Johannesburg, 14 Feb 2017
Digital transformation is all-pervasive, with the majority of businesses across all industries embarking on some sort of digital journey. The focus is well and truly on the customer, with the network, data centre, applications and other infrastructure - whether located on-premises or in the cloud - all built around customer-centric business models.
Let's explore some of the key themes in digital business that we see emerging in 2017:
Trend 1: Who owns the data?
There'll be a renewed focus on control over and ownership of data and metadata in the year ahead. Data has been described as the new oil as it provides the key to your customers' behaviour and preferences, enabling you to provide outstanding service and thereby 'owning' the customer.
Of course, there are also compliance issues around data, such as the Protection of Personal Information legislation, which changes forever what can be done with a customer's personal data.
Trend 2: Automate to become agile
Automation and DevOps will become a business concern and embraced at every level within the organisation. Business will need to automate their entire IT operation to remain competitive and agile.
Trend 3: Disruption of traditional transactions
Centralised transactional models are coming under attack by innovative models that bypass traditional ways of transacting, facilitated by platforms like Blockchain that bypass legacy financial institutions.
It's believed that peer-to-peer transactional models will offer real-time, ultra-low cost or free transacting, support micro-transactions at scale, and provide the required security.
Trend 4: Hybrid IT has arrived
Today's IT environment is a blend of on-premises and cloud-based assets, with multiple providers and requiring a complete reference architecture characterised by a certain level of automation.
In the world of hybrid IT, it's not systems but ecosystems that need integrating, and the skillset required to manage a multi-vendor, multi-platform IT environment entails a collaborative mindset that can think outside of the organisation to ensure workloads move seamlessly across the various platforms.
Trend 5: Containerised data centres
Containers are forecast to be the next big disruption in the data centre. While the advent of the virtual machine monitor (hypervisor) and virtualisation haven't yet been fully adopted, they're already being disrupted by containerisation.
Containers eliminate the need for hypervisors entirely and are operating system-independent. In addition, some providers are open sourcing container technologies, making it accessible to many who wouldn't have been able to afford it otherwise.
Technology is the key to unlocking potential for businesses, and for the world, and we can't even begin to predict where it will take us in the foreseeable future.
Read more about these and other trends for 2017 here.
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