They might be in a dedicated room or just sat in your office, most likely with a well-known brand on the box and a trusted VAR on hand to lend support when needed. If you were a bona fide enterprise, you’d have entire rooms or even datacenters housing your heavyweight computers, allowing you to keep precise control of the environment – and access. Oh, and whether you were large or small, there was probably only one chip vendor “inside”.

Things are much more fluid now. Any organization can have some or all its “servers” in the cloud. When it comes to onprem hardware, Intel faces serious competition from longtime rival AMD, while ARM has made the leap from the palm of your hand to the server room. And supply chain issues notwithstanding, many organizations are not content with the standard offerings from the standard vendors and will go direct to original design manufacturers (ODMs) to spec out precisely the box they want, by the 100s or thousands.

That’s the theory anyway. But what is really happening out there? We spoke to 1,238 IT decision makers across a range of geographies, industries, and company sizes. The results offer an insight into what has changed in how companies buy and operate their servers – and what has stayed the same.

Download the report to find out what they had to say.