ICT Investment Trends In Utilities

1 Trends in ICT budgets
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Survey demographics
1.3 ICT budget changes
1.4 ICT budget allocation by core technology area
1.5 Likely growth in industry-specific ICT
1.5.1 Hardware budget breakdown
1.5.2 Software budget breakdowns
1.5.3 Third party IT services expenditure
1.5.4 Communications expenditure
1.5.5 Cloud computing budget
1.6 Outsourced IT functions
2 ICT investment priorities and vendor satisfaction
2.1 Introduction
2.1.1 Cloud computing
2.1.2 Business intelligence
2.1.3 Network services
2.1.4 Security services
3 ICT procurement trends
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Business objectives influencing IT investment strategy
3.3 ICT provider selection
3.4 Key decision maker for purchasing technology
3.5 IoT investments and uptake
4 Sector-specific trends
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Business challenges
5 Summary
5.1 Utilities are increasing their ICT spending in key areas like BI and IoT, but lack a clear direction
6 Appendix
6.1 Definitions
6.2 Further reading
6.3 Contact the authors

Figure 1: Utility companies - ICT survey geographic breakdown
Figure 2: Utility companies - ICT survey breakdown by size band (number of employees)
Figure 3: Recent and expected ICT budget changes among utility companies
Figure 4: Utility companies' (external) ICT budget allocation, 2015 and 2016
Figure 5: Utility companies' growth in industry-specific ICT
Figure 6: Utility companies' average hardware budget allocation
Figure 7: Average allocation of software budgets in utility companies
Figure 8: Utility companies' average IT services budget allocation
Figure 9: Utility companies' average communications expenditure
Figure 10: Utility companies' average cloud computing budget allocation by technology
Figure 11: Utility companies' average cloud computing budget allocation by implementation type
Figure 12: Outsourced IT functions - Utility companies' current and future outsourcing priorities
Figure 13: Cloud computing - Utility companies' current and future investment priorities
Figure 14: Business intelligence - Utility companies' current and future investment priorities
Figure 15: Business intelligence - selected primary provider and vendor satisfaction among utility companies
Figure 16: Network services - selected primary provider and vendor satisfaction among utility companies
Figure 17: Security services - selected primary provider and vendor satisfaction among utility companies
Figure 18: Business objectives which influence utility companies' IT investment strategy
Figure 19: Factors influencing utility companies' decision to choose an ICT provider
Figure 20: Role of key entities in making ICT purchasing decisions
Figure 21: Primary integrator of IoT deployments
Figure 22: Plans to adopt cloud-based IoT
Figure 23: Importance of the following business challenges for utility companies

SECONDARY RESEARCH
Secondary Research Information is collected from a number of publicly available as well as paid databases. Public sources involve publications by different associations and governments, annual reports and statements of companies, white papers and research publications by recognized industry experts and renowned academia etc. Paid data sources include third party authentic industry databases.

PRIMARY RESEARCH
Once data collection is done through secondary research, primary interviews are conducted with different stakeholders across the value chain like manufacturers, distributors, ingredient/input suppliers, end customers and other key opinion leaders of the industry. Primary research is used both to validate the data points obtained from secondary research and to fill in the data gaps after secondary research.

MARKET ENGINEERING
The market engineering phase involves analyzing the data collected, market breakdown and forecasting. Macroeconomic indicators and bottom-up and top-down approaches are used to arrive at a complete set of data points that give way to valuable qualitative and quantitative insights. Each data point is verified by the process of data triangulation to validate the numbers and arrive at close estimates.

EXPERT VALIDATION
The market engineered data is verified and validated by a number of experts, both in-house and external.

REPORT WRITING/ PRESENTATION
After the data is curated by the mentioned highly sophisticated process, the analysts begin to write the report. Garnering insights from data and forecasts, insights are drawn to visualize the entire ecosystem in a single report.