In the age of the customer, CIOs of European businesses and governments must balance concerns about the slow-growth business environment against the importance of investing in technologies to help their firms win, serve, and retain customers. Our forecast for the European tech market in 2017 and 2018 shows that this balance will tilt toward caution given the aftershocks of the UK's Brexit vote and other economic and political factors. Given this backdrop, CIOs must leave room in their tight tech budgets for investing in business technology (BT). Rising adoption of cloud solutions will help them achieve these two offsetting goals.