The 2026-27 Telarus Tech Trends Report Is Live

Today, we get to take a closer look at what these trends actually mean for you and your customers. Please join me in welcoming Jen Dimas, our chief marketing and experience officer, Tim Basa, SVP of sales, and Rachelle Laura, VP of corporate marketing. Jim, Jen, Tim, and Rochelle, thank you so much for joining us. We’re all so excited to hear about the the tech trends. So I’m gonna go ahead and give you the floor.

Thank you, Cass. Okay, you guys. Good morning. I am for those of you not on camera, I have my Christmas mug here because it’s one of my most favorite times of the year, and it feels like Christmas. I love being able to launch this foundational piece of content to you guys. We’re super excited about the report this year and kind of what we’ve been doing a little bit differently.

So this is our fourth annual tech trends report.

Chandler, if you wanna just flip to the next slide.

We basically just to so you guys know, Telarus Advisors, you received your copy yesterday in email, so check out your inbox es, and we will continue to share that resource with you in various ways so you have it fresh and ready.

We have basically research from over five hundred mid market and enterprise IT decision makers and over four hundred and fifty Telarus technology advisers to inform this year’s report. Just so you guys know, last year, you may recall if you have been looking at a report over the last few years, actually, we had a lot of mid market versus enterprise data that was very different this year. So much of the insights and so much of the responses have been very consistent across those two segments. So you’ll see combined, basically, one one stat per finding for for these audiences because mid market’s caught up, you guys, with this is some exciting stuff we’re we have to share.

So this year, we basically moved to a very intuitive microsite versus a flipbook, making it much easier for you guys to find what you need and pull those supplemental assets that we give you to turn more of those insights into action. So this year, three key findings.

One interactive report, supplemental assets to quickly turn those insights into action. You guys asked last year, you know, we love this data, but tell us what’s in it for me more. Give me a quick action step. Give me a thing I can download and start engaging in these conversations and looking more like an expert than ever. So that’s what we’ve done.

And let me let’s see. Chandler, will you proceed to the next slide, please? Thank you. So, yeah, that’s basically what what’s new this year, and we can go ahead and get the tour started.

Top nav, super easy to get to key sections, your introduction, key findings. And we have two AI maturity models to help benchmark your AI readiness and also where buyers are in their AI adoption. So Jen and Tim will get into that in a second, but I just wanna call out those two new features as well. Super exciting.

We have a resources section where the downloadable assets and the charts are available in downloadable slide version for our Telarus tech advisers. And we have, of course, for those of you who love the good old PDF, a downloadable PDF version as well. I’ll just point over here to the hamburger menu. If you wanna dig in just specifically to a topic, you can just go right ahead and check that out and click where you need to go.

So that is the gist of the format of this year’s report. And, Jen, why don’t you just let me know where you want me to steer first?

Sure. Good morning, everyone. Merry Christmas, I guess. Christmas in September. And, we’re very excited to bring you this year’s report.

And for those of you who, were at Summit, as Rochelle mentioned, we’ve already gone through at a very high level these three key findings, and the AI maturity models. Today, we will be able to Tim and I will actually walk you through each of those findings and actually show you those findings on the report. In addition to the resources that are available to you today, which we’ll show you, during this conversation as well, we will also in a couple of weeks, we will follow-up with a version of this report that is written with the end user in mind, and that will be a version that you can put your logo on, you can customize, and you can use yourself for meeting makers or as a follow-up to a great discovery call or as a an as an enticement to get someone to, to meet with you for the first time.

So that’s another, resource that’s coming your way in the following weeks. Rochelle, I think it’s probably a good idea just to scroll down. Good morning, Tim.

Good morning.

I wanted to say hello and have you say hi.

I I’m here I’m here. I’m ready. I’m I’m excited. You guys know I read every every word of every page. I love a PDF download. Yes. I got it right here.

And your posters. Out with post its on it. Yes.

Exactly. We’ll talk about don’t don’t spoil it.

Oh, sorry. Sorry.

