Red Hat determines customer spending priorities for 2019

For the fifth consecutive year, Red Hat reached out to customers to hear where they are in their technology journey and where they want to go in 2019. The findings from the annual Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook* include: 

Automation, cloud, and security top IT funding priorities

The top IT funding priorities for organisations in 2019 are IT operations automation, cloud infrastructure, and security, in that order. The same priorities were also the top three last year, but automation moved from third to first this year, with 44% of respondents saying it was a top three funding priority compared to 36% last year.

This development indicates "an increased emphasis in taking out manual operations across IT in order to increase productivity and reduce costs," said Margaret Dawson, VP, Portfolio Product Marketing at Red Hat in a blog post.

In 4th and 5th place for funding priorities were optimising or modernising existing/legacy IT, and enterprise integration. "When I talk with customers, I consistently hear how integration has become even more complex with increasing business requirements around data and applications," Dawson said.

Organisations continue to shift investment from legacy to innovation, but for most enterprises, 50%  to 60% of IT funding will still go to existing technologies. 

Source: Red Hat. Investment is shifting towards innovation, or new infrastructure. "Numbers this year around investment in legacy versus new seemed aggressive, which I take as either overly optimistic or we are finally moving the needle in what we used to call the 'bimodal challenge'", Dawson said. The bimodal challenge refers to juggling the maintenance of legacy technology which needs to be stable and efficient, while at the same time introducing completely new technology which requires a more experimental mindset and can be constantly improved. 

Virtualisation still dominates enterprise infrastructure

Virtualisation turns out to be the most common infrastructure for not only existing workloads but for new application deployment. That said, respondents want to provide virtualisation to their users as a self-service cloud. More than half (51%) of respondents listed virtualisation as the No. 1 technology they intend to offer as-a-service.

"Many of the organisations that responded have multiple hypervisors in their environment and don’t plan to bet on a single hypervisor in the next few years. From what I’m hearing from customers, they are looking to reduce the cost and complexity of their virtualised environments, but are currently using different hypervisors for different workloads or environments. I think we will see this start to consolidate as virtualisation is needed as a consistent architectural fabric across environments, from on-premise to public multicloud," said Dawson.

Operating systems: choosing a standard

Red Hat customers want to reduce the number of operating systems (OSes) they manage today. Of the customers that responded, 15% say they have 10 or more operating systems in their IT infrastructure today but that slips to 13% when asked about the next two years.

Only 3% of respondents say they have a single operating system in their IT infrastructure today, and 4% hope to have a single OS within the next two years. The largest cohort has two or three OSes in their infrastructure - 33% today, and 38% aspire to have two or three OSes by 2020.  

"We have seen this trend in customer discussions, where they are looking for a single OS that can provide a consistent architectural fabric from physical infrastructure to private cloud to multiple public clouds. Part of this journey could be just getting to the latest versions of OS software, which helps organisations reduce complexity and cost as they move to a more hybrid cloud reality," said Dawson.

Containers must be secure

Container usage is expected to increase by 89% in the next two years. The biggest issues involve concerns around security and ease of use, Dawson said. 

"In addition, many IT leaders still have a knowledge gap about what containers are and are not. About half of those who responded said that they aren’t sure if containers are secure, and only 42% said that containers are easy to set up," Dawson shared.

"I think some of this confusion comes from container vendors and the market. Some would have you believe that all containers are created equal, and that all containers are inherently secure. There’s a reason we base our container platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, because we have many years experience building OS-based technologies with security in mind."

While testing has largely shown that containers are closer to bare-metal performance than virtual machines (VMs), 45% of respondents said they were unsure whether containers performed better than VMs and 12% said that containers were slower than VMs.

Nevertheless, 57% of those surveyed saying they are using containers today—and the vast majority of those are Linux containers. In addition, 75% expect to use containers within two years. Nearly two in 10 (19%) say they’re using Windows and Linux containers, but 36% hope to use both by the end of two years.

According to the survey, 37% of organisations are running 10% (or less) of their workloads in containers today. Almost four in 10 (38%) are not using containers at all, but that is to drop to 26% in two years. Today, 13% say they’re using containers for half or more of their workloads today. In the next two years, 28% said they will run 50% or more workloads in containers and 47% said up to 49% of their workloads will be in containers.

Only 13% say they’re using containers for half or more of their workloads today. That changes in the two-year timeframe, with 28% saying they’ll run 50% or more in containers and 47% say they’ll be running up to 49% of their workloads in containers.

When it comes to emerging technologieis, Red Hat customers put Blockchain, edge or fog computing, and developer productivity tools (in that order) as their top three. "Of customers surveyed, 86% said that they would consider putting budget towards Blockchain in 2019. Eighty-two percent were considering spend towards edge or fog computing, with telecommunications and financial services being the top industries. Fifty-seven percent were looking to new developer productivity tools," said Dawson.

Other findings included:

- The quest for digital leadership will not be just a CIO mandate, but a CEO and board priority, and the need for clear strategy and investment to achieve this will be paramount.

- Disparate on-premise and public cloud strategies will come together, with organisations going after a truly integrated hybrid cloud architecture.

- Security will become an even greater “survival of the fittest” competition for both enterprises and the IT solution providers working with them.

*The Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook surveyed more than 400 Red Hat customers around the world, with respondents from 51 countries. Of these, 26.7% responded from APAC. These IT leaders weighed in about their current challenges, their deployment strategies, technologies they are excited about, as well as budget and technology priorities for 2019.