Spiceworks Survey Shows Changing Priorities for IT Spending

conducted between September and October 2014. Participants were asked a few questions regarding their predictions for 2015 budget numbers, as well as allocation details. Interestingly, most respondents said that End of Life deadlines in 2015 are driving their IT spending for the year.

Going deeper into this point, the Spiceworks survey showed that 67% of IT pros said EoL is the driving factor for new hardware and software purchases this year. It is important to note that “Additional growth/need” was tied for first place with IT Pros, signaling an uptick for the channel. “Project Need” took second place for 57% of overall respondents.

Overall, IT Budget allocation broke down into Hardware, Software, Cloud, and Managed Services.

The Spiceworks survey revealed that IT Pros will be more focused on purchasing Hardware than anything in 2015. 41% of overall respondents stated that hardware projects are a priority. In this segment, the top three projected purchases will be new desktops (20%), servers (19%) and laptops (15%). Tablets/Mobile devices were at the bottom, at 7%.

On the Software side (33%), the focus is on updating operating systems (17%) – this ties back into the EoL conversation-, with Productivity software (16%) and Virtualization (14%) taking the second and third places. I found it a bit surprising that Security software was at the bottom of the list at 8%, given the changing threat environment in 2014, but in speaking to Spiceworks reps, it makes sense. Priorities for IT departments are changing, and they have to utilize funds wisely. The Spiceworks team also made another great observation on the Software side. They are predicting that software will be the big “win/win” of the year, as clients can be motivated to invest in software, even on a tight budget, and IT Pros save money with this delivery.

Let’s move on to the Cloud portion. IT Pros responded that they are allocating 12% of their budget on cloud services. The top three for 2015 include: Email hosting (18%), Web hosting (16%) and online BDR (13%). It’s interesting to see that, although online BDR is in third place as far as spending, it actually makes up for the most “new services” spending in this segment.

On the Managed Services side (10% of budget overall), the focus is actually on the Managed services provider. IT Service Providers made up 19% of the Managed services budget for the US and EMEA respondents. This was followed by Consulting (16%) and Connectivity/bandwidth solutions at (16%).

Looking at the Resources

We’ve seen the “what,” but let’s dig a little deeper into the budget itself. The average IT Budget broke down to $291,062, and survey results showed that IT budgets are not on any path to break records. In fact, 44% of the Spiceworks respondents said that there would be no change between the IT budgets of 2014 and 2015, nor will there be much change in the number of IT employees. The good news is that many of these same respondents (57%) are expecting an increase in revenue.

“Over the years, IT professionals have become accustomed to doing more with less and 2015 will be no exception,” said Sanjay Castelino, VP of Marketing at Spiceworks. “Aging PC hardware and the impending countdown to Windows Server 2003 end of life will force IT professionals to get creative this year when it comes to spending the resources they do have and choosing the right technology investments that will help increase employee productivity and drive their organizations forward.”

I would encourage you to view the full survey report at: http://www.spiceworks.com/marketing/it-budget/report/.