Over 80% of Business Leaders Feel Optimistic About the Economy, Forecast Larger IT Budgets in 2024

Matt Cloke
Endava

The past few years have presented numerous challenges for businesses: a pandemic, rising interest rates, supply chain disruptions, and geopolitical conflict that sent shockwaves across the global economy. But change may finally be on the horizon. According to a recent report by Endava surveying nearly 1,000 organizational leaders and decision makers across North America and Western Europe, a majority of executives confirmed they are feeling optimistic about the current business climate, and as a result, are forecasting larger IT budgets, increased technology funding and rollout, and prioritized innovation in the coming year.

Image removed.

The report findings point to the importance of focusing on results over hype in today's business climate, as lasting success in business demands a holistic approach, not just one revolutionary idea. And while it's essential for leaders to keep a pulse on emerging trends, it's just as critical to adapt to the ever-changing markets. With today's uncertainties and the quickly evolving technology landscape, innovation, transformation, and optimization are always on the agenda, with technology playing a pivotal role in continuous problem-solving and adaptation.

Technology acceleration is a practice that blends innovative technology with leading methods; leveraging smaller projects that focus on optimization over transformation, while emphasizing composable architectures and iterative engagements. Through this research, Endava aims to provide perspective on the trends and technologies that are contributing to the emergence of technology acceleration, and the role that technology partnerships play in the rollout of this practice.

Other key insights from Endava's Tech Acceleration report include:

A boost to IT budgets

Nearly 75% of the organizations surveyed forecast a yearly IT budget increase, opening up more resources to hire additional staff, explore new markets, and make strategic investments that enable growth and innovation.

Artificial intelligence, big data, and predictive analytics as top priorities

Artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and predictive analytics ranked as top priorities for organizations included in the study. Over 50% of organizations prioritized AI very highly and just 2% said it wasn't a priority at all. Close to 40% prioritized big data and predictive analytics very highly.

When looking at individual technologies, artificial intelligence rose up as the undisputed champion. Nearly 80% of those surveyed regarded it as either a “high” or “very high priority” technology. Currently, interest in AI is exceptionally high, with Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT dominating technology discussions globally.

5G on the rise, again

5G has been a technology that for some time has struggled to take off. Survey findings suggest that interest in 5G is growing again, particularly in Telecom and Mobility. This aligns with a growing consensus of analysts that predict 5G will be a major element of society in the years to come, acting as the backbone across smart cities, connected factories and automotive, and immersive customer experiences.

Innovation over stability

Over half of the respondents (56%) plan to invest in innovation rather than operational stability. More dollars for technology mean that companies can hire additional staff, explore new markets and make strategic investments. When making such IT investments, organizations must balance pursuing operational stability with innovation that will set them apart from their competitors.

Composable architecture

A comparison between Endava's Emerging Tech Unpacked report and this study revealed that awareness of composable architecture and its application to business may be growing. Previous data showed that many organizations lacked a strategy regarding composability and were unfamiliar with it entirely, while data from this study shows that nearly 60% of respondent organizations are prioritizing it highly.

Organizations applying tech acceleration principles often rely on composability, artificial intelligence, big data, 5G, predictive analytics, microservices, and digital ecosystems. But it's critical to remember that technology acceleration encompasses both strategic and technological elements, so organizations looking to apply a similar framework and stay ahead of the competition must adjust more than just their software and hardware to see success, they must also adjust their thinking for the long haul.

Matt Cloke is Chief Technology Officer at Endava

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Over 80% of Business Leaders Feel Optimistic About the Economy, Forecast Larger IT Budgets in 2024

Matt Cloke
Endava

The past few years have presented numerous challenges for businesses: a pandemic, rising interest rates, supply chain disruptions, and geopolitical conflict that sent shockwaves across the global economy. But change may finally be on the horizon. According to a recent report by Endava surveying nearly 1,000 organizational leaders and decision makers across North America and Western Europe, a majority of executives confirmed they are feeling optimistic about the current business climate, and as a result, are forecasting larger IT budgets, increased technology funding and rollout, and prioritized innovation in the coming year.

Image removed.

The report findings point to the importance of focusing on results over hype in today's business climate, as lasting success in business demands a holistic approach, not just one revolutionary idea. And while it's essential for leaders to keep a pulse on emerging trends, it's just as critical to adapt to the ever-changing markets. With today's uncertainties and the quickly evolving technology landscape, innovation, transformation, and optimization are always on the agenda, with technology playing a pivotal role in continuous problem-solving and adaptation.

Technology acceleration is a practice that blends innovative technology with leading methods; leveraging smaller projects that focus on optimization over transformation, while emphasizing composable architectures and iterative engagements. Through this research, Endava aims to provide perspective on the trends and technologies that are contributing to the emergence of technology acceleration, and the role that technology partnerships play in the rollout of this practice.

Other key insights from Endava's Tech Acceleration report include:

A boost to IT budgets

Nearly 75% of the organizations surveyed forecast a yearly IT budget increase, opening up more resources to hire additional staff, explore new markets, and make strategic investments that enable growth and innovation.

Artificial intelligence, big data, and predictive analytics as top priorities

Artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and predictive analytics ranked as top priorities for organizations included in the study. Over 50% of organizations prioritized AI very highly and just 2% said it wasn't a priority at all. Close to 40% prioritized big data and predictive analytics very highly.

When looking at individual technologies, artificial intelligence rose up as the undisputed champion. Nearly 80% of those surveyed regarded it as either a “high” or “very high priority” technology. Currently, interest in AI is exceptionally high, with Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT dominating technology discussions globally.

5G on the rise, again

5G has been a technology that for some time has struggled to take off. Survey findings suggest that interest in 5G is growing again, particularly in Telecom and Mobility. This aligns with a growing consensus of analysts that predict 5G will be a major element of society in the years to come, acting as the backbone across smart cities, connected factories and automotive, and immersive customer experiences.

Innovation over stability

Over half of the respondents (56%) plan to invest in innovation rather than operational stability. More dollars for technology mean that companies can hire additional staff, explore new markets and make strategic investments. When making such IT investments, organizations must balance pursuing operational stability with innovation that will set them apart from their competitors.

Composable architecture

A comparison between Endava's Emerging Tech Unpacked report and this study revealed that awareness of composable architecture and its application to business may be growing. Previous data showed that many organizations lacked a strategy regarding composability and were unfamiliar with it entirely, while data from this study shows that nearly 60% of respondent organizations are prioritizing it highly.

Organizations applying tech acceleration principles often rely on composability, artificial intelligence, big data, 5G, predictive analytics, microservices, and digital ecosystems. But it's critical to remember that technology acceleration encompasses both strategic and technological elements, so organizations looking to apply a similar framework and stay ahead of the competition must adjust more than just their software and hardware to see success, they must also adjust their thinking for the long haul.

Matt Cloke is Chief Technology Officer at Endava

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MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

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In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Enterprise Edge AI Reaches Inflection Point

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

AI Is Hitting Operational Limits

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

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For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

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I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

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Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

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