We’ll talk we’ll talk about that later. But I will I will tell you guys and and everybody listening, fourth annual, And this it’s it’s common that people say it’s the best. This is the best. There’s great insights.

They’ve been refined to be immediately usable. You guys will get the gist of it as you scroll through. You’ll find things and ways to create conversations immediately. You’ll also peak it’ll peak your curiosity interest in things you should learn more of, and we’ll give you some hints about that.

And then it’ll prepare you for the customer facing version that you’ll all get. So this is stage one.

Learn it. Get accustomed to the materials. And then the customer facing one, you’ll be ready to deliver the content in a meaningful way.

So I saw a question that is the one that is online right now today is not customer facing yet. This version that you’re that you’ve been sent the link to yesterday is for you. It’s to help educate you about the trends that we have unveiled through these surveys. And the version that is customer facing that’s just ready to go and have you guys customize is coming. So this one today and for the next couple weeks is meant to help you understand those findings.

So that that’s an interesting question in the chat.

Yeah. And you’ll see it’s very different. Right? There’s action steps specifically catered for you guys. There’s language specifically meant to give you guys the most value out of these insights. So the customer facing version would look quite different.

Same same findings, but tailored to that audience for you guys.

And for anyone who is having I see a couple people are saying that they haven’t found it. It will be remailed. So don’t worry. We’re gonna be get taking every opportunity we can.

It should also be all over LinkedIn today. So, it should be all the way out there. So, Rochelle, if you could scroll up a tiny bit, I wanna start by talking through some of the content here. And there is a couple of really great findings that are underlying this report this year.

And one of those is that of all the of all of the responses here we go.

So this is some great news for all of us. Hopefully, this is something that you’re feeling already when you’re in market. But of all the respondents, both mid enterprise and enterprise, eighty four percent of the responding organizations expect their technology budgets to increase.

And last year, that was seventy seven percent. So this is a, you know, a big jump. People are not IT leaders are not scraping for budgets. Their budgets are rising, and they’re, of course, rising for software rather than for headcount.

So they’re going to be looking for solutions to help solve their business outcomes, and these are the prioritized business outcomes. So you will hear a theme throughout this conversation, which is that we need to be helping as technology advisers to solve business problems that actually end up crossing technology silos. These are the three top business challenges that our leaders said that they are out solving today, which is innovation and new technology adoption. So that’s probably a lot of AI driving that and all of the ancillary solutions that people need to solve their problems.

The simplification and consolidation of their tech stacks, and revenue growth and business expansion.

So those are things that are just underlying all of the report I wanted to make sure to point out.

Yeah. I wanna just pause real quick, especially on number two, which is that simplification and consolidation.

We see a big opportunity. And and if you look, Jen, you see the the supplier sales.

Aggregators are in our top twenty all the time, but they it didn’t always used to be that way. So when we talk to end users, business owners, business leaders, they they say what you’re saying in a little bit different way. But, basically, we don’t have a budget problem. We have the money, number one.

Number two, we need to know where the spend is because shadow IT, shadow initiatives, all these things going on that get put on expense reports. So they’re spending known budget plus unknown budget. They’re trying to get their arms around all the spend so they can consolidate and optimize that spend to hit the number one priority. Right?

They wanna focus the money. They wanna focus their attention. So it’s our job through our conversation, through outcome based selling, through all the things you guys learn in sales mastery and and and on your own training, is to is to build the trust and relationship to have the deep conversation about where are the funds going? Where’s their opportunity to consolidate?

You know? Are they paying thirty bills when they only need to pay six? Is there shadow are they double paying for things? I talked to a guy who was double and triple paying for calendaring software.

Yeah.

And it was over six figures a year. It’s big enter bigger enterprise. Right? That’s all wasted money. So alright. I’ll hit the pause button there, Jen, but it’s just that consolidation that number two really feeds number one.

And, all of that all of those business priorities underlie everything we’re about to talk about and the and the fact that budgets are increasing. So keep those things in mind as we go through. So these this is a summary of the three key findings that we’re gonna walk through. I just wanna point this out as a way to navigate through the report. When you scroll down from the intro, this is right underneath there, and it summarizes all three of the key findings. And as you choose to, you can click into each of them.

