WT report puts focus on 2015 purchasing plans

Our 2015 Trends in Government Purchasing special report explores the technology priorities and purchasing plans of government customers across a broad spectrum of agencies.

Among our findings are the top priorities for purchasing over the next year in areas such as cybersecurity, infrastructure, data centers, and mobility.

The report is part of our WT Insider membership program, so the entire report is available only to WT Insider members, as are five other research reports we’ve published in the last year. Click here for information on how to become a WT Insider.

Inside the 2015 Trends in Government Purchasing report, you’ll find a roadmap of buying habits, plans and priorities.

For example, 49 percent of respondents said they plan to do business with a consultant or professional services provider, while 32 percent named systems integrators, and 28 percent said resellers would be their business partners in the coming year.

The report also looks at favorite contract vehicles such as GSA Schedule 70, which topped the list with 16 percent. But what was most interesting about this list is that 46 percent said they don’t plan to use any of the large, well-known contract vehicles.

That’s an insight that business development and capture management folks need to understand.

Some highlights:

• Email and collaboration solutions top the purchasing plans in the cloud/virtualization category.
• Networking and storage tied as the top priority of infrastructure and data center purchasing plans.
• Data analytics is the top priority for health IT purchases.
• The procurement process continues to be a drag with many buyers saying they face restrictions in how they interact with vendors.

While many of the findings in the report focus on plans for the next year, we did a breakdown of the demographic information of our respondents and found that the aging of the government workforce is accelerating.

Only 6 percent of our respondents were under the age of 35, while 38 percent were between 55 and 64 and other 11 percent were over 65.

With that kind of age distribution, the government workforce will only get grayer and grayer in the years to come. It is also disturbing that the under-35 group is so much smaller than the 55-and-older group.

The impact of the aging of the workforce will play out over several years. In the meantime, the 2015 Trends in Government Purchasing special report can be an important tool as you study the market and decide what your company’s priorities should be for the coming year.