4 trends affecting IT

Sometimes summer gives you the opportunity to reflect for a moment. As we met up in the office in August a few of us realized we had been thinking about the same thing – what’s going on in the IT market these days – and how can we help companies to be better prepared for the future?

Our discussion can be summarized with the following 4 main trends:

1. Digital is everywhere

Recent studies suggest executives expect radical digital disruption across all sectors in the next 2-5 years. And that over 70% of them foresee disruption coming from outside their own industry. What this means is that the IT industry must be able to contextualize digital strategies for every single customer. It means that cross industry competence is becoming ever more important. Digitalization of business processes clearly requires industry insight and customer intimacy. Expectations on automation reflect exponential efficiency savings.

1. Sourcing behavior has changed

Secure and optimized infrastructure is a commodity. Now it’s all about transformational initiatives as opposed to traditional IT outsourcing. As part of that organizations are looking to providers that combine ability to address both modernization of business applications and new solutions relevant for their end customers. Both large and small technology investments are treated with strategic importance. And increasingly these decisions are taken by business lines as opposed to the IT department.

1. Everything as a service

Although service orientation has been top of mind with CIOs for years, we see a shift towards real service procurement for everything from the datacenter to the end user apps. The ability to provide seamless service experience across both private and public clouds is increasingly important. Link this to rapid growth of cloud born applications and you get a situation where service integration and management will be essential to keep end users happy.

1. Speed of business transformation

As the speed of transformation is accelerating –IT service provisioning must do the same. This typically means that successful IT initiatives start smaller and build bigger. It also means that customers pick COTS over custom and adopt the principles of DevOps. We have undoubtedly reached the stage where technology is the key enabler.

Summer feels long gone by now, but hopefully the trends we discussed can add value for our customers during many seasons.