2019 Business IT Trends | Annual Report
Skills, support and budgets are the key to success
Discover where small to medium businesses are planning to invest their technology budgets. How do your plans stack up?
In December 2018, we surveyed businesses of all sizes and across all major industry verticals about their technology budgets and spending priorities for 2019. Their responses show that businesses have a confident outlook on 2019, with the bulk of organizations increasing or maintaining their IT budgets.
This year’s report also includes a new “Retrospective” section, in which we focus on questions about the respondents’ previous IT projects, and the success factors and challenges they faced.
Main Themes
Large companies are transforming their IT
Unlike last year, which saw smaller (6–250 employee) organizations lead the way in budget growth, for 2019 larger companies will dominate as their digital transformation projects continue.
Skills pay the bills
Business success is highly correlated with technical skill. Key success factors for business IT rollouts include internal expertise, partner technical support and vendor support. Thus, successful organizations were those that identified the challenges facing their IT teams and allocate resources accordingly..
Successful organizations are investing in IT
Successful businesses – those who met or exceeded their financial goals – are increasing, or at least maintaining, their IT budgets. Overall, IT budgets in 2019 are looking healthy compared to 2018, with only 17% of organizations expecting a decrease.
Finance, manufacturing and professional services lead the way
As was the case in 2018, the finance industry is looking at the biggest IT budget increases, followed by manufacturing and professional services.
Key Takeaways
Boost your support to SMBs
Enterprise spending is growing but SMBs are relatively flat. We believe this represents an opportunity for the channel to support and grow the SMB market through 2019.
Double down on successful businesses
Businesses that are successful spend more on IT and rely heavily on vendor support and IT partners.
Partners, successful businesses need you more than ever
Businesses deemed successful in 2018 highlighted strong external IT partnerships as a key success factor.
Businesses are buying
Security, IT automation and blockchain are key technology priorities for 2019. Security is the number-one priority and businesses are looking to invest.
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About this report
Every year, OneAffiniti likes to take the pulse of the IT plans of our customers and clients, as we work with thousands of companies across all major industry verticals. We like to inquire about future plans regarding their technology — how they plan on investing their IT budget, how they feel about current trends in the IT industry, and what their technology priorities for the upcoming year will be. As we are uniquely positioned to hear from so many companies of all different sizes, we achieve informative, helpful results each year.
This report is based on an annual global survey conducted by OneAffiniti in December 2018. Over 800 North American, Australian & New Zealand businesses responded.