And so I will ask Rochelle let me just let me just summarize the three key findings, and then we’ll go through each. The first is the ecosystem sale. So what we will and we’ll spend time talking about this in just a minute. But this is really the fact that the IT end user buyer is really looking to solve those problems that Tim and I just spoke about, and they aren’t necessarily out doing siloed technology buys as they have been in the past.

They’re trying to solve a business problem, and the solutions that help them solve that problem span those swim lanes that we often talk about. So they’ll want an AI solution with data protection strategies. How are they going to store content, how will they move it between things. If it’s a CX challenge, it will also include AI.

It will also include cyber, all of those kinds of things. So this is a way so what you should keep in mind here is that you’re solving a business problem, and don’t keep yourself constrained to one technology swim lane. But we’ll talk about this in more detail in just a second. The second finding is that our buyers value the the way that you help them answer questions more quickly, vet suppliers, and execute on their implementation of these solutions more than they value cost savings.

So take this in the context of everyone’s budgets rising, and we’ll talk a little bit about that as we get to the second finding. And the third finding is that vendor loyalty is at a historic low, And so every renewal is an opportunity for you to take a step back, evaluate not just the solution that’s up for renewal, but also is it really solving the business problems that are being prioritized, And is there an opportunity there for you to expand the solution, again, going back to that ecosystem sale? And have you developed a consistent renewal practice within your business? So those are the things that we’re gonna be talking about in the three key findings, and I’d love to start with the first one.

So finding number one is that, again, that great ecosystem sale. So you can see if you scroll down to this chart, these are the areas of new investment. We provide you this every year through this report. This is where the end user buyer said that they’re focusing their technology buys, but they also said, here’s a great quote from an adviser that says AI has moved from an optional add on to core design. Offerings are being redesigned around ecosystems and joint solutions.

So what what users are really looking for, what they’re looking for in these solutions is a full a fully integrated solution that will help them solve whatever the business problem. So remember, those were simplifying a tech stack, innovation, and revenue generation were the top three.

Yeah. Jen, there was a question in the chat that’s really applicable to this section, which is what’s the percentage of AI budget or where’s AI budget going, or AI driven budget going? Really, what we see is what’s in the graph, which is there is AI spend, but there’s also pullback. A lot of people got excited about AI, set a pile of money on fire, didn’t get the result they wanted.

So they realized they needed to shore up the ship a little bit before they moved into other categories. That’s this ecosystem conversation. AI still was number two in the in the chart, but you look at cloud, it’s it’s bracketed by cloud and security. Right?

So there’s other things going on in the enterprise. So AI gets the headline, but sometimes it’s gonna trail the play or there’s a bit gonna be a bit of a pullback to do better the second time around as people deploy capital to maybe a more meaningful AI strategy than just, hey. What’s your AI plan, Jen?

And underneath each of these sections where the finding data is, is an action plan. So this is something new based on your request. You were saying to us last year, how do I take what’s in this report and make it actionable to me? So each of these findings is followed by things that you can do and, in many cases, assets that will help you do those things.

So I’m gonna just walk you through this one in detail. The other thing, to know is that you can see up at the top nav don’t go there, Rochelle, but you can see in the top line nav, there’s a resources, area. That’s where you can find by the way, every chart that is in this, report is listed in that resources tab for you to just automatically download and plop into a slide, which I know many of you like to do this yourselves so that you’re using these data in your discovery conversations, and we’ve made that really easy for you to take in. But in this case, for finding number one of the ecosystem sale, our action plan is bring in a sales engineer.

So one of the things that I’ve definitely learned by spending time with all of you in market is sometimes you have comfort areas in certain technology silos, and then you are developing conversations in the next. If you have any trepidation at all about any of these, technology conversations or if you want training wheels to help you expand into that ecosystem conversation, we all know that bringing in this sales engineering team expands your deal size and increases your win rate. So what a better way than to help you accomplish an ecosystem sale than to bring in these experts who will, you know, wear your shirt and show up and help you help you do accomplish this.

