The CIOs or IT directors of 10 midsize enterprises spoke with CRN about their IT spending priorities for the coming year, with cybersecurity at the top of the list for nearly every company.

At the recently concluded Midsize Enterprise Summit, hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company, a lot of the talk was focused on IT priorities.

Mike Cisek, vice president and analyst at Gartner who focuses on the midsize enterprise market, told attendees during his keynote presentation that security is far and away the top technology priority. In a Gartner survey of 251 North American midsize enterprises where business leaders were asked what three areas of IT they planned to spend the largest amount of funding on, cybersecurity and information security came out on top, followed at a considerable distance by CRM solutions, artificial intelligence and machine learning, 5G, and business intelligence and analytics.

The CIOs, CTOs, IT directors and people with similar titles at the conference appeared to have agreed with Gartner. CRN asked 10 executives from midsize enterprises about their spending priorities for 2023, and almost every one replied that security was top of mind when it comes to planning IT budgets for next year. Other common responses included spending on wireless, automation and development.

[Related: Network Solutions Provider’s Walker: Midsize Enterprises ‘More Open To Next-Gen’ Tech]

Even so, each midsize enterprise IT executive had his or her own take on the different priorities. Seeing the executives’ and their companies’ own takes on these spending priorities provides a good starting point for conversations between solution providers and their customers on their plans for 2023.

Here is how these midsize enterprise IT executives look at spending priorities.

Joseph F. Kovar is a senior editor and reporter for the storage and the non-tech-focused channel beats for CRN. He keeps readers abreast of the latest issues related to such areas as data life-cycle, business continuity and disaster recovery, and data centers, along with related services and software, while highlighting some of the key trends that impact the IT channel overall. He can be reached at jkovar@thechannelcompany.com.