70% of IT Managers Expect Spend Increase on Hosting, Cloud or SaaS Services in the Next 5 Years

Rackspace Survey Indicates 70 Percent of IT Managers Expect Spend Increase on Hosting, Cloud or SaaS Services in the Next Five Years-Customer demand for hosting is likely to increase over the next five years, according to a recent customer survey conducted by Rackspace Hosting, specialist in hosted IT services. Nearly 70 percent of customer respondents indicated that the number of IT functions they outsource to hosting, SaaS or cloud service providers should increase over the next five years.

Customer respondents also revealed that the amount they will spend on hosting is expected to increase over the next five years. Today, 47 percent of respondents said they spend between 0 and 20 percent of their IT budget on hosted services, while 30 percent of respondents said that they spend 30 – 50 percent of their IT budget on hosted services. Nearly 50 percent of customer respondents said that they expect the percentage of IT budgets spent on hosted services to increase over the next five years.

"Rackspace is changing the way companies are buying IT services," said John Engates, chief technology officer, Rackspace Hosting. "Two thirds of the survey respondents use a services provider to host one or more of their SaaS applications today and the data indicates that demand is likely to increase. To meet this demand, Rackspace intends to continue to build out its portfolio of hosted IT services, which currently includes email and cloud solutions, and to back them all with our award-winning Fanatical Support."

The customer survey also acknowledged that outsourcing IT functions to a hosting provider can save IT managers a significant amount of time. More than 40 percent of the customer respondents said that outsourcing their IT functions to a hosting provider saved them from 30-50 percent of their time. As a result, almost three-fourths of them believe that they can spend at least 25 percent more time on new projects because of the time they saved from outsourcing their hosting needs.

The methodology for Rackspace’s survey research involved sending an email survey to approximately 1,600 US-based Rackspace customers. Approximately seven percent of survey recipients responded to the questions.

Detailed information and the full survey report (7 pages)