FRAMINGHAM, MA--(Marketwired - Feb 5, 2015) - IDG's CIO -- the executive-level IT media brand providing insight into business technology leadership -- releases the 2015 CIO Magazine Tech Poll: Tech Priorities (click to Tweet). The poll findings show that a majority of IT leaders (57%) anticipate an increase in IT budgets for the coming year, the highest percent in the past six years, as well as provides insight into how those budgets will be invested.
Results from more than 200 top IT executives reveals that organizations, on average, are seeing an overall increase of 6.2% to their budgets in the coming year, up from 3.9% in November 2012. Edge technologies continue to receive these investment increases.
Garnering more value from organizations' data has taken over as the greatest area of interest as well as for investments. Currently, 46% of organizations are researching or piloting business intelligence and analytics solutions. Aligning with this, IT leaders plan to allocate more of their budget to this area, with 56% anticipating an increase, up from 48% in 2013. The results show a shift in investments by company size with 65% of enterprise organizations -- organizations with more than 1,000 employees -- planning to increase investment significantly more than their SMB counterparts -- organizations with less than 1,000 employees -- (48%). Other edge technologies expecting an increase in budget allocation include SaaS/cloud apps (55%), business continuity/disaster recover (52%), mobile apps (52%), security applications (52%), and enterprise mobility management (52%).
Sever virtualization remains the top technology in production, with 69% of participants implementing a server virtualization project. To get ahead of trends, IT leaders are actively researching the next phase in IT projects and initiatives. Mobile apps (32%) and software defined networking (31%) remain areas that IT leaders have a growing interest in and are actively researching. Private cloud computing services (17%), social/collaboration tools (17%), and enterprise mobility management (17%) are the top technologies being piloted and desktops/laptops (28%) is the top technology being upgraded.
"The CIO magazine Tech Poll provides an ongoing pulse on the market and where IT leaders stand with technology implementation and budget projections," said Adam Dennison, senior vice president and publisher, CIO. "Enterprises are continuing strong investments in edge technologies in order to revolutionize their business and provide cutting edge products and services to customers, ultimately creating additional revenue channels. Aligning priorities and investments around business intelligence and analytics is a smart way to drive new innovation."
Innovation is driving technology decisions and DevOps is a new methodology being used to align business requirements with IT performance, often resulting in solutions that drive competitive advantage.. While this approach has been surfacing in many articles, it is still in the early stages of adoption with only 29% of enterprise organizations, and 22% of SMB organizations planning for adoption. Enterprises prefer to use the Waterfall (traditional) development approach, whereas SMBs focus on interactive & incremental development, and agile development. As another approach to help streamline communications, 65% of CIOs use a liaison between business and development teams.
To receive a PDF of the research or to schedule a meeting to review the full results, contact Sue Yanovitch, vice president, marketing, IDG Enterprise at syanovitch@idgenterprise.com.
About CIO Magazine Tech Poll
CIO Magazine's Tech Poll: Tech Priorities was conducted to gauge for the upcoming year which technology areas will be the focus of IT leaders and to measure the direction of spending within those categories. The current CIO Magazine Tech Poll was conducted between October 21 and November 20, 2014 through the CIO LinkedIn Forum, CIO newsletters and email to CIO customers. Results are based on 208 respondents who indicated they are the top IT executive at their organization or business unit. The margin of error on a sample size of 208 is +/- 6.8%.
About CIO
CIO is the premier content and community resource for information technology executives and leaders thriving and prospering in this fast-paced era of IT transformation in the enterprise. The award-winning CIO portfolio -- CIO.com, CIO magazine (launched in 1987), CIO executive programs, CIO custom solutions, CIO Forum on LinkedIn, CIO Executive Council and CIO primary research -- provides business technology leaders with analysis and insight on information technology trends and a keen understanding of IT's role in achieving business goals. Additionally, CIO provides opportunities for IT solution providers to reach this executive IT audience. The CIO Executive Council is a professional organization of CIOs created to serve as an unbiased and trusted peer advisory group. CIO is published by IDG Enterprise, a subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world's leading media, events, and research company. Company information is available at http://www.idgenterprise.com/.
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