Recent conversations with IT decision makers show a stark contrast between the period exiting 2023 versus the mindset leaving 2022. CIOs are generally funding new initiatives by pushing off or cutting lower-priority items. While security efforts are still being funded, those that enable business initiatives that generate revenue take priority over cleaning up legacy technical debt. The bottom line is, for the moment at least, the mindset is not to cut everything, rather it’s to put a pause on cleaning up legacy hairballs and continue to fund initiatives to drive monetization. Cloud has become fundamental and getting data “right” is a consistent theme that appears to be an underpinning of initiatives getting funded today. 

In this Breaking Analysis we tap recent discussions from two primary sources: year-end ETR roundtables with IT decision makers and conversations on theCUBE with data, cloud and IT architecture practitioners.