US Tech Market Outlook For 2015 And 2016: The BT Agenda Powers Steady Expansion

Three trends dominate our updated US tech market forecast for 2015 and 2016. First, spending by CIOs and their business partners on the business technology (BT) agenda to win, serve, and retain customers will outpace spending on the back-office systems and technology infrastructure in the classic IT agenda. Second, in large part for that reason, spending on software, tech consulting and systems integration services, and tech staff will grow more rapidly in 2015 and 2016 than spending on tech outsourcing, telecom services, and especially computer and communications equipment. Third, this mixture of strong and weak tech sectors, combined with a hot-and-cold US economy, will lead to moderate growth of 5% to 6% increases in tech budgets in 2015 and 2016. For CIOs, these trends will mean much more work with business partners in shaping and guiding the purchases of BT-related software and less scope devoted to the spending on IT where the CIO traditionally had sole or dominant domain. It also means new challenges in reining in the burgeoning costs of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and negotiating bigger savings in the older IT categories. And it means juggling and justifying an overall tech budget in which growth in tech spending may well exceed growth in corporate revenues.