How Chief Technology Officers Are Investing Big in the Future
A survey of more than 3,000 executives across industries provides a crystal ball into how firms are spending today for tomorrow.
(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- One way to anticipate the next tech revolution is to ask those spending the money: technology leaders. So Bloomberg Businessweek teamed with Bloomberg Intelligence, the analysis arm of Bloomberg LP, to survey 3,038 executives across industries. Their responses, detailed in the Bloomberg Digital Economy Index powered by Infosys, show where chief technology officers at leading companies are focusing spending—and why they’re making those choices.
● The picture that emerged from the survey is one of the most detailed analyses yet of corporate tech spending. Staying ahead on tech is a top priority: 61% of respondents say they expect to increase their tech spending. Of those, 72% will likely increase their budgets by 9% or more this year.
● Respondents are bullish on tech’s current crop of buzzwords, but they are even more focused on security and marketing.
● 53% of respondents say threats to data security are higher than a year ago, with smaller companies seeing the biggest increase.
▲ When asked which area of expertise was most in demand at their company, cybersecurity was the top answer for respondents. On average, companies expect to dedicate a larger amount of their tech budget to security in the coming year. This bodes well for companies such as CrowdStrike, Microsoft, IBM, and Accenture, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana.
● Spending on cloud computing should keep ticking upward, too. It seems unlikely that Google’s cloud offering, which had sales of $19 billion last year, will manage to break into the top two anytime soon: Companies said they’ll increase investment in software from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft at a faster pace than in Google’s this year.
▼ More than 8 in 10 companies expect to increase tech spending in the next 12 months or keep it steady. Health-care, life sciences, and financial companies are planning the biggest increases; consumer packaged-goods (CPG) companies predict the smallest.
● Geopolitical changes ranked low on this survey’s list of challenges, which was conducted in part before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet those sentiments could change “if geopolitical and inflation concerns remain elevated,” Rana says.
Conducted quarterly, the survey will provide a running indication of how opinions on tech trends evolve, as well as which new trends emerge.
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