Service providers expect IT budget growth and rely on vendor innovation to drive it

By Liam Eagle and Ellie Brown

Service providers generally anticipate their 2025 IT budgets will increase, continuing a trend from 2024, with demand for increasing performance a key growth driver. Service providers also see their technology vendors and suppliers becoming more important overall to how they deliver services, especially as they concentrate their spending and engagement among a smaller number of core vendors. Vendor value comes from technology innovation and strategic input, as well as co-creation, co-selling and ecosystem opportunities that enable service providers to partner with each other). Meanwhile, service providers describe the energy challenges they faced when executing plans to expand datacenter capacity, citing cost and lead time of utility power as lead issues. Responses to our Differentiation, Vendor Selection & Budgets 2025 survey detail these challenges and growth expectations.