Enterprise IT Spending Priorities Are Changing

While IT organizations are always trying to reduce the amount of money they spend on IT, they are willing to spend money in order to save money. A survey of 100 IT leaders working at organizations with more than 25,000 employees, which was conducted by International Data Corp (IDC) on behalf of IT services provider Datalink, finds that transforming IT operations using a mix of private and public cloud computing platforms is clearly the highest priority. Solution providers across the channel should also be heartened by the fact that the number of organizations planning to outsource tasks to external IT service providers will increase from an average of 18 percent today to 25 percent in two years. This suggests that the number of opportunities for solution providers to increase revenue should be expanding—regardless of where application workloads wind up running. The most immediate opportunity for solution providers might simply be helping IT organizations complete application workload assessments. Given the hundreds of applications an IT organization manages today, it's little wonder that many of them don't have a firm plan concerning what to continue to run in house and what to move to a public cloud. Whatever the role, however, the one thing that is becoming clear to all concerned is that most IT organizations simply can't do everything on their own.