Three in five enterprises will move the majority of their IT away from enterprise data centres and onto public cloud infrastructure and software as a service (SaaS), according to a new report from 451 Research.

The study, the analyst firm’s inaugural Voice of the Enterprise Digital Pulse survey, polled more than 1,000 IT professionals worldwide, finding the largest spending increase for IT teams this year is for ‘as a service’ delivery.

Naturally, providers such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are emerging as likely strategic technology suppliers for enterprises. One in three enterprises already consider Microsoft in this role, with the number expected to rise to 35% by 2019, while 17% will opt for AWS in 2019 compared with 7% today.

Business intelligence and analytics was the main IT priority in 2018, according to 45% of respondents, ahead of machine learning and artificial intelligence (29%), big data (28%), and software-defined networking (25%). The figures are interesting when considering all of the emerging technologies interesting CIOs and CTOs alike. Machine learning and AI polled well, but interest in blockchain – cited by 12% of respondents – and fog and edge computing (7%) was not as significant.

Ultimately, the research does suggest a trend; that of data-centric technologies. “The survey suggests that many – but certainly not all – organisations are finally reaching the point where they can focus on endeavours that help differentiate the business, instead of merely keeping the lights on,” said Melanie Posey, research vice president at 451 Research. “In 2018 we expect to see much of this effort focused around a new set of approaches to data optimisation and analysis.”

Back in July, the analyst firm said that ‘everything as a service’ was rising towards the mainstream, thanks to the increased demand for managed security, disaster recovery, and networking.

You can find out more about the report here (subscription required).