Digital transformation is a trending buzzword in the information technology industry. While somewhat nebulous, it speaks to the need for generally risk-adverse, slow-moving enterprises to embrace things like the app economy, cloudification and software-based virtualization of business process. Factor in the threat from highly focused startups – what Uber did to transportation and Airbnb did to hospitality – and constant cost pressures, enterprise IT managers are quickly being forced to sink or swim in the digital world.
Assessing this climate is the focus on new research from Dell Technologies, which found 78% of the 4,000 businesses surveyed “feel threatened by digital startups.”
Other key findings of the new research include:
- Forty-eight percent of respondents don’t know what their industry will look like in three years;
- Six out of 10 businesses “are unable to meet customers’ top demands”; and
- Forty-five percent of global businesses surveyed “fear they may become obsolete in the next three to five years due to competition from a digital startup.”
“So far, the fourth industrial revolution has proved as ruthless as its predecessors,” said Jeremy Burton, CMO at Dell. “If companies can’t keep up, they will fall behind … or worse. The ‘delay until another day’ approach simply won’t work.”
Burton said IT infrastructure will have to advance to manage “1,000-times more users and 100-times more data. Almost every business will have software development expertise at its core. Many of these companies will be brand-new, others – having not written a line of code in 20 years – will have been on a momentous journey.
As it applies to the telco space, digital transformation will require holistic customer views, open software ecosystems and other drivers covered in this guide.
In predicting digital trends for 2016, Uri Gurevitz of Amdocs said digital native millennials expect seamless service experiences reliant on mobile broadband.
“This trend will continue as more industries incorporate automation and weave digital into their products and operations, either by partnering and/or incorporating virtualization technologies (e.g. cloud), embedded connectivity and analytics to create new ‘smarter’ services,” Gurevitz said. “Companies across verticals, both traditional and new players, including service providers, are in a race to offer new digital products and services, which capture attention and wallet share.”
