Flexera recently surveyed 303 IT executives with an employee count of over 2,000 headquartered in North America and Europe. The Flexera 2020 State of Tech Spend Survey questionnaire was designed to offer insights on how businesses are spending on technology, what they are investing in, how they are tracking and managing the spend, and challenges the face while optimizing the spend.
According to respondents, 8.2% of company revenue was spent on IT, while businesses with more than 10,000 employees spent 9.3% of revenue on IT. The survey’s respondents have estimated that about 12% of their total IT spend is wasted, and industry sources consider the wastage to be 2.5 times higher.
The top priorities were digital transformation, cybersecurity, and cloud-first/cloud migration. The cloud spend is seeing significant investment with 25% compared to on-premises solutions (22%). The 25% spent on cloud is being distributed across three services- 7% for SaaS and 18% for IaaS and PaaS.
Over 40% of respondents currently have six or more data centers, while 33% of the respondents are planning to significantly reduce the number of data centers they use by next year. Currently, 32% of workloads are already in the cloud (across SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS) and cloud workloads are expected to increase to 43% in the next year.
Based on vendors of cloud technology and software, the order of adoption was a follows: Microsoft, VMware, SAP, and ServiceNow, followed by AWS and Oracle tied for number five. While 65% of the respondents expect to increase their use of AWS by next year, and 30% expect to decrease their Oracle use during the same time frame.
Microsoft held the largest spend for 43% of respondents, while 13% invest in SAP and 10% in AWS. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Microsoft is the on-premises vendor with the largest adoption of SaaS (39%) and public cloud (25%).