Jen, I just wanna hit the pause button for thirty seconds to frame an analogy. Many of you know, over four hundred people, five hundred people on the call, whatever the number is, have heard this from us before.

And as we cover these three points and other things in the report, I want you to think of yourselves. A lot of you started in this business as a specialist in a thing, network, telephony, cybersecurity, traditional MSP. And when you look at what’s required to sell the full ecosystem, the full tech stack, you have to reframe your mind like a general contractor. A general contractor doesn’t know everything about building Jen and Rochelle’s dream home. They know the people to bring in early and often to find the right resources, help narrow the choices down, create confidence with Jen that she’s gonna get exactly what she wants on the timeline that she wants.

A modern technology advisor is a bit of a technology general contractor. So I know a lot of you guys are used to being the specialist. Lean into the resources at Telarus with suppliers. Reframe some of your questioning and your sales methodology around that general contractor concept, and the results are gonna increase exponentially.

We’ve seen it all around our community where when they remove the specialist label and go in as a technology advisor, contractor, and they’re really focused on these ideal outcomes and creating great results. They bring in the right people fast. Decisions are made faster with more confidence. It creates a great result.

Back to you, Jen.

Okay. I love the general contractor analogy too, and we got a couple a couple of comments too that I also really appreciate that.

Let me know when my dream house is ready, Tim.

Yeah. We’re working. We just got the project plan done, Rochelle.

Thank you.

The tile that you want is very special, though, so that’s gonna take a that’s a long pole in the tent.

Well, the second action is to do a solution audit. So this would be looking at your not dream house and understanding what, what you what is the gap? What’s the gap analysis to get to where you are and where you want to be? So the second action plan there actually, Rochelle, can you just go back to the action plan and let it rest there? Yep. Yep. Thank you.

Is to sorry.

I got ahead of myself.

There you go. It’s okay. Is to run a solution audit. So this is a good idea in any conversation anyway to really understand what is the installed technology that exists.

And because of this ecosystem, you need to think more broadly than just the area that that you are talking about. So so you’re looking at the full installed tech stack since we know that one of the one of the options that people are focusing on from a priority perspective is simplification. Let’s make sure we get a great audit out there to understand what are the solutions that are currently solving problems for that company. And then the third is to schedule a business review with your top single solution accounts, again, to say, are your solutions solving the business problems that you’re the most focused on, or is there an opportunity for us to take a look newly at this at this tech solution and see if there’s a way to broaden it to better meet our challenges?

And you can see that there’s a cheat sheet that’s installed here that is the technology ecosystem selling conversation starter. So a list of questions that you can download to help you in these conversations.

Yeah. Look. Also, I talk to a lot of technology advisers every single week, and we talk about doing business reviews or quarterly business reviews or road map reviews. Some of you guys get some fear.

Fear is false evidence appearing real, folks. It’s an it’s an acronym. Your clients want your expertise.

Don’t think that if you go in there, you’re you’re not gonna offer value. Don’t think that you gotta let sleeping dogs lie because what if they don’t like the solution and then you get blank? I don’t know. I hear all these excuses.

I’m telling you that it offers real value. It gives you real upside to have meaningful conversations. And if you don’t do it, someone else does. And then you get wedged out.

So you have to be top of mind with the buyer’s table, the people who are making these decisions, and there’s more people at that buyer’s table than ever before. You have to be the known go to for business technology services. So these reviews, action three, is a critical part of your sales process. It should be ongoing with all your clients.

If you have hundreds of them, maybe you have a cohort that you do it with and you can’t get to them all. I get it. But it’s a mandatory thing for a modern technology adviser.

Great.

Okay. Now after finding number one in the report, just so I can talk through the layout, there are two blocks that you can see here that are links to get to those two maturity models, the AI maturity models that you can also get to through those top line navs. We’re gonna pass those right now and come back to those after we go through the findings. So let’s talk about finding number two, which is super interesting.

