What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #272

Silver lining - enterprise IT spend to continue 📈

Jan 15, 2022

2022 headlines are all about tech stocks getting crushed but if you read on, there is a silver lining.

While I’ve always believed that a correction on valuation multiples was imminent, focusing on the stock market tick by tick could cause one to lose their mind. If you’re a believer in enterprise IT and infrastructure, what you want to look at is where IT spending is going. And one of the most transparent organizations to analyze is JP Morgan. They are usually a leading indicator of what other banks (largest spenders in tech) are doing and hence other large multinationals. As tech spending increases, there are usually plenty of net new opportunities for startups to sell into. In a flat or downward spending cycle, much of the opportunity becomes all about replacement of old tech which means super long sales cycles. The good news is that in JPM’s Q4 2021 earnings call/report they spent $12B on tech in 2021 and expect that to grow over 20%, yes over 20% to $14.4B (PDF here).

And tech, which we've broadened to include tech-adjacent spend, reflecting our recognition that tech means more than just software development. It encompasses data and analytics, AI, as well as the physical aspects of modernization, such as data centers. And what's really powerful to note here is our ability to make these investments, which are quite significant in dollar terms and are designed to secure our future, while still delivering excellent current returns.
Turning to Page 14. In addition to all of our distribution-related investments, a critical foundational component of our strategy is technology, where we spend over $12 billion annually, with about half of that being investments or, as we sometimes call it, change the bank spend.
It's important to understand what's in the investment category. About half of that is foundational and mandatory, which includes regulatory-related investments, modernization and the retirement of technical debt, in addition to other key strategic initiatives to help us face the future. On the left-hand side, you can see some more detail around this. Modernization, which includes migrations to the cloud, as well as upgrading legacy infrastructure and architecture; data strategy that enables us to extract the value that exists in our proprietary data set by cleaning it and staging it in the right ways and then deploying modern techniques against it; attracting and acquiring top talent with modern skills; and a product operating model, which is, obviously, a popular buzzword these days.
But if you look through all that, it reflects the simple reality that the best products get delivered when developers and business owners are working together iteratively with end-to-end ownership. Underpinning all of this is our continued emphasis on cybersecurity to protect the firm and our clients and customers, as well as maintaining a sound control environment. Moving to the right-hand side. The other half of the investment spend is to drive innovation across our businesses and with our client-facing products.
We believe it's critical to identify and resolve customer pain points and improve the user experience. And we're attacking the problem with a combination of building, partnering and buying

Here’s Jamie Dimon on cloud spend - still lots of apps to be migrated from legacy data centers to the cloud:

Jamie Dimon -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
And Mike, to tell you, so we spent $2 billion on brand-new data centers, OK, which have all the cloud capability you can have in private data centers and stuff like that. We're still running the old data centers. Now we are not going to get involved in every time we talk to you, I'll explain every part of the pancake buildup of expenses going in and expenses going out. But all this stuff going to these new data centers, which is now completely up and running, are on apps.
Well, some are, but most of the applications that go in have to be cloud eligible. Most of the data that goes in has to be cloud eligible. We're running a whole bunch of major programs, which I don't think we disclosed, on AWS. And we're working with Google and Microsoft to run stuff -- some of the stuff in the cloud because we want to have multiple cloud capabilities.
And this year, roughly 30%, 40%, 50% of all our apps and all data will be moving to cloud-related type of stuff. This stuff is absolutely totally valuable. I mean, I can't -- if you sat in this room and look at the power of the cloud and big data on risk, fraud, marketing, capabilities, offers, customer satisfaction, do with errors and complaints, prospecting, it's extraordinary. You actually see some of that already in how we manage stuff.

Add to that this most recent Morgan Stanley CIO report 🧵…