IT Trends 2018: The Intersection of Hype and Performance - Part 1

Leon Adato
Learn more about SolarWinds

According to Google, in the time it takes you to read this sentence, a website will lose 53% of its visitors if the page hasn't loaded. This confirms what most of us have known for a while: IT performance is more important than ever in today's digital economy. It's crucial to an organization's bottom line, as high bounce rates can result in lost money, while improved performance can save time and money.

Also well known is that emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and blockchain are disrupting the industry. With that said, while they may be top of mind for the c-suite, in many cases, IT professionals are focused on more urgent, basic performance problems. The SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2018: The Intersection of Hype and Performance investigates how IT professionals view the current state of technology and digital transformation.

Overall, the 2018 key findings show:

Hybrid IT and cloud computing will remain IT professionals' top priority for the next five years as these elements meet today's business needs while serving as the foundation for trends like machine learning and AI.

■ 94 percent of IT professionals surveyed indicate hybrid IT or cloud as one of the top five most important technologies in their IT organization's technology strategy today, with 51 percent listing it as their number one most important technology.

■ When ranking most important technologies today, and for digital transformation over the next three to five years, as well as technologies with the greatest potential to provide productivity/efficiency benefits and ROI, IT professionals ranked hybrid IT and cloud as number one across the board (by weighted rank).

At the same time, IT professionals are prioritizing internal investments in containers as a proven solution to the challenges of hybrid IT and cloud computing, and a key enabler of innovation.

■ 44 percent of respondents ranked containers as the most important technology priority today, and 38 percent of respondents ranked containers as the most important technology priority three to five years from now.

■ Concurrently, AI and ML investments are expected to increase in importance over the next three to five years – 37 percent of respondents indicate that AI is the biggest priority and 31 percent of respondents indicate that ML is the biggest priority three to five years from now (compared to 29 percent and 21 percent today, respectively).

The results of the IT Trends survey suggest a dissonance between the views of IT professionals and their senior managers on priorities for IT investment over the next three to five years.

■ On the weighted list of technologies IT professionals believe are needed for an IT organization's digital transformation over the next three to five years, AI did not make the top five. This contrasts with a recent CEO survey, which found that 81 percent of CEOs consider AI and machine learning to be a priority for their business, up from just 54 percent in 2016 (Fortune).

While IT professionals continue prioritizing hybrid IT and cloud computing, adoption of these technologies has made it challenging to optimize performance of their systems and applications.

■ 58 percent of IT professionals surveyed indicated that by weighted rank, hybrid IT/cloud presents the greatest challenges when it comes to implementation, roll-out, and day-to-day performance.

■ Nearly half (47 percent) of all IT professionals surveyed think that their IT environments are not operating at optimal levels.

■ Over half of all IT professionals surveyed spend less than 25 percent of their time proactively optimizing performance.

■ Nearly half of IT professionals spend 50 percent or more of their time reactively maintaining and troubleshooting their IT environment.

Many IT professionals cite a lack of organizational strategy and inadequate investment in areas such as user training as the most common barriers to system optimization.

■ Of IT professionals indicating their environments are not optimized, 43 percent ranked inadequate organizational strategy as one of the top three barriers to achieving optimization. To achieve true performance and work toward a successful digital transformation, IT professionals require deeper strategic collaboration with business leaders.

If IT professionals want to be instrumental to their organization's successful digital transformation journey, they should continue prioritizing a hybrid IT environment while simultaneously developing new skillsets and leveraging emerging technologies.

Start with: IT Trends 2018: The Intersection of Hype and Performance - Part 2, offering recommendations on how to manage the intersection of hype and performance.

Methodology: The 2018 IT Trends Report is based on a survey of IT practitioners, managers, and directors at public- and private-sector small, mid-size, and enterprise organizations, fielded in December 2017 by C White Consulting on behalf of SolarWinds. 803 respondents from North America, Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Kingdom were surveyed, as reported on the SolarWinds IT Trends Index.

