IDC: Business Now Funds Most Enterprise Technology Projects

The majority (61 percent) of enterprise technology projects are now funded by the business rather than the IT department, and IT spending driven by the functional business areas will continue to outpace IT spending by the IT organisation in the future, according to a survey of 1,200 business executives conducted by IT research firm IDC.

In fact, today’s line-of-business employees are looking more and more like an extension of the IT department as, on average, 8 percent are technical personnel.

Business value

The survey also found that IT continues to be a strong partner to its business colleagues. According to respondents, 85 percent said that compared to three years ago, IT is becoming a more valuable partner to their functional area. Overall, marketing took the top position with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 9 percent.

“Technology has long been central to improving business processes, enabling greater speed, efficiency and reliability,” Meredith Whalen said in remarks made at IDC’s Global Regional Advisory Council event. “As businesses embrace the third platform, built on cloud services, big data analytics, mobile computing and social networking technologies, they are taking the critical first steps toward business-process transformation and, in some cases, business-model transformation. With such high stakes, the business is increasingly taking a front seat in technology initiatives.”

The report also noted that as today’s business executives are more tech savvy, have easier access to technology through the cloud and are under pressure to implement new technology initiatives more quickly, it’s not surprising that line-of-business executives are spearheading more IT projects.

“The link between technology and business results has never been greater and is shifting the buying centre away from IT and towards the business,” Eileen Smith, programme manager of IDC’s Global Technology and Industry Research Organisation, said in a statement. “Navigating these waters requires a change in your go-to-market approach focusing now on understanding the unique pain points and investment priorities across the various business functions.”

Infrastructure growth

In a concurrent report, IDC found the worldwide integrated infrastructure and platforms market experienced an impressive 50.2 percent year-over-year factory value growth during the second calendar quarter of 2013, totalling $1.3 billion (£820m) in system sales.

Integrated platform systems are integrated systems that are sold with additional preintegrated packaged software and customised system engineering optimised to enable such functions as application development software, databases, testing and integration tools.

The market generated 529.6 petabytes (PB) of new storage capacity shipments during the quarter, which was up 60.5 percent compared to the second quarter of 2012. Oracle was the largest supplier of integrated platform systems with $305.9 million in sales, or 56.7 percent share of the market segment.

Do you know all about public sector IT – the triumph and the tragedy? Take our quiz!

Originally published on eWeek.