And for those of you who missed it this morning, tomorrow, Tim is hosting a mark a marketing mastery class, and those classes are really helped are really set up to help you identify your unique value proposition, proposition, like what makes you different and better than everybody else out there, and how do you talk about that when you’re speaking to prospects and customers. One of the things that I have observed in conversation with you is many of you lead with a message of cost savings. One of your primary values that you bring to your prospects and customers is cost savings. You can see that here on the right side of the chart where advisers think they add more value.

Fifty four percent of our advisers polled mentioned that they lead they lead with cost savings, and that’s one of the main values that they drive. And the other one that I think is really true is that these long term client relationships that you manage, you really know your customers, you really understand their business. Those are true things. What is interesting when we asked our IT buyers what value they derive from technology advisers, you can see they listed many things before they got to cost savings.

Cost savings way down there at twenty six percent. So what do they really value from you? They value you helping them make quick decisions. Right?

Sometimes when they’re making these technology decisions on their own, they get caught up in their own drama and their own bureaucracies and they maybe some analysis paralysis. Maybe they don’t know exactly how many suppliers they should be looking at or feel confident enough with the knowledge that they have about those suppliers. Well, what they told us was that they get stronger vendor vetting when they work with a technology adviser. They get better organized implementation and project approach when they work with you.

They have better planning for integration, and they make decisions faster when they work with you. So those are all very higher order values. Right? These are things that make you a strategic partner to them that is valued way more highly than simple cost savings.

So when we scroll down to this action plan, one of the things that I think it would be a great takeaway would be for everyone to reconsider your discovery call openings. When you talk about who what you do and how you help people, look at that look at that talk track and see if it mentions cost savings. Because with how far down cost savings was on the list of value and also with the fact that we’re in an increasing budget environment, you’re probably much better off framing yourself as a strategic technology adviser who can help align projects to the most prioritized business projects and help drive business outcomes rather than someone who drives cost savings.

Yeah. Let the client tell you that they want cost savings. Right? But most of the time, back to, the general contractor analogy, people don’t want the cheapest of anything. They don’t want the cheapest materials in their home. Jen, I don’t think you drive a Yugo, do you?

I do not.

So you don’t have the cheapest car. Many people who are who are on this webinar so what what they want is the vision in their head of what success looks like. What does that look like for them and their team? And that’s a sort of a woo woo way of saying it.

You’ll say it in your own words, what’s on the screen or what you think. You’ll navigate your clients. You know them better than we do, but there’s hints all around you. There’s hints in the materials they put on their website.

There’s hints in the hiring. You know, if you look at their Indeed page or their careers page, you see what they’re hiring for.

So navigate that thoughtfully again as as a high level consultant to shape their vision and then document what the success looks like and work backwards from that. If savings is part of it, that’s great. But the truth is in this business, there’s no such thing as real savings because the capital just gets redeployed usually back into the tech bucket anyway. So it’s just additional dollars you’re going to deploy later.

So identify, qualify, and then going if you if you go back to some of the key points in the in the data, what the data says at the highest level, and we’ve heard this from you for years and years and year and years. Your clients want a couple things. They want clarity, absolute clarity, just like when you’re buying something expensive or a car. Next is they want confidence.

They wanna know that when they go to their boss or or somebody else or the departments get together, they all lock arms, arm and arm towards the solution that you help them identify. And last is the execution hurdle. They have to have reduced friction. They have to know they’re locked in with you and with suppliers that are gonna make it easier because there’s a smooth path to success.

So many of these projects sort of die on the on the vine while ripening because they don’t lock in those steps. So it’s your job to give them that smooth road road map to success. And when they see it clearly, then they’ll believe it. So they gotta see it to believe it.

Right?

And I’ll just add real quick. Take a minute to watch our video case study from our friend Chad and Jason Kaufman. It just brings to light an example of how Telarus helps you become that full end to end execution partner in the real life example of a deal that gave that adviser sixty k monthly AI and CCaaS revenue. So just a little plug there for our friends.

