ETR Data will tell you what's happening in the enterprise tech market, but it can't always tell you why. That's where ETR Insights enters into the equation. Every year the ETR Insights team hosts analyst-led interviews with our community of IT decision makers designed to gather feedback on the macro, sector, and vendor-level data collected in our proprietary surveys. Read on for a list of some of the top ETR Insights quotes from the last year.
TOP QUOTES OF THE YEAR
ETR Insights 287: Head of Infrastructure & Information Security - Large Financial Services Enterprise
"I think we are definitely a best-of-breed company. We are looking at the best solutions to satisfy our requirements. For example, Dynatrace is perhaps the Rolls Royce for monitoring. We are using Dynatrace to monitor our technology stack and ensure we have full visibility and to ensure we can react to incidents and prevent instability from increasing, escalating, or moving to the higher level of incidents."
ETR Insights 288: CIO - Large State Judiciary System
"We recognized the value of using Zscaler for everything, connectivity across all of our devices. Our full infrastructure now runs through Zscaler, as we’ve started bridging application access, which is the Holy Grail for us, making sure users can only go where we want them to go. We looked at them specifically for that “zero trust” between devices so you couldn’t jump back and forth, and it eliminated a channel for viruses and ransomware. We accomplished that and the VPN, and we also have a combination between Microsoft and Zscaler that we use for two-factor. Now we’re looking on the application side."
ETR Insights 290: Sr. Director of IT - Large Tech Services Enterprise
"We’ve had Splunk, but we’re moving towards an Elastic and Grafana combination ... Elastic is kind of a self-serve type model, whereas Splunk’s is more expensive for that type of technical capability and support from the vendor … With the transition to Elastic, we started slow and small. There’s a lot of other work going on. It’s like, here’s another thing to throw at the group to learn. So, we started with just a few applications, a couple servers, and we’ll grow it as necessary... as group members learn the platform and become experts, we’ll start to scale up, as opposed to having this big thing come down and no one knows how to use it. There’s no need to leverage all the technology and features right away."
ETR Insights 298: CIO - Midsize Retail/Consumer Enterprise
"DocuSign and Adobe [Sign] are towards the upper part of that list. When budgets tighten the question gets asked, why do we have more than one of these?”
ETR Data: Our January 2023 Macro Views survey is currently polling. Prelimary data shows that consolidating redundant vendors across business units is still the number one way that IT decision makers are trimming the budget when they need to make cuts.
ETR Insights 303: VP Technology Services - Large Software Enterprise
"Again, I'll go back to my prior statement. It depends on what your business needs are. If you need all of the advanced features, automation and integrations that Salesforce offers, some of these other solutions aren't going to quite be as attractive to you. Salesforce is the 800-pound gorilla for a reason. They have done it for a long time. They have done a really good job of looking at where the market was going, listening to their customers, and building in features that their customers need. These are typically large enterprise customers. Now, it doesn't come inexpensively. So depending on if you're a small and medium-sized business and you can live with, “I don't need everything that Salesforce offers,” yes, then you can consider another alternative at a better price. And you also have the ability to leverage that, because with a smaller organization that's up and coming, you have much more influence on how they're building and developing their products going forward."
ETR Insights 310: Principal Software Engineer, VP - Large IT Services Enterprise
"So far, [AWS] has been unable to [usurp Snowflake]. This is sort of my area of expertise, and so far they're struggling. I think for AWS, they have a “too many cooks in the kitchen” problem. Redshift is probably the closest Snowflake competitor, but they're definitely not building out everything else that Snowflake has. I don't see them taking over Snowflake at any point in this space. Snowflake is singularly focused on execution for the data warehousing niche they’re in, but I should point out Snowflake still runs on AWS, Azure, or GCP. AWS still gets a cut of whatever Snowflake is doing, is essentially what I'm saying. Processing and storage is effectively a passthrough bill, but Snowflake has a lot of value. [...] AWS is never the one differentiator for Snowflake. Snowflake is one product, whereas at AWS there's a couple. Redshift is a fork of a very old Postgres database, but it's quickly evolving through multiple engine rewrites, etc., to be the type of offering like Snowflake was, meaning the separation of storage and compute. So, I think for Snowflake, they have three things: The separation of storage and compute, meaning multiple people can query stuff not bumping into each other, all on-demand. Direct data sharing, so I load a table on my side, I share it with you, you get it, you don't need to run ETL, and you can use it with the rest of your stuff. Redshift is catching up to that and the marketplace."