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IT Trends 2018: The Intersection of Hype and Performance - Part 1

Leon Adato
Learn more about SolarWinds

According to Google, in the time it takes you to read this sentence, a website will lose 53% of its visitors if the page hasn't loaded. This confirms what most of us have known for a while: IT performance is more important than ever in today's digital economy. It's crucial to an organization's bottom line, as high bounce rates can result in lost money, while improved performance can save time and money.

Also well known is that emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and blockchain are disrupting the industry. With that said, while they may be top of mind for the c-suite, in many cases, IT professionals are focused on more urgent, basic performance problems. The SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2018: The Intersection of Hype and Performance investigates how IT professionals view the current state of technology and digital transformation.

Overall, the 2018 key findings show:

Hybrid IT and cloud computing will remain IT professionals' top priority for the next five years as these elements meet today's business needs while serving as the foundation for trends like machine learning and AI.

■ 94 percent of IT professionals surveyed indicate hybrid IT or cloud as one of the top five most important technologies in their IT organization's technology strategy today, with 51 percent listing it as their number one most important technology.

■ When ranking most important technologies today, and for digital transformation over the next three to five years, as well as technologies with the greatest potential to provide productivity/efficiency benefits and ROI, IT professionals ranked hybrid IT and cloud as number one across the board (by weighted rank).

At the same time, IT professionals are prioritizing internal investments in containers as a proven solution to the challenges of hybrid IT and cloud computing, and a key enabler of innovation.

■ 44 percent of respondents ranked containers as the most important technology priority today, and 38 percent of respondents ranked containers as the most important technology priority three to five years from now.

■ Concurrently, AI and ML investments are expected to increase in importance over the next three to five years – 37 percent of respondents indicate that AI is the biggest priority and 31 percent of respondents indicate that ML is the biggest priority three to five years from now (compared to 29 percent and 21 percent today, respectively).

The results of the IT Trends survey suggest a dissonance between the views of IT professionals and their senior managers on priorities for IT investment over the next three to five years.

■ On the weighted list of technologies IT professionals believe are needed for an IT organization's digital transformation over the next three to five years, AI did not make the top five. This contrasts with a recent CEO survey, which found that 81 percent of CEOs consider AI and machine learning to be a priority for their business, up from just 54 percent in 2016 (Fortune).

While IT professionals continue prioritizing hybrid IT and cloud computing, adoption of these technologies has made it challenging to optimize performance of their systems and applications.

■ 58 percent of IT professionals surveyed indicated that by weighted rank, hybrid IT/cloud presents the greatest challenges when it comes to implementation, roll-out, and day-to-day performance.

■ Nearly half (47 percent) of all IT professionals surveyed think that their IT environments are not operating at optimal levels.

■ Over half of all IT professionals surveyed spend less than 25 percent of their time proactively optimizing performance.

■ Nearly half of IT professionals spend 50 percent or more of their time reactively maintaining and troubleshooting their IT environment.

Many IT professionals cite a lack of organizational strategy and inadequate investment in areas such as user training as the most common barriers to system optimization.

■ Of IT professionals indicating their environments are not optimized, 43 percent ranked inadequate organizational strategy as one of the top three barriers to achieving optimization. To achieve true performance and work toward a successful digital transformation, IT professionals require deeper strategic collaboration with business leaders.

If IT professionals want to be instrumental to their organization's successful digital transformation journey, they should continue prioritizing a hybrid IT environment while simultaneously developing new skillsets and leveraging emerging technologies.

Start with: IT Trends 2018: The Intersection of Hype and Performance - Part 2, offering recommendations on how to manage the intersection of hype and performance.

Methodology: The 2018 IT Trends Report is based on a survey of IT practitioners, managers, and directors at public- and private-sector small, mid-size, and enterprise organizations, fielded in December 2017 by C White Consulting on behalf of SolarWinds. 803 respondents from North America, Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Kingdom were surveyed, as reported on the SolarWinds IT Trends Index.

