We recently released the results of our third annual global IT decision maker research, which surveyed 500 tech leaders from Australia, France, Germany, UK and the US. The goal was to understand how MACH investment has accelerated over the past 12 months and what impact that is having on organizations’ ability to thrive in a difficult economy. We learned that business leaders deeply feel the urgency to innovate in order to stay ahead in a rapidly changing business environment, and they view MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, Headless) as a means to respond to economic volatility.
With so much more to uncover from the data beyond what you saw in our press release, we’re publishing a four-part series that digs deeper into the study’s core sections, including:
1. Challenges to upgrading infrastructure
2. Influences on transformation
3. MACH utilization
4. Evidence of MACH benefits
To begin, let’s examine what respondents said are some of the most pressing challenges to upgrading infrastructure, including the volume and time involved currently on IT upgrades.
Legacy is still holding companies back, with one in five companies spending over half their IT budget on upgrades
Time and money spent on upgrades is an expensive and ongoing issue. And it’s not one that’s going to be solved overnight. That is likely related to the fact that the average portion of organizations’ IT infrastructure is 41% legacy, according to respondents. Further, over a quarter of companies are running more than 20 projects each year, and one in five are spending over half of their IT budget on upgrades.
To put that into context from a dollars perspective, Gartner has forecast that global enterprises will spend about USD $856 billion on software this year. If a quarter of that was spent on upgrades, that would represent more than $200 billion that could be spent on innovation and improvement of digital experiences. Imagine the possibilities…
With the high cost and volume of upgrades, it’s no surprise that respondents also noted in the research that they’re a massive time-suck: 21% of organizations said upgrades take over half of their team’s time. And in terms of the delivery of upgrade projects, they’re averaging three months – an entire quarter. Not exactly a quick-turn when you think of all the other things IT teams could be working toward: Innovating, building personalized customer experience features and functionality and finding ways to differentiate from competitors.
Here’s the tricky thing about upgrades that we know all too well: They’re not optional. Upgrades are needed to keep systems compliant and up-to-date, adding pressure to the fact that teams must be vigilant in managing them. They’re quite literally keeping your systems and your business running.
Conversely, the beauty of MACH (and specifically, the “C” which stands for Cloud-native SaaS) is that organizations have the promise of keeping their cloud infrastructure updated without needing to invest a penny into doing so. The maintenance and management are part of the package deal if you will. Updates run automatically and continuously. That means teams can free up their time to focus on value-added initiatives like those we’ve mentioned.
The bottom line: Companies cannot afford to maintain the status quo. The cost of doing nothing actually comes with a high price tag, perhaps even higher than the price of making a transformation. The transition to MACH is a large undertaking. But to maintain the status quo is an equally large undertaking, especially for bigger businesses. Legacy not only often holds companies back in their innovation potential and hurts their competitive edge; it hampers their ability to shift gears as the business environment ebbs and flows. And we know from the past few years that steady waters are hard to come by.
Not being able to create an ownable customer experience that fits with the brand, not being able to innovate or even adapt the tech, and not being able to change the way clients are served when – for example – a pandemic hits, costs too much. And for some, it’s the difference between shuttering or thriving.
Stay tuned for the second part of this four-part series, which will publish in two weeks and focus on the factors that influence a MACH transition.