Image Gallery: 10 Tasty Insights from Spiceworks SpiceWorld

SPICEWORKS SPICEWORLD — This week at SpiceWorld 2017 in Austin, Texas, Spiceworks executives showed off the company’s 2018 State of IT report. Based on responses from more than 1,000 IT respondents from a mix of company sizes and types, the survey paints an optimistic picture of tech buying trends in North America and Europe.

Several channel supplier exhibitors also discussed with Channel Partners their latest initiatives, and Spiceworks announced a new Learn initiative and some product news. Find details here.

The just-released survey, which ran in July, shows IT budgets will stabilize and, for 44 percent, grow in 2018. Just 11 percent expect IT spending to decrease. Key investment areas include hiring additional IT staff and increases in adoption of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality and IoT.

Spending on cloud-based services will also rise.

And we’re not talking anemic growth. Among companies that anticipate budgetary gains, the average increase is 19 percent. One area of concern for partners: more competition for talent from deep-pocketed enterprises. Sixty-two percent of organizations with 1,000 to 4,999 employees and 70 percent of companies with more than 5,000 employees report they’ll hire more IT professionals in 2018.

On the plus side for digital-services sellers, the top workloads running in the cloud will be communications and collaboration, cited by 42 percent; backup and disaster recovery, 41 percent; and productivity apps at 29 percent.

We also spoke with Arcserve, Carbonite, Intel and Sophos at the event and picked up some tips on engaging with the Spiceworks community. And as you can tell by the photo at the Eaton booth above, people were having fun. Click through our image gallery below for pictures and a recap.

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