In today’s challenging macroeconomic environment, companies are under increasing pressure to do more with less. In this reality, 89% of Spanish companies (91% globally) consider that optimizing IT costs is a priority for their business.
However, only 5% of companies, both in the world and in Spain, believe that their technology budget is fully optimized, and only 30% of Spanish organizations (35% globally) are proactively analyzing their spending. in IT or looking for formulas to be able to control it. This is the main conclusion that emerges from a report that the firm has just published crayons and that has been carried out by the market research company SAPIO Research.
Despite this, the IT managers consulted who work in companies without a mentality focused on cost optimization, are convinced that this practice can bring significant benefits to their business, especially in terms of productivity (63 % in Spain and 49% globally), efficacy (38% in Spain and 58% globally) and profitability (38% in Spain and 42% globally).
The cloud, the main objective of optimization
According to this study, technology costs have skyrocketed since the pandemic. 39% of Spanish respondents (56% globally) say that their company spends more than a million dollars a year on the public cloud alone. In the US, up to 75% of companies spend at least this much, and in Norway, 12% of the organizations that participated in this study spend more than $25 million each year.
These figures explain why 50% of Spanish respondents (55% globally) place cloud optimization as a priority point in their cost reduction tactics and strategies. In second place comes the negotiation with service providers (46% in Spain and 45% worldwide) and, next, the negotiation with software providers (44% in Spain and 41% in the rest of the countries).
“The economic outlook is turning out to be incredibly difficult for almost every company in the world,” says José Manuel Marina, general director of Crayon in Spain. “Our research highlights that business leaders are struggling to find a formula that allows them to remain competitive while cutting costs. We also know that when it comes to IT costs, many companies aren’t applying the same level of scrutiny as other major items.”
In addition to the challenge of optimizing costs, organizations are forced to face other challenges, such as internal ignorance about innovative technologies.
In an effort to keep costs under control, the Crayon survey indicates that although one in five companies globally (16% in Spain) leaves IT cost decisions in the hands of financial directors and their teams, three out of five companies (54% in Spain) are already implementing FinOps departments, a financial discipline that includes business departments in data-based spending decisions. This practice is being widely adopted in countries such as Singapore (84%), Saudi Arabia (76%), Denmark (75%), the US (74%) and Norway (73%), reflecting the importance attached to concedes to cost optimization and suggests that organizations are trying to be more rigorous in extracting value from their technology investments.
Lack of knowledge, visibility and time
For 30% of Spanish professionals, the biggest obstacle when it comes to optimizing IT costs in their companies is the lack of knowledge about the best way to do it (28% globally). This is followed by the lack of visibility of the organization’s expenses (28% worldwide and 24% in Spain) and the lack of time for those responsible for decision-making (31% globally and 19% in Spain).
When managing their IT assets, in addition to the challenge of optimizing costs, organizations are forced to face other challenges, such as internal ignorance about innovative technologies, such as AI or Cloud (34% in Spain and 36% in global level); cloud migration and implementation (29% in Spain and 33% globally) or the simultaneous management of cloud and on-premises environments (32% in Spain and 33% globally).
“The change in strategy with regard to reducing IT costs is opening up new challenges”, continues Marina. “This is due to the highly technical nature of this expense, which makes it difficult to manage. To weather the storm both now and in the future, organizations need to collaborate with a partner to help define the right lines between different technologies and platforms, business needs, unused contractual clauses and subscriptions, organizational structures, data gaps, skills and much more.
