Unpacking the Technology Spending Intentions Survey

In today’s evolving digital landscape, understanding enterprise technology spending patterns is crucial for technology decision makers, investors, and technology vendors. ETR has been at the forefront of tracking IT budget trends. An example is our Technology Spending Intentions Survey (TSIS). This quarterly survey captures forward-looking spending intentions for hundreds of publicly traded and private enterprise technology vendors across the global market, providing a gauge on demand for vendors tracked.

What is the Technology Spending Intentions Survey (TSIS)?

ETR’s TSIS is a highly anticipated, forward-looking survey that captures real-world insights from technology leaders across industries and geographies. Our data-driven methodology aggregates responses from thousands of IT leaders to assess shifts in technology adoption, vendor performance, and overall IT budget sentiment.

TSIS focuses on critical investment areas such as cloud computing, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and infrastructure modernization. By analyzing these trends, we provide valuable intelligence to help organizations stay ahead of the curve in a competitive market.

Key Takeaways from the 2025 TSIS

While full survey results are reserved for ETR clients, we have a pulled some takeaways to share.

Polling for the January 2025 Technology Spending Intentions Survey (TSIS) was conducted from 12/3/2024 - 1/2/2025 and saw participation from 1,835 technology leaders, including 277 from Fortune 500 and 424 from Global 2000 organizations. Of the total survey respondents, 26% hold C-suite titles, with another 51% respondents at the VP/director level. Geographically, 76% of respondents are from North America. The Services/Consulting, IT/TelCo, and Financials/Insurance verticals account for 55% of the respondents. Finally, 57% are from Large organizations and 43% are from Midsize and Small organizations.

Final estimates for CY2024 IT spend landed at +3.9% vs. CY2023, a 0.5 percentage point increase over the October dataset. Similarly, CY2025 IT spend change projections have increased 0.5 percentage points to +5.3% year-over-year. That 5.3% growth projection is higher than initial estimates captured during the OCT24 Macro Views survey and is the highest level captured in our work since July of 2022.

In 2025, 73% of respondents plan to increase IT budgets by 1% or more, with project acceleration and cloud resource expansion identified as key drivers. Notably, only 6% cited new vendor adoption, while 12% focused on enhancing capabilities with existing vendors—reinforcing debates around platform-ization versus vendor sprawl. 

Among respondents planning spending reductions (15%), fewer cited cloud optimization or SaaS licensing adjustments than in previous surveys. Staffing cost reductions remained the top reason, followed by project delays and hardware spending cuts. Meanwhile, IT department headcount is expected to grow by an average of +2.2% over the next six months, up 0.7 percentage points from October polling. 

TSIS tracks hundreds of companies, and each quarter we publish more than 200 vendor specific reports, but in our quarterly webinar we highlight certain vendors. In our most recent webinar, we highlighted 20 vendors included AWS, Dynatrce, Google, Salesforce, Snowflake, Workday, and Zscaler. Of those twenty, 13 had positive outlooks for this survey period. Two were downgraded, while three maintained their outlook.

Vendor Takeaways:

As aforementioned, TSIS covers hundreds of vendors. Here are summaries from a handful:

• Prior survey concerns around CyberArk’s Net Score declines are temporarily alleviated, especially with a strong rebound among the Global 2000, while competitive positioning remains stable. Meanwhile, high Replacement rates persist but are partially offset by even higher Adoption indications.
• Palantir has seen a notable increase in its Net Score, particularly among large organizations like Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 companies, along with continued positive alignment with growing ML/AI spend.
• Wiz sits in rarified air in terms of Net Score, Adoptions, and Pervasion growth. While less penetrated than its more mature security peers, the highest Adoption rate across the entire TSIS survey universe highlights the vendor’s auspicious, forward-looking data set.