Technology evolution

A recent IBV report stated that “An uneven response to the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that to operate effectively in the presence of an unanticipated crisis, organizations need to be agile, robust, and secure. They need to be able to seamlessly engage customers and employees in both physical and digital domains. However, current events have been challenging —even painful—as industries and enterprises react and adapt.”

Flexible adoption of new technology

Today, when we refer to the flexibility of adoption of technology, it is not just centered around IT infrastructure, that is, the hybrid cloud. There are also a number of other considerations, such as the adoption of new processes, techniques, and innovations, including AI and ML.

From a digital transformation perspective, there are four characteristics that need to underpin any transformation and the adoption of new technology:

• Agile: Based on the fundamental principle of keeping the core clean, standardizing business processes provides agility in extending the business processes and integrating with other solutions without disruption.
• Flexible: A cloud infrastructure inherently provides flexibility in terms of services that are on offer. That flexibility goes further into the application layer when you want to increase or reduce the number of services provided. This is even more critical when you want to scale as the needs of the business change.
• Consumable: Switch from CapEx to an OpEx financial cost mode to pay for a service, whether related to infrastructure, software, or services.
• Software innovation: Innovating at the speed of external innovation comes with its own challenges and businesses have never been able to truly master this, with the disruption of maintaining business as usual and at the same time bringing in new enhancements and innovation.

Technology strategy

With the backdrop of adopting new technologies, what are the challenges businesses face when considering digital transformation in the cloud?

• Business transformation rather than more of the same.
• Focusing on the value addition that the cloud brings. For example, opening up a technology platform to intelligent workflows accelerates moves to both enterprise platforms and the cloud.
• Innovating at the speed of external innovation. An enterprise platform must deliver new innovations without additional cost and with minimal impact.
• The number of options when adopting and adapting to the cloud when shifting core business processes, for example, hybrid migration in less time to preserve the investment.
• A consumption-based offering that compliments software application flexibility in delivering a complete solution.
• Greater emphasis on cost efficiencies, that is, lower TCO and shifting the cost model.

Emerging new technologies

With the emergence of Industry 4.0 technology (for instance, IoT, digital twins, and AI), products have become more connected, and OEMs and service providers now have ready access to products’ and equipment’s field performance data. This enables them to analyze, predict, and control the performance in order to maximize the efficiency at the customer’s end.

Integrating and keeping up with the evolution of technology is yet another example of how businesses are under immense pressure to continually re-invent themselves to remain relevant both for consumers as well as for stakeholders.