In addition to ETR's syndicated surveys that populate our proprietary data sets and set the basis for the industry's most comprehensive spending intentions research, we also offer a full suite of custom research ranging from focus panels, expert end-user, and customer interviews, consulting analysis, and the industry's best custom surveys. In fact, ETR has a robust portfolio of custom research and Drill Down surveys we produce for our clients. These studies ranged from small-scale deep dives on the strengths and weaknesses of specific products to hypothetical spending decisions on technologies if macroeconomic conditions deteriorate to groundbreaking global-scale studies on the state of observability. [Please note that many other custom projects are privileged to clients only and were not applicable for this summary. Reach out to us at service@etr.ai to learn more or start your own custom survey.
For this article, we’ve plucked five of the most interesting findings from a selection of these diverse custom research projects in 2022. Read on for some of the highlights.
Full-Stack Observability Leads to Better Incident Detection and Response
In March and April 2022, observability vendor New Relic partnered with ETR to produce its second annual State of Observability report. The wide-reaching survey captured insight from more than 1,600 practitioners and IT leaders from 14 countries to get a full picture of the state of observability and monitoring practices in organizations. Questions focused on the number of tools used for observability, how observability connects to business goals, budgeting plans for observability, and staffing concerns.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the study was that organizations that had achieved full-stack observability (defined in the study as having a combination of capabilities spanning multiple technical domains) experienced fewer services outages and achieved faster mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to response (MTTR) for outages. This is just the tip of the iceberg of this massive global study. New Relic published the full report and raw data here, including cuts of the data by region, role, and rank.
Gloomy Macroeconomic Outlook Shifting CAPEX spend to OPEX
With the reality of a serious economic slowdown sinking in, an ETR client commissioned a Drill Down survey on CAPEX vs. OPEX spending in October 2022 to capture shifting IT spending priorities. It is perhaps no surprise that most organizations reined in CAPEX spending and put new initiatives on hold to prioritize day-to-day operating budgets, but the data in this survey make that change so crystal clear. A year ago, the average split between CAPEX and OPEX spending was 55% to 45%. In October, it went to 48% and 52%. By next year, survey participants anticipate 58% of their IT budgets going to OPEX spending and just 42% to CAPEX.
Cloud Dominance
An October 2022 a client-commissioned Drill Down survey on cloud computing trends generated a number of eye-opening findings. On average, respondents said they were just two years away from more than half of their workloads moving to IaaS or PaaS cloud environments, and they estimate 58% of workloads moving to the cloud three years out.
The most jarring finding in the cloud Drill Down survey, however, was the anticipated jump in spending on IaaS and PaaS cloud. Current average annual spending on cloud stands at $375,000, but in three years, this number is expected to skyrocket to $1.75M, a more than 4.5x increase.
Vendor-Specific Surveys Uncover Competitor Pressure
In 2022, ETR ran a number of client-commissioned Drill Down surveys focused on specific vendors, too. These included surveys on DXC Technology, Twilio, Freshworks, Coupa, and many more. Here are just two among many interesting takeaways from these custom surveys.
This February 2022 Drill Down survey on SaaS enterprise platform Freshworks asked respondents to weigh in on spending plans for the vendor, reactions to its recent IPO, its new Neo product, and other topics. One stand-out question in the survey, however, shed some light on what may be Freshworks’ biggest competitive threats. Organizations said they would turn to ServiceNow, Zendesk, or Atlassian Jira as their top choices if they were to no longer utilize Freshworks. On the other hand, Zoho, Kustomer, Adobe, and Microsoft Dynamics were less popular substitutes for Freshworks’ capabilities.
A July Drill Down survey on communication platforms-as-aservice (CPaaS) was also full of vendor-focused questions, but this time the competitive threat was not a specific rival company but rather a shift to entirely different technological paradigms. When asked how likely organizations would replace Twilio’s password authentication capabilities with biometric authentication in the next four years, half of the respondents said they were either likely or very likely to do so.
Drill Down surveys and custom research from ETR are a great way to get deeper insights into specific lines of thinking about a variety of topics and vendors. Clients have used this service to gauge nuanced ideas about product features during the product development process, to test price sensitivity in target markets, to get answers to hypothetical questions about budget pressures, to size-up competitive threats, and to read the terrain of unfolding tech landscapes and new trends.
If you’re interested in getting juicy insights like these of your own, reach out to service@etr.ai to discuss your project. We source this insight from our large and growing ETR Community of qualified IT decision makers, the same engine that powers our decade-plus of industry-leading data on enterprise IT spending intentions.
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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