IT Spending: Steady in the Clouds

Let’s get the most important stuff out of the way first. 

Tiger tees off in the first round of this year’s Masters at 10:42, grouped with Australia’s Marc Leishman and England’s Tommy Fleetwood.

You can feel the Augusta Tiger buzz all over the world (okay, the golf world, anyway).

But enough golf, let’s talk IT spending.

Today’s Wall Street Journal “Morning Download” email had this headline: “IT Spending Outlook is Steady Despite Volatile Days in Tech.”

Volatile? Amazon has lost more than $50 billion of market value in the last week, Facebook somewhere north of that.

But despite that, the talk of trade tariffs and regulation, the Journal reports that “the outlook for spending on information technology appears steady.”

The estimate was based on a survey of 75 U.S. and 25 European CIOs at companies in a range of industries conducted by Morgan Stanley (and most of the firms with more than $1 billion in annual revenue.)

What’s driving the increase? First, the cloud.

The report “found that IT budgets at these firms are set to increase 5.4%, slightly up from 5.2% last year, and that “budget gains are being driven by ongoing growth in cloud computing.” It suggested that 25% of total application workloads will be running in the cloud by the end of the year (up from 20% today).

Cloud was one priority spending area, and security software was cited as another.

Fifty-nine percent indicated they “do not expect changes in tax rates, appreciated depreciation, and cash repatriation” to impact their 2018 IT spending plans, and 29% indicated the tax changes would likely put upward pressure on spending.

A Gartner forecast from earlier this year had projected estimates of IT spend to reach $3.7 trillion in 2018, a YOY increase of 4.5%.