Within all the talk of magnificent companies, mega-investors, billions and billions of dollars and the march of new gigawatts around the world, we can remember that enterprise IT still matters.

It's good to take a pause and remember there is consequentiality beyond the small number of people who've been in the AI-centric news over the past few weeks. Companies in the Fortune 500, Global 2000, and similar lists are joined by millions of smaller companies and individuals who buy digital infrastructure for their companies and actually drive a multi-trillion-dollar global business.

Long-running reports from Gartner are a prime source of overview data here. The 2025 Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast shows slightly more than $5.7 trillion to be spent on IT this year, including $367 billion on data centers, $800 billion on devices, $1.2 trillion on software, $1.7 trillion on IT services, and $1.6 trillion on telco.

The total comprises about 5 percent of the global economy. But that 5 percent truly drives the other 95 percent today. Even in the United States, which has the world's largest economy and by far the world's most powerful consumer economy (with more than $16 trillion in spending expected this year), it is the enterprise IT lying underneath it all that makes things possible.

So an obvious question which must not be ignored about the latest trends is, what does this mean for enterprise IT? Even the poor IT gang at Dunder Mifflin needs to stay on top of things, understand what the latest trends mean for them, and be active in adopting the tech that's best for the company.

An IDCA survey in 2024 reinforces this notion, with 66 percent of enterprise IT respondents citing AI as the main “game-changer” in their world today.

A similar audience surveyed by a major industry event in 2018 found cloud computing cited by more than 60 percent of respondents as the “primary” technology in their sites. The contrasting results in 2018 and 2024 are not a surprise. In fact, it's been the growth of cloud computing – public, private, hybrid, and multi – that's driven enterprise IT to new capabilities and compute consumption levels, begetting an era in which powerful AI platforms are becoming real.

Cloud computing has become part of the furniture over this time, now used by consumers to store pictures and documents, and considered a de facto way of doing computing. The Big Three now rack up about $300 billion annually from it.

But wait. The Gartner report cited above projects $2.9 trillion in enterprise software and services this year. Where is all this budget being spent? We cannot make a clear, apples-to-apples comparison between public-cloud revenues and overall enterprise IT spend, but it's clear the the majority of enterprise IT infrastructure and consumption is happening on-site or with a variety of vendors.

The dilemma of buying cloud public-cloud services and losing control versus DYI virtualization and cloud and not doing it as well as public cloud providers remains. Colocating with major providers provides another attractive option, with less DYI risk – and with no major colo vendor having more than about 7 percent of this market, less fear of vendor domination.

There are indeed as many ways to “do” enterprise IT as there are companies doing it. And the people managing these doings are highly consequential. Enterprise IT is the heart and soul of today's global economy, the world's nascent and growing Digital Economies, and how the world will house, clothe, feed, transport, and entertain itself today and tomorrow. It's good to remember this as we see someone smiling and talking about sending another $10 or $100 billion or a trillion dollars or so into the etherverse.