ESG recently completed its annual technology spending intentions survey of 664 senior IT decision makers at midmarket (i.e., 100 to 999 employees) and enterprise (i.e., 1,000 or more employees) organizations across North America and Western Europe. As part of that research, respondents with purchasing influence or authority for networking products and services were asked about their organization’s networking spending plans over the next 12 months, and the results were published in the ESG brief, Network Spending Trends for 2021 (only available to ESG clients).
In addition to determining what percentage of organizations were increasing, decreasing, or keeping their budgets flat, ESG was also able to identify how digital transformation efforts impacted network spending.
Given that modern IT environments are becoming highly distributed and complex, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the most common goal of digital transformation efforts reported by respondents is to drive operational efficiency. Given the increased reliance on the network in these distributed environments, ESG also asked respondents to identify what actions they would take to streamline network operations. The most common response, selected by almost half of the respondents (47%), was to adopt cloud-based network management solutions to facilitate remote access and data collection.
Clearly, the network will play an increasingly important role in connecting users with those applications, regardless of location and organizations need network management solutions to help them drive greater operational efficiencies. This in turn will allow network resources to focus on more strategic digital transformation initiatives and enable these highly distributed environments. For more details, check out my ESG brief, Network Spending Trends for 2021 (only available to ESG clients).
