TDWI | Training & Research | Business Intelligence, Analytics, Big Data, Data Warehousing

IT Spending Remains Strong for Data and Business Analytics Initiatives

Most IT operations and DevOps leaders expect to either accelerate or maintain digital transformation initiatives through the global pandemic.

• April 21, 2020

Note: TDWI’s editors carefully choose vendor-issued press releases about new or upgraded products and services. We have edited and/or condensed this release to highlight key features but make no claims as to the accuracy of the vendor's statements.

OpsRamp, a SaaS platform for hybrid infrastructure discovery, monitoring, management, and automation, has released the results of a new report: “Thriving in the New Normal: How IT Operations Leaders Can Deliver Business Value in an Economic Slowdown.” Data professionals will be particularly interested in how IT is planning to spend its budget.

Enterprise IT organizations are facing extraordinary challenges as they shift to supporting remote workforces and meeting the needs of online customers and partners. Survey participants were asked how enterprises will align technology priorities, budgets, and hiring in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Among the insights from the survey: the majority of IT leaders (58%) expect to either significantly or moderately increase their annual technology budgets now; 38% plan to either significantly or moderately reduce their technology spending. Of key interest: 73% IT operations and DevOps team leaders expect to either accelerate or maintain digital transformation initiatives and projects.

IT leaders understand the need to run business operations smoothly during massive remote work scenarios. To that end, they are prioritizing technologies that keep business services secure, optimized, and always available, including:

• Information security and compliance (62%) to help protect remote workers from sophisticated cyber attacks
• Big data and analytics (46%) that deliver rapid customer insights and feedback for fact-based decision making
• Public and multicloud infrastructure (45%) that can help their teams quickly tap into on-demand computing power from hyperscale providers

Performance monitoring is a top priority. To proactively identify performance issues and boost customer experience, technology leaders are investing in: 

• AIOps (69%) tools that can detect, diagnose, and resolve incidents at scale
• Cloud-native observability (51%) tools that maintain visibility into the health of distributed microservices applications
• Network performance monitoring and diagnostics (51%) tools that help IT teams cope with traffic spikes and high levels of network utilization

Creative cost-cutting is another area of focus. IT leaders must deliver superb user experiences to keep customers happy and loyal but under tighter cost constraints. IT leaders will need to reduce the cost of “keeping the lights on” so they can reallocate a greater portion of their budgets to strategic initiatives that deliver immediate business value.

To that end, IT operations and DevOps teams are considering the following cost-cutting measures:

• IT teams are investing in self-service technologies (60%)so they free their staff from reactive work, driving technology vendor consolidation (59%) so they can eliminate waste and work with strategic technology suppliers, and partnering with managed service providers (58%) to reduce the cost of internal operations and gain access to skilled technologists.

• IT leaders are planning to hire more IT financial analysts (68%)  than cloud architects (53%), DevOps engineers (50%), and data scientists (47%). Technology chiefs will need to work with their finance counterparts to align IT spending with organizational priorities and ensure they use the right benchmarks to measure the business impact of IT investments. Without financial accountability, IT leaders will struggle to meet their funding goals or gain the C-level support needed for digital business transformation.

The survey, conducted on April 1, 2020, is based on responses from 137 IT operations leaders at U.S. companies with at least 500 employees and $5 million in annual IT budgets. The report is available for download here.