IT culture is shifting away from ownership in favor of flexible, consumption-based tech solutions that can be immediately scaled up and down and spread around geographically. Enter the Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) model.

Migrating to an XaaS framework for IT lets businesses accelerate their digital transformation strategies, while staying within budget. It’s a trend that customers are increasingly asking about, and it’s been on the radars of some of the largest tech giants for several years now. Now is the time, these companies say, to move XaaS from concept to cash.

XaaS can include compute, storage, security, and networking as a service (NaaS) solutions, to name a few. Networking giants like Cisco Systems and Aruba Networks are developing NaaS solutions, while security specialists, like Sophos, are going big with Cybersecurity as a service (CSaaS) offerings to help businesses adjust as quickly as possible to the ever-changing threat landscape.

As part of CRN’s CEO Outlook 2023 report, we asked the CEOs at some of the world’s biggest IT companies about key investment areas and the biggest market opportunities they plan to tackle this year. As predicted, a handful of leaders specifically called out XaaS and consumption-based IT. Here’s what these top executives had to say about the XaaS trend, why it’s increasingly appealing to their end customers and why their partners should be building practices around XaaS in 2023.