6 Key Trends Shaping ITSM and ITOps in 2025

As mature and established disciplines, IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations are not exactly evolving quickly. It's hard to imagine that there is momentous change ahead in either of these realms in the new year.

But IT pros should expect some more subtle changes — like the six trends below that are poised to impact ITSM and ITOps in 2025.

1. Evolving Observability Strategies

Although the world of IT management as a whole hasn't changed dramatically in recent years, application performance monitoring and management is one area where a lot has been happening.

2019 saw the launch of OpenTelemetry, which streamlines and standardizes the collection of monitoring and observability data. The typical IT department has spent the past several years coming up to speed with OTel and learning how to take full advantage of it.

But now that OpenTelemetry adoption is widespread, it's likely that IT teams will look for even more efficient ways to work with monitoring and observability. This is why we suspect the industry will see greater adoption of more innovative technologies, like eBPF, in 2025 and beyond. Don't expect OpenTelemetry to go away (it won't because it offers capabilities that eBPF lacks, like true cross-platform support), but prepare for a continued shakeup in the tools and strategies that teams use to monitor applications and manage performance.

Related:Gartner 2024 IT IOCS Highlights: Equipping IT I&O Leaders for an AI Future

2. Lower Expectations for AI in ITSM and ITOps

For the past two years, you could barely mention a phrase like "IT trends" without hearing all about how AI — especially generative AI — was poised to revolutionize the way IT teams work.

But the hype cycle surrounding AI has gradually receded, and IT engineers are increasingly coming to terms with the reality that AI's value for them is limited. To be sure, AI can do powerful things, like summarize ITSM tickets or automate incident response. But there are many things it can't do — at least not reliably enough — such as troubleshoot complex failures or optimize IT architectures.

For these reasons, we predict 2025 will be the year when the IT industry has a reckoning with AI's value and limitations. No one will be ditching AI entirely, but they'll likely scale back expectations and rhetoric about AI's potential to transform virtually everything IT teams do.

3. Growing IT Budgets and Spending

Although the 2024 IT Priorities Survey showed that a majority of organizations have experienced increases in IT budgets over the past year, growth in IT spending has been modest. It was limited to 5% or less in most cases. Plus, more companies reported decreases in spending in 2024 than they had in previous years.

Related:ITOps in 2024: AI, Open Source, and the Challenges of Overstretched Teams

These trends are likely to change in 2025, thanks mostly to what feels (for now, at least) like a more vibrant economic environment. The surging inflation and high borrowing costs that restricted IT spending in the recent past appear to have receded, making it likely that more companies will allocate more cash to their IT budgets this year.

4. Increased Investment in IT Cost Optimization

Even if IT budgets grow, businesses are likely to remain keen to ensure that they're not wasting money.

The past decade has shown how easily IT spending can spin out of control due to issues like "cloudflation" and shadow IT. Organizations are now more aware than ever of the importance of getting ahead of unnecessary spending — which is why increased IT budgets in 2025 will likely be accompanied by greater pressure on IT teams to optimize resources from a cost perspective.

5. A Healthier IT Job Market

We'll go out on a limb and predict that 2025 will yield more IT career opportunities.

The past couple of years have been, in a word, atrocious for IT workers due to massive layoffs. But an improving economic environment and economic confidence may reverse this trend this year.

It's unlikely that we'll witness a return to the IT job market that predominated circa 2022, when job openings outpaced supply and IT professionals typically had an easy time finding high-paying gigs — many of which also offered the option of hybrid or remote work. But conditions are likely to improve at least somewhat in 2025 for IT engineers who are out of work or who want to move up to better positions.

6. Increased Adoption of Platform Engineering

Platform engineering — a practice that aims to provide a company's employees with turnkey access to IT services and platforms — remains a key IT trend. It's also a relatively new one, which means many companies have yet to adopt it fully.

For these reasons, expect platform engineering adoption to grow in 2025. For IT teams, this will mean increased pressure to implement and manage internal developer platforms (IDPs) that provide their companies' workers with access to high-quality preconfigured tools and platforms on a self-service basis.