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Bill Lundell: ESG's Technology Spending Intentions Survey is our annual look into enterprise tech buyers' plans and priorities for the coming year. This year's study is based on a survey of more than 650 senior technology decision-makers across North America and Western Europe.

This marks the 11th iteration of this particular survey, which allows us to monitor multi-year trends with respect to both technology adoption and changing customer preferences.

From a big picture perspective, 56% of organizations expect to increase IT spending in 2020, with a mean overall spending change across all respondents of more than 3%.

Led by the healthcare technology and manufacturing sectors, spending gains are most frequently expecting in the areas of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and public cloud services. It is worth noting that this is the first time in ESG's research that AI has surpassed other historically high priority spending areas, such as cybersecurity and public cloud services.

Digital transformation initiatives are alive and well. 58% of firms surveyed now have mature or in-process digital transformation projects, up from 51% in 2018. We found that these efforts are directly correlated with an organization's public cloud posture. Specifically, organizations with mature digital transformation initiatives are significantly more likely to be public cloud infrastructure users, to have cloud-first policies for new application deployments, and to believe that only one in five of their remaining on-premeises workloads is not a candidate to move to public cloud services over the next five years.

While two-thirds of respondent organizations now use infrastructure-as-a-service, to some extent, most companies say they will still consider on-premises infrastructure for their net-new applications and workloads. This embrace of a hybrid cloud infrastructure model is having a number of effects on IT organizations.

For example, as companies rethink their infrastructure to support a mix of traditional, cloud-native and hybrid applications, they report pressing skills shortages in areas such as cloud and IT architecture planning, as well as orchestration and automation. There's also increasing interest in applying cloud consumption models to on-premises data center infrastructure. Forty-two percent of IT leaders say they would prefer to buy infrastructure via a monthly subscription based on resource utilization.

The 2020 Technology Spending Intentions Survey Annual Report is now available to ESG clients, and covers market trends across cybersecurity, analytics, cloud computing infrastructure, and more. Additional content based on the survey findings will be continuously published over the coming weeks, so viewers should check back often. To learn more about this year's report, or to schedule a readout with the ESG project team, viewers can check out ESG's website or contact their ESG Client Relations Representative.