Related Links

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OpenTelemetry: A Complete Telemetry Framework that Grows with You

Most organizations approach OpenTelemetry as a collection of individual tools they need to assemble from scratch. This view misses the bigger picture. OpenTelemetry is a complete telemetry framework with composable components that address specific problems at different stages of organizational maturity. You start with what you need today and adopt additional pieces as your observability practices evolve ...

The Quiet Power of Milliseconds in High Traffic Systems

One of the earliest lessons I learned from architecting throughput-heavy services is that simplicity wins repeatedly: fewer moving parts, loosely coupled execution (fewer synchronous calls), and precise timing metering. You want data and decisions to travel the shortest possible path. The goal is to build a system where every strategy and each line of code (contention is the key metric) complements the decision trees ...

Are AI "Autonomous Coworkers" Ready for Payroll?

As discussions around AI "autonomous coworkers" accelerate, many industry projections assume that agents will soon operate alongside human staff in making decisions, taking actions, and managing tasks with minimal oversight. But a growing number of critics (including some of the developers building these systems) argue that the industry still has a long way to go to be able to treat AI agents like fully trusted teammates ...

Enterprise AI Reaches Pivotal Inflection Point: From Automation to Agentic Intelligence

Enterprise AI has entered a transformational phase where, according to Digitate's recently released survey, Agentic AI and the Future of Enterprise IT, companies are moving beyond traditional automation toward Agentic AI systems designed to reason, adapt, and collaborate alongside human teams ...

The Real Reason Enterprise AI Stalls: It Doesn't Fit in the Box

The numbers back this urgency up. A recent Zapier survey shows that 92% of enterprises now treat AI as a top priority. Leaders want it, and teams are clamoring for it. But if you look closer at the operations of these companies, you see a different picture. The rollout is slow. The results are often delayed. There's a disconnect between what leaders want and what their technical infrastructure can handle ...

AI's Inflection Point Will Redefine Enterprise Readiness in 2026

Kyndryl's 2025 Readiness Report revealed that 61% of global business and technology leaders report increasing pressure from boards and regulators to prove AI's ROI. As the technology evolves and expectations continue to rise, leaders are compelled to generate and prove impact before scaling further. This will lead to a decisive turning point in 2026 ...

Turning Foresight into Resilience: Reclaiming Prevention in the Age of Exposure

Cloudflare's disruption illustrates how quickly a single provider's issue cascades into widespread exposure. Many organizations don't fully realize how tightly their systems are coupled to thirdparty services, or how quickly availability and security concerns align when those services falter ... You can't avoid these dependencies, but you can understand them ...

MLOps Meets DataOps: Creating Unified Backbone for AI

If you work with AI, you know this story. A model performs during testing, looks great in early reviews, works perfectly in production and then slowly loses relevance after operating for a while. Everything on the surface looks perfect — pipelines are running, predictions or recommendations are error-free, data quality checks show green; yet outcomes don't meet the ground reality. This pattern often repeats across enterprise AI programs. Take for example, a mid-sized retail banking and wealth-management firm with heavy investments in AI-powered risk analytics, fraud detection and personalized credit-decisioning systems. The model worked well for a while, but transactions increased, so did false positives by 18% ...

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Basic uptime is no longer the gold standard. By 2026, network monitoring must do more than report status, it must explain performance in a hybrid-first world. Networks are no longer just static support systems; they are agile, distributed architectures that sit at the very heart of the customer experience and the business outcomes ... The following five trends represent the new standard for network health, providing a blueprint for teams to move from reactive troubleshooting to a proactive, integrated future ...

2026 AI Predictions - Part 5

APMdigest's Predictions Series concludes with 2026 AI Predictions — industry experts offer predictions on how AI and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2026. Part 5, the final installment, covers AI's impacts on IT teams ...