As enterprise departments pivot their IT spending cycles toward cybersecurity and SDN, vendors like Microsoft and VMware could see demand grow throughout 2018.
According to a new Cowen and Company survey, cybersecurity and SDN were top of mind of participants.
“Cybersecurity was clearly listed as the highest IT spending priority, providing further evidence that overall security demand remains healthy,” Cowen and Company said in a research note. “Specifically, 65% of respondents selected cybersecurity as their highest IT spending priority, as compared with 58% in our prior survey."
Cowen added that "IaaS, application development/maintenance, and SDN/NFV all performed better this time around.”
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The research firm said that Microsoft saw high grades in the survey as a key benefactor of enterprises’ spending on network visualization spending. VMware also saw what Cowen and Company said were better-than-expected survey results. Cowen said that 39% of respondents intend to use vSphere “a lot” over the next 12 to 18 months, rising from 32% today.
Additionally, upcoming VMware Cloud on AWS deployments over the next 6 to 12 months were very strong. However, Cowen said that Red Hat's RHEL fared well overall, but not quite as well as the research firm had expected.