Technology Spending Intentions Survey: Tracking tech budget trends & vendor demand
Technology
ETR’s Jan TSIS, based on responses from 1,835 tech leaders, projects 5.3% Y/Y IT spending growth in 2025, the highest since Jul 22. 73% of organisations plan budget increases, driven by cloud expansion and project acceleration. Notably, only 6% cited new vendor adoption, while 12% focused on enhancing capabilities with existing vendors - reinforcing debates around platformisation vs. vendor sprawl. TSIS tracks hundreds of companies and each quarter ETR publishes 200+ vendor specific reports. In their most recent webinar, they highlighted 20 vendors including AWS, Google, Salesforce, Snowflake, Workday and Zscaler - 13 had positive outlooks, 2 were downgraded and 3 maintained their outlook.
Edition: 205
- 21 February, 2025
Tech: AI innovations, market disruptions and emerging opportunities
Technology
The themes SPR will be focusing on in 2025 include 1) AI related: (a) AI applications move to the edge - benefitting the likes of Ciena, Arista and Crown Castle. (b) AI networking transition to ethernet vs. InfiniBand, benefitting Arista, Cisco, Juniper and Extreme. (c) AI use cases that are delivering strong ROI vs. others that are not, despite strong sales efforts by vendors - impacting renewals for Salesforce, ServiceNow, and others. 2) In cyber security, areas of growing priority include SOC automation and Next Generation SIEM. 3) More vendors bypass distribution and sell via the CSP marketplace or direct, negatively impacting large distributors. 4) BEAD - despite delays, this program will drive meaningful revenue. 5) Vendors benefitting from the rapid growth in DevOps / DevSecOp.
Edition: 202
- 10 January, 2025
Technology Spending Intentions Survey
ETR’s July 24 TSIS saw participation from 1768 IT Decision-Makers, including 293 Fortune 500 and 419 Global 2000 organisations. Highlighted vendors include:
Equinix (EQIX) - rising sector and vendor-level spending intent places EQIX in a dominant position among peers, as the vendor seems well-aligned with broader IT spending and ML/AI trends, warranting ETR’s first-ever positive outlook on the data set.
Salesforce (CRM) - souring spend intent for its core Enterprise Apps business, in tandem with overall Net Score in Cloud Computing registering sharp declines, warrants a negative outlook.
Varonis (VRNS) - Negative outlook. ETR has observed a clear declining trend in spending intentions for two years, with an even lower Net Score among the Global 2000 and a sharp rise in Replacement intentions among existing customers.
Edition: 191
- 26 July, 2024
10Q / 10K filings analysis
Utilising AI, NLP, data analytics and qualitative analyst oversight, 280First can rapidly glean material / actionable insights from a company's financial reports. Recent alerts include: 1) Assured Guaranty - caution on liquidity claims; colour on impact from downgrade of financial strength. 2) Burlington - more positive views on comparable store sales. 3) Dollar Tree - may need to lower prices to remain competitive. 4) Keysight Technologies - seeing order cancellations? 5) Mattel - no longer focused on advancing e-Commerce and DTC business. 6) Salesforce - rethinking level of additional growth opportunities.
Edition: 183
- 05 April, 2024
SAP (SAP GR) Germany
Technology
SAP got a lift this week after announcing tough action to meet its FY25 profit goals. However, while Arete applauds the company’s efforts they struggle to get too excited. Restructurings of this magnitude are not without risk. It is also notable that SAP beat its FY23 targets on licences but scraped home at the bottom end of the range for Cloud growth. The stock is already trading on 23x FY25 FCF if it hits these goals. Arete would rather own Salesforce which trades at a similar valuation but is a much better asset.
Edition: 178
- 26 January, 2024
Connectivity, speed & scale combine to blow up IT as we know it
Technology
In John Harrington’s latest Tech Trends report, he looks at several factors that have combined to change IT development and sales dynamics. These include how the accelerating deployment of speedier wired and wireless connectivity to the cloud, very fast computing platforms being built at scale within the clouds, the accelerating development of quantum computing as a viable commercial business, and the development of serious AI capabilities are affecting the global digital landscape. As IT increasingly transitions from in-house networking to the cloud, some new areas of IT will benefit, while others face an uncertain future.
Positive: Advanced Micro Devices, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Broadcom, Ciena, Dycom, Intel, IonQ, Microsoft, Nvidia, Rigetti.
Negative: C3.ai, Cisco, Dell, Qualcomm, Salesforce.
Edition: 162
- 09 June, 2023
IT Spending & Cyber Security
Technology
As always, SPR will be tracking the trajectory of IT spending, changing priorities and competitive dynamics for the segments and vendors they follow. Key questions / themes for 2023 include: IT Spending: 1) Which vendors are seeing more than anticipated pressure from reduction in seats and end user efforts to contain costs? 2) Vendors benefitting from the rapid growth in DevOps / DevSecOps. Cyber Security: 3) Which vendors are executing well with XDR solutions, capturing share and potentially disrupting existing vendors? 4) Maturing of the End Point Protection market. 5) Growth for Zero Trust Network Architectures. Additional Themes: 6) Vendors successfully leveraging AI / ML. 7) M&A speculation.
Positive views include: Palo Alto, Cyberark, Five9, Snowflake, Ciena, Datadog. Cautious: ServiceNow, Salesforce, Tenable.
Edition: 151
- 06 January, 2023
Healthcare
Elliot Favus sees CORT being forced to “wind down” over the coming months - his earlier research revealed how the company's salesforce was paying doctors (who had no business receiving any money) substantial amounts to prescribe its drug for treatment outside of the exceedingly rare medical condition for which it is approved. Since then a Federal criminal investigation has begun, but Elliot believes the Street is misreading the nature of the investigation - he expects the prescribers who have been “bribed” to be targeted, and once this happens, CORT’s prescriber base will rapidly disappear along with its revenues.
Edition: 150
- 09 December, 2022