2023 Predictions: Digital Spend is Not Discretionary

Go back to the first video in this series, Top 3 Predictions for 2023 to Act On Now.

Paul Gottsegen

So, first of all, peel that layer of digital into what are the subsectors? What does digital even mean these days? What are the parts of digital that are non-discretionary next year?

 

Steve Hall

So, Paul, I think the spend on digital and why I'm taking a contrarian view is over the last several years we have seen the market at a seven and a half billion, basically per quarter. It was good, but most of that spend was coming from I.T. Through 2022, we really saw 9 billion of spend per quarter - significant growth that was going to the service providers that we typically cover.

But what we saw was growth across the enterprises. Now, what do I mean by that? Engineering, industry, specific BPO applications, they all increase significantly. The challenges that we saw or the opportunities, even better word for it, that we see is engineering is exploding. So everything from IoT, IT OT integration, all of these things are changing how we do work. Manufacturing is being completely disrupted with electronic vehicles, batteries, different components coming together, all of which requires a really different way to manufacture and develop. Knowledge workers have changed industry specific BPO, from claims processing, loan processing, to critical care, all of that is now driven by digital technologies and they're all being driven at the top end of the market.

So I think what you're going to see is continued spend there. And again, even as we go into what could be a tough recession which can be particularly difficult for retail and others, I still think on the tech side, we're going to see really strong growth for most of the service providers in the space, but also across banking, insurance, manufacturing, utilities, and energy. I think you're going to see a lot more spend on the technology side of the house.

 

Paul Gottsegen

Well, just one follow up question on that. Not really a prediction, but just given that prediction, how do you advise clients to find the money to fund these non-discretionary digital investments while they're just managing day to day operations?

 

Steve Hall

Yeah, it's a brilliant question on a lot of fronts because if you think about some of the capital, capital is going to increase for them because of the inflationary pressure, the interest rates and things there. But more importantly, there's a great cost optimization play here. So how do you think about reducing your cost of software, reducing your cost of network, and reducing the cost of capability across. Once you do that, how do you take that money reinvest it into some of the digital components that we talk about? But I also think there's going to be new money. There's going to be spend coming from manufacturing, there's going to be spend coming from other organizations. It’s just not an IT bucket anymore. And finally, I think the last thought on this is there's going to be a lot of revenue generating opportunity because of the digitization of data. And those revenue opportunities will have its own business case. You'll see spend go into that as we see more and more monetization of data just like what we're doing internally, you're going to see lots of organizations do that externally as well.

Continue to the next video to dive into Trend #2: The energy crisis fuels cloud consumption.