondents, Retail/Consumers organizations were previously far more ambitious, expecting to grow IT spend by 9.3% in December 2021 and 11.4% in September 2021.
At the sector level, Retail/Consumer organizations indicated decreasing spending intent for 2022 vs previous expectations across ~2/3 of the 28 sectors tracked. While sequential declines are a common occurrence as budgets solidify further into the year, a few notably large declines stand out as particularly worrisome from Retail/Consumer respondents. The largest sequential drop was seen in Data Center Collocation Services with 19 percentage point drop in Net Score from initial 2022 levels captured in JAN22. Other notable sector declines included PC/Tablet/Laptop, IT Consulting, Infrastructure Software, Database/Data Warehousing Software, and Cloud Computing.
Finally, using our Idea Generator dashboard, we isolated those vendors with >30 Retail/Consumer citations and found that 20 of the 29 vendors’ Net scores declined S/S. The top-5 vendors with the largest declines in 2022 spending intent include Lenovo, Smartsheet, Rapid7, SolarWinds, and Oracle. Those bucking the broader trend include Okta, Citrix, HPE, Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler.
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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