Survey: Microsoft to Top List of IT Spending Priorities in 2025

Microsoft will be the company that IT decision-makers spend the most on in 2025, allowing the software giant to hold a tight grip on their needs.

An estimated 63% of IT buyers said that Microsoft was their top technology vendor, according to Flexera's 2025 IT Priorities Report. The report, which surveyed 800 IT leaders from across the world, inquired about how these companies intended to organize their priorities and focuses in the coming year. The next popular was Google at 49%, followed by AWS at 38% and OpenAI at 37%. This is the first year that Flexera listed OpenAI as a technology vendor in its report.

The report also noted that AI is a growing priority for a number of these companies. Forty-two percent of respondents said that they believe integrating AI into their solutions will have the largest impact, according to Flexera.

Flexera's Conal Gallagher

"While IT leaders are facing myriad challenges and opportunities, artificial intelligence seems to pose the biggest potential gains in the short- and long term,” said Conal Gallagher, CIO at Flexera. “There’s an extraordinary expense required of AI projects, creating an even greater sense of urgency to not only understand the impact of the investment but to quickly demonstrate returns that advance core business objectives. AI is not only disrupting and transforming IT − for example, creating more focus on compute resources and data quality − but planting the seeds to change the way we all work. It’s no surprise that IT is at the forefront of recognizing and ushering in this disruption, helping to be a guiding force for their organizations.”  

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IT Vendors, Partners and Overspending

A number of respondents also expressed concern about overspending. Nearly one in three (31%) said they were overspending on security tools, while 28% said they were overspending on cloud infrastructure (28%) or hardware (27%). Some respondents have also claimed that the growing interest in new technologies burdens their bottom dollar. Seventy-one percent said that cloud costs were a heavy burden on their IT budgets, while 68% said their business units are spending more on SaaS and cloud than they even know. They also intend to continue expanding their investments in the coming year, with the vast majority of clients intending to invest in emerging applications such as like ChatGPT (74%), or in security tools (74%).

Very few (13%) are considering FinOps a priority, despite increasing concerns about overspending and a shift toward expensive AI investments.

According to Flexera, 94% of respondents stated that innovation was a "top strategic priority" for their organization.

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