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Executive Summary
Understanding trends and shifts in IT markets requires more than anecdotal evidence. Well-designed, focused, and executed telephone surveys are a prime vehicle for conveying whats going on in general and in a specific market. The HfS Research Global IT Trends Survey concludes that in the area of IT infrastructure outsourcing, cloud computing is the hottest spending trend for 2013, followed by a desire for more flexible contract terms and a movement from fixed-based pricing towards outcome-based pricing. In the area of application development and outsourcing, a shift towards packaged and cloud apps is high on the spending agenda as well as achieving an overall reduction in apps spending. Long-term infrastructure outsourcing will be dominated by the IT utility concept and hybrid cloud services, whereas application development and outsourcing will gravitate towards verticalization as well as SaaS and other cloud apps.
Survey Background
Every year, IT executives and vendors alike struggle to prioritize their scarce resources, with technology and operational budgets on one side and marketing, sales, and pre-sales labor on the other. One of the important tools for making these decisions is the use of timely and targeted surveys that explore the real buying trends of enterprise IT decision makers. HfS Research, therefore, decided to field its first Global IT Trends Survey to get a better idea of what is happening with the IT budget overall and in the most important IT markets (such as cloud, virtualization, IT service management, outsourcing, and SAP) as well as to determine where IT departments are going to invest in 2013. The HfS Research Global IT Trends Survey consisted of a phone interview fielded to 468 IT decision makers in various enterprises. The respondents job titles included CIO, VP IT, VP Infrastructure, VP Operations, IT Manager , IT Operations Manager, and IT Supply and Purchasing Manager. All companies interviewed were large enterprises with a headcount upwards of 250 and a turnover of more than 50 million. Major countries, such as the United
States, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, were considered in a statistically valid fashion as well as all major industry verticals. The survey was conducted in September and October of 2012. It is also important to note that we used a top-box approach in this survey, which is common in customer satisfaction surveys. This means that we asked respondents only for the number-one most important investment 1 trend . Why? Because it is a known rule-of-thumb that most enterprises fund and implement only the most important projects (numbers one and two, if they are lucky). This focus avoids the unnecessary diluting of results, which would result in misleading conclusions. Also, survey results actually vary significantly by country, region, and industry. Vendors are encouraged to review the detailed survey results before making their own decisions.
The total percentage per question is therefore 100 percent. Actual percentages may not total 100 percent exactly due to rounding. 2 The numbers on the relationship between maintenance IT spending and new projects have been reported many times. Following are three examples: http://en.community.dell.com/dell-groups/dell_it_efficiency_metrics/w/overall_it_performance_metrics/1338.aspx http://www.enterprisecioforum.com/en/blogs/genefa-murphy/how-free-valuable-it-budget-modernization http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/its-new-holy-grail-break-out-of-the-70-maintenance-loop/4283 For the development of IT spending on human resources, see Amasol AG Kundentag 2012 presentations (http://www.amasol.de/loesungen_download.html).
Hybrid Cloud
To some, cloud computing is already old news, but this is not the case when it comes to IT infrastructure outsourcing. Cloud computing took first place for 2013 spendingwith 18 percent of respondents top priorities 4 5 on hybrid cloud services and another 10 percent on IaaS which is proof that cloud has most definitely arrived in the enterprise. There will be no more is this really real? kind of discussion. Enterprise IT managers are now putting their money where their mouths are and vendors are busy offering new cloud services every day. Clients, however, will be cautiously evaluating IaaS and hybrid cloud options when it comes to infrastructure outsourcing. As a manufacturing company CIO reported, We spent 2012 evaluating many cloud outsourcing options. We are more confident with hybrid solutions for the time being, but this may well change in the future.
3
HfS defines cloud computing as standardized IT services, based on Internet technologies delivered in a flexible, self -service way. 4 Hybrid cloud is also known as virtual private cloud services delivered by traditional IT services companies and outsourcers but with added security and reliability, whereas public cloud uses the native Internet to deliver services. 5 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) supports the Platform as a Service (PaaS) layer, which includes the middleware and development tools used to build, provision, and manage cloud-optimized applications. Both are necessary to create the Software as a Service (SaaS) layer and cloud applications such as CRM, ERP, help desk, or email.
Outcome-Based Pricing
Along the same lines is the second runner-up, with 12 percent: linking IT infrastructure outsourcing fees to business outcomes. This is old news for business process outsourcing clients, for whom the link is obvious. In IT and especially infrastructure outsourcing, this is still new, and few vendors are currently ready and capable to fulfill that need. Watch for much innovation on that front in 2013 as vendors are gearing up accordingly. A CIO for an airline stated, Our business in under huge cost pressure. We can no longer afford to sink huge chunks of our IT budget on fixed spending blocks without linking it to real consumption.
19%
IT Utility
Will it finally be a reality five years from now? According to our survey, 19 percent of respondents believe so. The IT utility and all good things that come with it, such as cost reduction, easy switch of services, and full industrialization. A CIO for an insurance enterprise commented, I cannot believe that five years from now we will still be buying and managing IT infrastructure services as a separate line item. It will all be part of a vertically integrated package.
Hybrid Cloud
As number one on the agenda for 2013 and number two for the long-term trends with 15 percent, hybrid clouds are most certainly going to be with us for a long time. This is also consistent with HfS findings on overall infrastructure outsourcing market changes. HfS concludes that the hybrid cloud infrastructure services market will 6 enjoy the highest growth rates of all cloud markets over the next five years . Long-term, I am expecting almost all my IT services to be hybrid cloud ones, remarked a vice president IT services at a life sciences firm.
Corporate IT buyers as well as IT departments are looking toward IT service providers to help manage the various service delivery options. IT service providers will gradually replace existing outsourcing contracts with more flexible ones, adding cloud flavors as they go. We expect that by 2015, approximately a quarter of the IT infrastructure outsourcing contracts will be able to qualify as hybrid cloud infrastructure services, resulting in a $22.7 billion market. An additional driver, albeit on a lower level, will be cloud management and cloud broker services. See Market Overview: Cloud Infrastructure Services 2012. 7 The actual percentage result before rounding was slightly lower, hence it is not a joint second place. 8 IT Infrastructure Library, see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_Infrastructure_Library.
SaaS/Cloud Apps
In the application services space, cloud is also a long-term trend, with 23 percent of companies seeing SaaS and cloud apps as their most important area of spending. Acceptance does vary by region; however, by far and away, the following quote represents the way clients feel right now: 2012 was the tipping point. I cannot see any new apps that would not be SaaS, said the CIO of a consulting company.
Recommendations
Following are a number of clear recommendations that can be derived from the data: