Cloud, Hosted Services Will Still Be Huge

Businesses will spend more of their budgets on cloud-based or hosted projects in 2017 and less on hardware and software, slightly less on managed services.

The percentage of cloud and hosted spending is projected to rise to an average of 17 percent of IT budgets from 14 percent, but those percentages are higher among small businesses with less than 50 end users, according to the survey.

The takeaway: There's good revenue growth potential here for solution providers with cloud as part of their portfolios who sell to small businesses, which have been looking to cloud as a way to shave costs.