IT professionals still hoping for budget for needed upgrades.
CIOs have launched into 2015, another new year on the IT front lines — and their teams have been assessing and defining a growing slate of infrastructure and services projects they’ll need in order to keep up with growing complexities in the larger organizations they serve. But despite the increasing complexity of IT responsibilities, according to a new report from Spiceworks, IT professionals this year are apparently not planning to expand their reach or their gear very much (or perhaps they just aren’t getting the resources to do so from upper management).
Here’s a question for IT pros: is this the year you hope to finally get approval to add budget for a more scalable storage infrastructure? How about an upgrade on decade-old software (Windows Server 2003, anyone?) or Windows XP workstations? Unfortunately, Spiceworks finds that budgets in 2015 may not be increasing quite as fast as your needs.
More revenue, higher IT budgets?
Spiceworks released this IT Budget Report describing some of the forces shaping IT budgets and staffing levels for the coming year, as well as offering insights into this year’s budget hurdles.
Despite an expected increase in corporate revenues this year, of the IT professionals Spiceworks surveyed, 44% predict their budgets won’t change at all from 2014. Just a third of respondents suggest their budgets might start to rise this year — less than the 42% who expected increased budgets last year. And, IT staffing will probably not rise — only a quarter of those surveyed think their department will add new employees.
Also worth noting: where IT departments are spending money, much of it may be on catching up to replace obsolete hardware and software. The study indicates respondents’ organizations have plenty of outdated gear, with more than half of all deployed PCs being over four years old, and over a third of server systems finally preparing to replace Windows Server 2003 — barely in time for its July 2015 scheduled end-of-life.
What will your IT colleagues focus on this year?
Want to compare your own IT priorities with survey respondents’? With an average annual IT budget of $291,062, according to the report, IT pros plan to spend on average 41% of budget on client hardware, with the top hardware needs further broken down as desktops (19%), servers (18%), laptops (14%) and networking (9%). Meanwhile, 33% of total budget is allocated for software deployment, including OS upgrades (17% of software total), productivity projects (16%) and virtualization services (14%). Finally, IT groups will spend 12% of budget on cloud or hosting services, including email hosting (18% of the category), web hosting (16%) and online backup/recovery (13%)
The study also looked at the various factors IT pros will consider when selecting their hardware upgrades and software projects. To learn more about your IT colleagues’ thinking, follow the link to read the details: Spiceworks IT Budget Report.
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Who is John Paulsen? A former small-business leader myself, I feel your pain (and joy) and hope you’ll enjoy the blog. I launched and ran a well-regarded production company in San Francisco with a team of 9 brilliant, hard working people. I learned to manage a wide array of tasks a small business must handle — business strategy, facilities design, HR, payroll, taxes, marketing, all the way down to choosing telecom equipment and spec’ing a server system to help my team collaborate in real-time on dense media projects from multiple production rooms. I’ve partnered with and learned from dozens of small business owners.
