Hardware Spending Plans, by Company Size

In 2022, enterprises are expected to spend a significantly greater portion of IT budgets on security appliances than SMBs. In fact, enterprises — with their bigger attack surfaces — are more likely to increase IT spending due to security concerns overall. And with a larger organization comes needs to support a larger remote workforce: enterprises will also spend more than smaller companies on telephony.

On the opposite end of the universe, small businesses will allocate a significantly greater percentage of their typically modest-by-comparison hardware budgets towards desktops and laptops. On average, the smallest companies plan to spend 21% of their hardware budgets on laptops, compared to 16% in enterprises.

Enterprises plan to spend significantly more on tablets and mobile devices (8% of their hardware budgets) compared to small businesses (6%), which are often used to support traveling employees or workers in the field.

Charting Out Software Budgets

Within the on-premises software category, we noticed big year-over-year shifts. 

Productivity software — which is useful for connecting and helping employees collaborate from anywhere — is expected to be the biggest software spending category in 2022, accounting for 12% of budgets, up slightly over a two-year period.

Also on the upswing are database management systems — accounting for 8% of expected software spend in 2022, compared to 6% in 2021 — potentially due to SQL Server 2012 reaching end-of-extended-support status in 2022. Security software spending is up significantly over the past two years, as protecting endpoint devices and remote users has fostered greater concern.

As IT spending shifts into cloud services, the software expenditures associated with on-premises servers are on the decline. As a percentage of total software spend, virtualization and operating systems both dropped significantly over the period spanning 2020-2022.

Resource: swzd.com/resources