technology
reseller.co.uk
BULLETIN : TRENDS
5
Mid-market IT budgets
to rise
Mid-market companies are bucking the
UK trend for lower IT budgets, claims
Node4, despite lack of confidence in the
UK’s economic prospects.
Its report,
Mid-market IT priorities 2017
,
reveals that 77% of decision-makers in
companies with a turnover of £15m to
£800m expect to see an IT budget increase
in 2017: 35% are looking forward to a rise
of 5-10%, with a further 22% anticipating
an increase of over 10%.
Hosted and cloud-based
services will consume
a significant share of
mid-market IT budgets
in 2017. Infrastructure
as a Service (20%) and
Managed Security as a
Service (16%) are the
top two cloud spending
priorities, followed by
Managed Services (12%)
and Disaster Recovery as a
Service (11%).
Overall business
confidence in the mid-market is weak, with
just 18% of respondents feeling optimistic
about their organisation’s prospects in
2017 and 81% viewing challenges thrown
up by Brexit as a medium or high priority.
UK cloud adoption rate
reaches 88%
Cloud penetration in the UK now stands
at 88%, with 67% of organisations
expecting to increase their adoption
of cloud services over the coming
year, reveals new analysis by the Cloud
Industry Forum (CIF).
However, concerns over data privacy
(62%) and budgeting constraints (35%)
mean that a ‘cloud-everything’ model is still
not feasible for all organisations.
A survey of 250 decision-makers in
public and private sector organisations
shows that the overall cloud adoption rate
has risen by 83% since 2010, with an
increase of 5% in the last year.
There has been a significant rise in
cloud usage by small businesses and
public sector organisations, with the cloud
adoption rate now standing at 82% for both
groups, up from 54% and 62% a year ago.
Most respondents (58%) say their
organisation has a hybrid approach to IT,
though 54% think their entire IT estate will
eventually move to remotely hosted cloud
services; 8% of the smallest organisations
in the sample have already made this
transition.
Developer density highest in
Dublin
London has the largest tech community
in the UK and Ireland, but Dublin has
the greatest density. According to Stack
Overflow’s
Q1 Developer Ecosystem Report
,
developers make up 9% of the workforce
in Dublin, 7.7% of the workforce in London
and 7.1% of the workforce in Edinburgh.
Despite its reputation as a major tech hub,
Cambridge only just scraped into the top
ten, with developers making up 3.8% of the
city’s working population.
IT resellers and distributors need to
adapt their business models to take into
account the greater influence that non-IT
executives, such as marketing and sales
professionals, are having on technology
evaluations and purchases, warns
technology association CompTIA in a new
report,
Considering the New IT Buyer
.
In a survey of 675 US businesses, 52%
said that in the last 12 month business
unit budgets had been used to pay for
technology purchases; 45% said that ideas
about technology had come from different
areas of the organisation; and 36%
said more executives are involved in the
decision-making process.
More than one quarter (27%) said that
final decisions on technology purchases
were now made by individuals or groups
other than the IT department.
Carolyn April, senior director, industry
analysis at CompTIA, said: “CIOs and
information technology (IT) teams remain
involved in the process, as their expertise
and experience is valued. But business lines
are clearly flexing their muscles. It’s another
strong signal that technology has shifted
from a supporting function for business to a
strategic asset.”
She added: “Lines of business have
little knowledge or interaction with the
channel. It’s incumbent on the channel to
get their faces in front of line of business
leaders. They need to speak the language
of business because this new generation
of buyers doesn’t want to hear about the
technical implications of their purchases.
Channel partners need to position
themselves as consultants and service
providers who can help customers make
informed decisions about what they buy.”
A separate CompTIA study has identified
a growing trend for lines of business to staff
their departments with technology-oriented
job roles, from data scientists and business
analysts to software developers and social
media managers.
UK wasting billions on failed
Agile IT projects
British business is set to waste an
estimated £37 billion on failed Agile
IT projects over the course of the next
12 months, claims independent IT
consultancy 6point6.
An Agile Agenda: How CIOs Can
Navigate The Post-Agile Era
reveals
that 12% of Agile projects are failing
completely. Over half (53%) of CIOs
regard Agile development as ‘discredited’
and 75% are no longer prepared to
defend it.
Chris Porter, CTO and co-founder of
6point6, said: “This is a conservative
estimate. We’ve only looked at Agile
IT projects that fail completely. This
doesn’t include the waste involved in
Agile projects that fail only partially.UK
and US CIOs now estimate that nearly
a third (32%) of Agile projects fail to
some degree. The failure to apply Agile
effectively is a huge problem for the UK.”
Time for resellers to court line of business
managers, says CompTIA
MID-MARKET IT
PRIORITIES IN 2017
Howmid-market companies are investing
in IT infrastructure and cloud services todrive
growth in a challengingbusiness climate
UKRESEARCH-BASED STUDY 2017
Carolyn April
