* By Tonny Martins
2020 was a unique year. If, on the one hand, unprecedented events have made us radically adapt our personal and professional lives to a new reality, on the other hand, the economic and social impacts of the pandemic have also ended up accelerating companies' digital reinvention projects. To cite an example, according to IDC, only in Latin America, the Cloud infrastructure will grow by 26.7% by 2021.
This acceleration has resulted in 3 market trends that are our biggest focus for the 2021 strategy at IBM:
- The open hybrid cloud will be the epicenter of the evolution of enterprise IT
In the current scenario of uncertainty and rapid changes in the market, companies are looking for solutions that make their businesses more intelligent and responsive. However, although several companies have already digitized isolated aspects of their operations, many have not yet integrated different segments of the organization in a way that allows them to be more resilient and flexible. One of the main challenges for this to be done is the inability of their systems to communicate with each other. This is because as companies began moving workloads to the cloud, they ended up creating multiple, fragmented and proprietary cloud environments.
According to IDC, the pandemic has accelerated the journey of companies to the cloud, and the hybrid cloud has become the most important trend in Latin America, especially in critical workloads. This is because an open hybrid cloud platform is today the main ally and facilitator to help companies in this process of digital integration and reinvention. The open hybrid cloud will redefine the way companies operate and deliver value. And it will provide flexibility so that they can balance the need to maintain some workloads on-premise or in a private cloud, while taking advantage of the speed and flexibility of the public cloud.
- Artificial intelligence, advanced analytics and hyper-automation with smart workflows will fuel work and innovation in all sectors
Automation and AI are at the top of the priority list of business leaders today. Especially in the face of the challenges presented by the pandemic, automating workflows and applying intelligence to IT and business processes has become urgent for companies to remain competitive. According to IDC, by 2023, a cloud ecosystem that extends resource control and real-time analytics will be the key platform for all business and IT automation initiatives.
The combination of automation and AI will make all jobs that are highly dependent on information more productive, and workflows smarter, helping to improve the performance of professionals and business performance. In order for the company to take full advantage of this modern infrastructure, it is essential to prepare its information architecture, applying advanced analytics according to the level of maturity of each business, so that its data can be used in the best way, in the current context of the world. business, with multicloud environments and artificial intelligence. The companies that scale the value of their data with AI will become ahead to become what we call cognitive companies, which are those that apply intelligence, automation, security and predictability in their businesses to gain productivity and improve the experience of your customers.
- The Partner ecosystem and the platform business will be increasingly important parts of companies' path to digital transformation across all industries
We know that enterprise AI and the open hybrid cloud are only as good as the ecosystem that supports them, because no vendor is able to provide everything customers need on their own, in every industry and in every country in the world. In addition, customers benefit much more when they rely on the support of an entire ecosystem building on top of the best platforms to offer the best products and services.
IDC predicts that by 2024, 80% of companies will review relationships with suppliers, providers and partners in order to execute their digital strategies in the best way. The Ecosystem will be critical to generating interoperability, which is the main benefit of the platforms, and to deliver the full value of the hybrid cloud and AI strategy. That is why companies need to strengthen their collective capacity, expanding their capacity for collaboration and co-creation in a broad industry approach to provide the right value for end customers.
Technology companies must accompany customers from all sectors in this transition process. The extent of their success will depend on how much they are able to commit to maximizing the value of the open hybrid cloud; accelerate AI adoption; and trust the ecosystem as a winning partner to lead the era of digital reinvention.
* Tonny Martins, General Manager, IBM Latin America
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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