Spiceworks State of IT Report Predicts Strong Hiring, Budgets in 2018

By nearly all measure, the IT industry is poised for strong growth 2018. That’s the main takeaway from the 2018 “State of IT” report from IT service provider Spiceworks. Spiceworks released the report Oct. 9 during its annual SpiceWorld customer conference in Austin, Texas. The company surveyed more than 1,000 IT professionals in North America and Europe and found that a majority of companies are planning to add more IT staff and support increased revenue for their companies in the coming year. IT professionals are also clearly stating an intention to invest more heavily in the cloud and reduce their reliance on managed services. Read on for more from the Spiceworks “State of IT” study and what IT professionals plan to do next year to boost their companies’ efficiency and productivity.

Looking at 2018, 44 percent of IT professionals expect their budgets to increase compared to 2017. Another 43 percent of IT professionals believe their budgets will remain the same, and just 11 percent think their budgets will decrease compared to 2017.

IT budgets are rising because of healthy corporate revenue growth. According to Spiceworks, 60 percent of companies expect their revenue to grow in 2018, and about one-quarter will experience flat revenue performance. Only 9 percent of IT respondents think corporate revenue will fall.

Increasing budgets and strong revenue performance should help the IT job market. The survey found that 45 percent of companies plan to increase IT staff in 2018, and 48 percent will maintain current staffing levels. Just 5 percent will reduce IT department headcount. 

According to Spiceworks, 31 percent of corporate IT budget funds will be allocated to hardware and 26 percent for software. Hosted and cloud services will get 21 percent of the budget allocation, topping managed services, at 15 percent.

Budget allocations are changing, according to the Spiceworks study. More than half of survey respondents said they’re increasing their hardware investment and 55 percent will boost cloud spending in 2018. Spending on managed services will be flat, with 46 percent of companies planning to just maintain current budget levels.

Although sales of desktop computers continue to slow overall, they’re still important to corporate buyers. In fact, 17 percent of total hardware spending will go to new desktops, representing the largest single allocation for IT hardware. Laptops have the second largest allocation, with 15 percent of hardware dollars. Servers and networking equipment are next, with 13 percent and 8 percent allocation shares, respectively.

Spiceworks examined software spending allocation and found that 11 percent will be dedicated to operating systems and 10 percent to security software. Another 10 percent will go to productivity software, while 9 percent will be allocated to virtualization.

Online backup and recovery services will attract 15 percent of cloud spending in 2018, topping productivity solutions, at 10 percent. Email hosting and web hosting will attract 9 percent of the budget allocation each, according to the IT professionals.

End-of-life concerns are driving 54 percent of new hardware, software or services purchases, Spiceworks discovered. Corporate growth and refresh cycles followed closely. Significantly, software or application compatibility was least likely to drive new purchases.

A whopping 42 percent of IT professionals said getting access to corporate data from anywhere is the chief reason to move to the cloud, followed by 38 percent who cited improved disaster recovery opportunities. Other reasons were better flexibility, at 37 percent, and reduced support overhead, at 36 percent.