The global pandemic has irreversibly affected the evolution of the IT industry, accelerating the development and adoption of new technologies. The prolonged health crisis has amplified the digital transformation process forcing companies to open up to new solutions that deliver business value. Let’s take a look at the factors influencing the increasing appetite for technology.
Global Trends and ‘Hype’ Technologies
It’s hard to get people to stop thinking in Bits and Bytes and start thinking in solutions that deliver business value. Hype technologies have a specific cycle of evolution: after reaching the peak – the so-called “Peak of Inflated Expectations” – there follows the phase of readjustment of overly optimistic expectations, then the crystallization phase, where second and third-generation products are launched and pilot projects start to multiply.
Only then do the technologies that survive begin to mature, enter the productivity stage, and become widely adopted. Many organizations focus their attention on such mature, market-validated technologies that deliver solid benefits to our customers. The particular context we are going through has, however, shortened this cycle, and technologies that are still in the “hype” stage – such as Advanced Analytics, Artificial intelligence, Machine learning – are being adopted more and more widely, even by small and medium-sized companies.
More and more companies have, for example, customers using artificial intelligence applications in decision-making processes to streamline approval workflows. Another example can be found in the travel and airline segment, which has started to use intelligent Dynamic Pricing applications, whereby the offer is flexibly adapted to demand.
Are Small and Medium-Sized Companies Becoming Early Adopters?
In recent years, many newly launched technologies have been adopted first by small and medium-sized companies, with major companies following suit later.
The best example of this is Microsoft 365 and collaborative working solutions delivered as a service, such as Teams. At the peak of the pandemic, SMEs were much more open to adopting technologies delivered as SaaS by an external provider, which offers end-to-end services that can be used quickly.
SMEs are more courageous, taking the risks of adopting new technologies. Both faster decision-making processes and simpler procurement procedures contribute to this adoption.
Which Mature Technologies Are Now Catching On
The accelerating digital transformation is putting huge pressure on IT infrastructures. Therefore, companies need to ensure higher levels of availability, scalability, and resource allocation flexibility, both on-premises and in the cloud. From this perspective, many experts put hyperconvergence first, which has become a de facto standard in data centers. Another technology increasingly used globally is containerization, which is as popular today as virtualization was 10 or 15 years ago.
While the main goal of virtualization is to simplify management and maximize resource utilization while ensuring independence from hardware, containerization aims to increase efficiency and application portability in hybrid architectures. But, the level of complexity increases substantially. Therefore, a key component of containerization is automation. And, as we all know, adopting automation requires, first of all, a change of mindset.
Automation solutions are increasingly in demand worldwide, and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) applications are also becoming increasingly popular among small and medium-sized companies. More and more accounting solutions developers are using RPA processes to make their applications more efficient. For example, at each month-end closing, any accounting company has to make reports, upload them to government portals, notify clients, get approvals etc. For a single client, this means, on average, more than 4,000 clicks in at least five different applications. But these workflows are in principle identical for every legal entity, so they can be automated with RPA, and vendors now offer pre-configured solutions that simplify the implementation process. The fully customized RPA applications market, which involves a lot of configuration and development effort, remains for the moment the exclusive preserve of major companies.
Present and Future IT departments
Companies need to understand that the modern IT department is no longer the one from 10-15 years ago, made up exclusively of system administrators and engineers, but one that brings together IT specialists who understand the business.
It is very difficult to get people to stop thinking in “Bits and Bytes” and deliver value to the business by automating the salesforce, or by converging operational IT processes with production processes. Modern companies need IT departments, but the departments themselves need to think strategically and be business-oriented.
Lately, many software vendors have turned into one-stop-shops for IT technologies and can deliver custom solutions for any company. This is an advantage compared to classic integrators, who specialize in infrastructure and cloud, security, or systems management, but do not cover all of these aspects.
Now, more than ever, companies are forced to understand that they can no longer operate using data silos and insular approaches where systems do not communicate with each other. Until last year, organizations often said they need automation, but didn’t have a holistic view of the entire digital infrastructure they operate. The global health crisis brought a paradigm shift and companies of all sizes are adopting new technologies.
