The tech locomotive, which has been steaming along for quite a while, is showing early signs that it’s about to tap the brakes.

That’s one conclusion from an early look at the “2H19 Pulse Check Survey” compiled by Enterprise Technology Research, which captures spending intentions and draws from 4,500 practitioners surveyed by the organization on a regular basis. The full results will be released on Oct. 16.

“Buyers are planning for a slowdown in tech spending,” said Dave Vellante, chief analyst at market research firm Wikibon Inc. and co-host of theCUBE, at SiliconANGLE Media’s studio in Boston. “That is clear, but the sky is not falling. Digital initiatives are really moving into a higher gear, and that’s causing some replacement on legacy technologies and some focus on bets for emerging technologies.”

Tech spending will be closely watched starting next week as earnings season begins for the big tech companies. IBM Corp. will report its third-quarter earnings results on Oct. 16, and the following several weeks will see reports from SAP SE, Microsoft Corp., Google LLC parent Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Intel Corp., Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and others.

Vellante’s full analysis with transcript is here.

Financial services affected

The spending intentions data shows that the industries likely to experience more significant slowdowns are telecommunications, large financial services and insurance. That may have a major global impact on nations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, which have been overweighted in banking services, according to Vellante.

“There’s a uniform slowing virtually across the board in all sectors,” Vellante said. “It’s the largest public companies and the largest private companies. Adoptions are really reverting back to 2018 levels.”

A deeper dive into the results shows that some major players in the technology sector could be more affected than others. One company that could weather a slowdown appears to be Microsoft Corp.

“Microsoft is getting very aggressive, it’s extending and expanding its total addressable market further into cloud, into collaboration, into application performance management and into security,” Vellante said. “Windows is not the future of Microsoft. It’s all of these other markets it is going after.”

Microsoft is also continuing to gain share overall in the cloud market, along with Amazon Web Services Inc. However, the ETR data points toward stormy seas for Google LLC’s cloud effort, although the long-term outlook is more positive.

“Google is way behind in terms of market share,” Vellante noted. “Its artificial intelligence and machine learning gains have stalled relative to Microsoft and AWS. However, the ETR three-year outlook shows Google Cloud Platform gaining.”

Here’s the complete video analysis, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE