Insights from Today’s CIOs

We recently hosted about 45 enterprise CIOs and IT leaders for an afternoon of conversation and gathered insights on their priorities and emerging technology trends. The participants represented industries such as Airlines, Banking, Entertainment, Healthcare, Insurance, Manufacturing, Pharma, Retail, Technology and Telecommunications. We had in-depth conversations on their top 3 priority topics – the move to the cloud, building a data science workforce, and cybersecurity. We also solicited their input on a broad range of priorities and emerging themes. Some of them are shared here:

CIO Top Priorities:

• Cloud/SaaS is #1
• Cybersecurity is #2
• Big Data/Analytics is #3
• Mobile is #4
• Software-defined infrastructure for networking and storage is #5
• IOT and Social are at the bottom of the priority stack

Cloud Adoption:

• 90%+ have moved or are planning to use the public cloud
• 83% will use public cloud for both new and existing apps

Cybersecurity:

• 73% Are NOT satisfied about protection from a future breach
• Insider threats are the biggest concern

Data Science Journey:

• 87% use or plan to use big data technologies like Hadoop and Spark
• 83% use or plan to use NoSQL databases like Mongo, Couch, and Cassandra
• 86% use or plan to use Machine Learning/AI solutions

Containers & Software Defined Infrastructure:

• 92% are using or plan to use Containers/Microservices
• 89% are using or plan to use Software-defined Infrastructure for storage and networking

The Mayfield CIO Innovation Forum provided an excellent opportunity to gain insight from real world buyers. IT continues to experience waves of innovation which are re-inventing industries and creating new markets. Enterprise CIOs feel the need to innovate rapidly and leverage advanced technologies like never before. As a result, we believe large opportunities continue to exist for startups.

We plan to share future insights from similar strategic buyer audiences — stay tuned for more!