Alright. Now, Tim, we’re gonna have to pick up the pace a little bit. We’ve got a third finding and two maturity models to get through and not very many minutes left. So I’m gonna I’ll I’ll I’ll wrap us up with finding number three and then get to those maturity models. Finding number three is a big one. Eighty four percent of buyers are open to switching vendors at the time of renewal.

So that that’s because there’s and there’s a chart that’s underneath here that shows what the reasons are that people have had dissatisfying experiences in the last twelve months, unsatisfying, about about some kind of technology solution. So what you need to do is develop, if you haven’t done this yet, a really repeatable renewal motion. I know a lot of you guys are new logo hunters out there, and you love that hunt. But you’ve already developed a relationship and delivered value to these, installed customers, and a very easy way to help and add more value to them is to keep your eye on their renewals and then make sure that you’re using those for an excuse for conversations.

I would recommend those conversations start a full year before that date so that you’re able to ask those questions about, is this solution really solving the broader business conversations, and can we bring this back to, like, are there other solutions that we can wrap around to this? Oops. Can you stop there, Rochelle? There we go.

These are the reasons that people have had, dissatisfaction with, and why they’re open to switching at the time of renewal. While eighty four percent of our of our IT end user buyers said that they’re open to switching, only fourteen percent of you listed renewal services amongst your top services offered to your customers and prospects. So this is a chance. It may be that you just didn’t think to list those in the in the, in the survey, but there there could be a big gap here.

And so we’re recommending that you take take a giant step back, look at your business process, and see if you have predictable renewal conversations. Tim is going to be delivering a mastery course all about renewal and cross sell, upsell motions for those people who need coaching. That will be another wonderful action that you can take to prepare yourself here. And the hub now has some incredible views of your renewals that are coming up.

So you can use the hub to help you look at that schedule. I just got a two minute warning.

So, Tim, do you wanna jump in here before I move on to those AI Yeah.

The the the big thing is the big thing there, right, which is solutions didn’t meet the expectations, and that’s usually because the expectations were not set right or the project didn’t get completed. I hear all the time from actual clients, buyers, that they they couldn’t take the roast out of the oven. Like, they couldn’t finish the project, and it’s be it always starts at the beginning. So it’s your job, everyone watching, to set the right expectations and then help them get to the finality that they want. Don’t leave these loose threads hanging all over, and you’ll be the hero of the day.

Okay. And in conclusion, there are two AI maturity models in here to help you. One is the buyer AI maturity model. So if you if you just click there, Rochelle, it shows how our respondents fell on this curve, and you can see it’s a nice bell curve.

Both of them ended up that way where you’ve got the bulk of the buyers in the middle in the middle phase here in terms of their AI adoption. But this and so there’s a lot you can read here that says, what is a builder? What is a starter? What is a leader?

And there are questions in here that you can ask that would help you spot who falls into which of these. I believe that this section is really helpful if you have been asked questions about, like, I’m interested in AI. I gotta, yeah, I gotta get some AI, and it’s sort of a general conversation. It might be a great place for you to start with your prospects and customers to benchmark them on this continuum and and have you guys both agree this is where they are in their journey and how do we take the next steps together.

How do we get there together?

And then there is another maturity model at the end here, which is a tech the technology adviser maturity model. So if you wanna benchmark yourself and your organization against those of your peers, you can do that here. There are questions you can ask yourself to put yourself into one of these boxes, and there are actions that you can take based on where you are to get to the next step.

And I think before I wrap, I just wanna click very quickly into that resource tab, Rochelle, and just remind everyone that all of those assets that we’ve talked about, the lists, the question the conversation starters, the charts, the graphs, the videos, they’re all available to you in that resources segment too to help make things easier for you.

Amazing.

Great job, everyone.

Congratulations, Rochelle, for getting this out to market, and thank every thank you all very much. I hope you’ll take a look at the report. And, also, please continue to tell us how you’re using it in your selling motions, in your conversations, and how that helps you because, as always, we’ll listen to what you need and, what has helped as we develop next year’s report.

Yeah. We look forward to your feedback, guys. Thanks for the time.