Gartner’s slew of new predictions from their Symposium

Gartner with a bunch of new predictions.  

First, their ten new tech trends to watch in 2023.  There are three themes — optimize, scale, and pioneer – where technologies can help organizations maximize resilience, operations, or trust, scale vertical solutions and product delivery, and pioneer with new forms of engagement, accelerated responses, or opportunity.

Three I want to focus on.

The Digital Immune System.    In a digital immune system, data-driven insight helps improve operations, automate incident resolution and increase the stability of systems.

Applied observability.    This strategy lets companies take observable artifacts — logs, traces, or API calls — and take an integrated approach to accelerate decision-making. 

Industry cloud platforms. A mix of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS will equip companies with industry-specific sets of modular capabilities to support the use cases needed by specific industry businesses. 

For years, providers have sought to address industry-specific needs, from Microsoft to AWS. 

These platforms will accelerate, with Gartner predicting that half of the enterprises will use industry cloud platforms by 2027.

This all comes from the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo this week, where other data points included A global Gartner CIO survey showing that organizations that lead in digital expect 3x more growth and that 79% of all workers see technology as essential to their jobs. In comparison, 75% see improving their digital skills as critical to business success.

And helpful — workers satisfied with their enterprise IT job applications are twice as inclined to stay in their organizations, significantly impacting retention.  Gartner predicts that by 2025, 50% of IT organizations will have established a digital employee experience strategy, team, and management tool, a significant increase from 5% in 2021.

IT budgets are projected to increase by an average of 5.1% in 2023, lagging behind a projected 6.5% global inflation rate.  This is from another Gartner report released Monday.     

And Enterprise IT spending is projected to reach $4.6 trillion worldwide in 2023, a year-over-year increase of 5.1%, according to a Gartner report released Wednesday.

Spending on software will get the biggest bump, with Gartner forecasting an 11.3% increase in 2023; spending on PCs and other devices is predicted to decline by just over half a percentage point year over year.

Lots to unpack.  In the near term, investments in tech keep workers, those budgets will increase, and the spending looks to be more in software than hardware. Got it.

Longer term, the tech to consider is observability over management.   I’m increasingly skeptical of “manage all the things” vendors whom both can’t actually manage all the things and intend that message to mean “all the endpoints,” and I see yesterday’s stories about that being less relevant.  I’m looking at you, RMM.    

I’m also keen on the increasingly industry-specific nature of technology, but more on that next.