ETR Insights 312: Managing Director, Cyber Risk & CISO - Large Services/Consulting Enterprise
"Splunk is great, but people are starting to realize – as they had in the past – that Splunk’s cloud, not properly tuned and managed, is costing me so much OPEX a year, I don't know if I want to continue with it... And they budget more and more each year, and that budget gets approved each year, until somebody comes in – the CIO over the CISO – and [says] this is ridiculous. And then they go back to the business case with, let's say, the old IBM product that they had in place as a SIEM prior, and they're saying, but look, costs on the IBM product went up 2% a year. Costs on Splunk are going up 25% a year. We just can't stay there. No matter how good the product is, we just can't stay in that arena."
ETR Insights 314: VP, Manager of Data Analytics - Large Financials Enterprise
"Historically, Oracle has been our primary go-to database, but strategically that's not got a bright future. [...] With Oracle, how many people do I need to manage that, to define constraints, keys, and indexes? I work with a 20-year veteran who's worked on an Oracle database, and I asked them to be in charge of our Snowflake instance. Let's just put it this way, he has not looked back."
ETR Data: This model shows the highest and lowest citation-weighted Net Scores within the Global 2000 in preliminary January 2023 TSIS data. Many of the names mentioned here by IT decision makers (AWS, Databricks, Grafana, Microsoft, Snowflake, UiPath, Zscaler) are among the highest-ranked vendors in our work.
ETR Insights 316: VP of Information Technology - Large Tech Enterprise
"The benefits that [Cloudflare and Fastly] provide, if you have many, many things that are exposed externally, you can kind of put one of these products over them, and it gives you a central point where you could mitigate some risks. Certain open-source vulnerabilities that came out, if you have one of these products fronting the door of accessing them, they might be able to come up with a remediation for a “zero day” vulnerability very quickly. It allows you to protect yourself until the underlying products can be fixed, and you can do that and respond very, very quickly. If you didn't have that, you would be somewhat exposed until the actual vendors were to issue a fix, and then you might be struggling to push that out depending on how many instances of that are out there. It could take days, or it could take weeks. But this way you can respond quickly, mitigate that risk, and then you have some breathing room to actually go and do the real remediation."
ETR Insights 321: CIO for Global Technology Solutions / Large Healthcare and Tech Enterprise
"I mean, when you buy Microsoft anything, you tend to, let's say, get the “best in suite,” as it's known, which means that you're getting a couple of powerful applications and then everything else is good enough. I would put Power Automate in the “good enough but rapidly getting better” category. Because here's the question, do you go and spend the money on a UiPath or an Automation Anywhere, which both tend to be more pricey apps than Power Automate, if Power Automate can solve for 95%, 97% of your use cases? I think that's really the driver. It may have some limitations, but by and large it pays for itself, and the user-friendly piece is critically important as you roll it out. Our objective and thesis, if you will, with Power Automate is to simply become “train the trainers,” where we're training daily users – or let's say, people in finance, for example – to use it as a tool to automate their own processes. So instead of some other group or some third-party consultant to come in, it's, no, train people. It's super user friendly, doesn't take long to learn it. And let them get rid of a big chunk of their mundane tasks so they can be more effective. That's one reason why I think it's been quite successful, is because of that model… I think the other thing is, coming back to origins, this is a fast-changing space. I do wonder about Automation Anywhere being part of IBM’s digital business automation platform, if that's worked against them. That they have added just too much overhead, if you will, and weight and cost."
Access these quotes and thousands more via ETR Insights' searchable Transcript Library, feauturing hundreds of interviews with high-level IT decision makers across industries. If you don't have access, now is the perfect time to try a Free Trial as we head into the January 2023 TSIS reporting season.
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