SoftwareOne study finds that 83% of CIOs must do more with less in 2023

London, United Kingdom I 9 March 2023 – SoftwareOne Holding AG, a leading global software and cloud solutions provider, today unveiled the findings of CIO Pulse: 2023 budgets & priorities.

The study, which recently surveyed 600 C-suite and IT decision-makers in the UK and USA examines how the current global economy is impacting IT priorities, revealing that despite 93% of CIOs expecting IT budgets to increase in 2023, 83% say they are under pressure to make their budgets stretch further than ever before – with a key focus on improved cloud cost management and tackling the reduction of mounting technical debt.

The survey found that 72% of CIOs admit they are behind in their digital transformation because of this technical debt, which is of particular concern as 92% of CIOs are expected to deliver digital transformation initiatives that act as revenue generators this year.

38% said the accumulation of this debt is largely because of rushed cloud migrations during the pandemic, with 31% failing to optimise their workloads before commencing the migration process. A further 38% revealed that their organisation miscalculated the cloud budget when provisioning, which resulted in significant cloud overspend. Many organisations also still have multiple on-premises IT legacy systems and 51% of CIOs state that the complexity of legacy IT is one of the top three challenges they currently face.

Craig Thomson, Senior Vice President of Cloud and Application Services at SoftwareOne: “Businesses are dealing with an uncertain economic environment, which makes planning big IT transformations a challenge. Yet organisations need to move to the cloud and modernise legacy applications to remain competitive. We’re seeing a real need for a combination of innovation with optimisation. Our clients are looking for pragmatic step-by-step transformation initiatives, rather than wholesale megalithic projects that can be hard to get approved when budgets are under pressure.”

The survey findings reflect this. 45% of CIOs surveyed believe having improved transparency and control of cloud costs would help them extract greater value from their cloud investments and therefore improve company buy-in. 80% plan to increase their investment in FinOps to achieve this and 39% say they will use cloud native tools to reduce licensing costs. Despite budget pressures, 82% will increase their investment in application modernisation. Security remains a priority, with 92% increasing investment in this space.

Dan Ortman, Global Practice Lead FinOps at SoftwareOne: “The next year is going to be a challenging one for businesses worldwide. The increased agility that comes with cloud computing will allow companies to better respond to these unexpected market changes. Adopting FinOps practices will help them optimise not just their spend but the processes, accountability and transparency required to get maximum value from their cloud investment. Once legacy IT is migrated and modernised, and cloud is optimised, any savings can be reinvested into innovative projects that help the IT team to achieve more with less.”

To see the full findings from the SoftwareOne CIO Pulse: 2023 budget & priorities, go to https://www.softwareone.com/en/now/cio-pulse-2023-budgets-and-priorities

CONTACT

Melissa Talago, Media relations SoftwareOne
Tel: +44 0203 5300 270, melissa.talago@softwareone.com

Georges Nellany, Champion Communications (UK)
Tel: +44 (0)20 7030 3818, georges.nellany@championcomms.com

Marissa Pasillas, Walker Sands (US)
Tel: +1 815-721-3086, marissa.pasillas@walkersands.com

ABOUT SOFTWAREONE
SoftwareOne is a leading global software and cloud solutions provider that is redefining how organizations build, buy and manage everything in the cloud. By helping clients to migrate and modernize their workloads and applications – and in parallel, to navigate and optimize the resulting software and cloud changes – SoftwareOne unlocks the value of technology. The company’s ~9,000 employees are driven to deliver a portfolio of 7,500 software brands with sales and delivery capabilities in 90 countries. Headquartered in Switzerland, SoftwareOne is listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange under the ticker symbol SWON. Visit us at www.softwareone.com

SoftwareOne Holding AG, Riedenmatt 4, CH-6370 Stans

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This media release may contain certain forward-looking statements relating to the group’s future business, development and economic performance. Such statements may be subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and other important factors, such as but not limited to force majeure, competitive pressures, legislative and regulatory developments, global, macroeconomic and political trends, the group’s ability to attract and retain the employees that are necessary to generate revenues and to manage its businesses, fluctuations in currency exchange rates and general financial market conditions, changes in accounting standards or policies, delay or inability in obtaining approvals from authorities, technical developments, litigation or adverse publicity and news coverage, each of which could cause actual development and results to differ materially from the statements made in this media release. SoftwareOne assumes no obligation to update or alter forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.