Viswanath Ramaswamy Vice President, Technology, IBM Technology Sales, IBM India / South Asia
Around the world, the rate of digital transformation is accelerating rapidly. We have also seen that the consumer, employee, and investor demands are shifting. The recent IBM Institute of Business Value Cloud’s Next Leap Study highlighted that the one-vendor approach to cloud is dead with only 3% of global respondents reporting using a single private or public cloud in 2021 – down from 29% in 2019. The study further indicated that the cloud market has entered the hybrid, multicloud era and concerns around vendor lock-in, security, compliance and interoperability remain paramount.
While open innovation, ecosystem partnerships, and integrated customer experiences become increasingly important, organizations will explore new ways to increase flexibility, strengthen cybersecurity, and reduce environmental impact each step of the way. As leaders pivot their business models, technologies like IoT, Cloud computing and AI will help deliver business results, build resiliency and adaptability to stay ahead in a future that is still characterized by disruption and change.
As we begin 2022, here are the top trends we anticipate in the rapidly expanding partner ecosystem.
- Increased adoption of open technologies and strategic migration of workloads will be the key focus in the Hybrid Cloud era: A recent IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) study highlighted that 99% of organizations in India are using varied combinations of hybrid cloud. This indicates that Hybrid Cloud has become the dominant architecture across most enterprises. Clients, as well as ecosystem partners like GSIs, ISVs and MSPs will embrace open technology and platforms that enable them to build solutions once and deliver them securely across environments with speed and scale. In addition, as organizations will continue to move forward in their hybrid/multicloud journeys, determining and selecting which workloads should be moved to the cloud or retained on-premises will be a key focus area.
- Modernization to accelerate digital transformation initiatives:An important aspect of digital transformation is modernization, and we will see businesses accelerate their modernization journey to stay ahead in the competitive landscape. Ecosystem Partners will continue to play a critical role in helping enterprises move forth in their journey by bringing in their deep expertise, along with the adoption of microservices architecture and platforms like RedHat OpenShift.
- Security will be at the forefront amidst rising cyberthreats: Organizations are adopting cloud-based technologies, platforms, and ecosystems to expand their reach, innovate and go-to-market quickly. However, they also introduce new threats. With open, secure cloud networks businesses can deliver results and accelerate innovation and collaboration while protecting their crown jewels. With rising security threats, both businesses and MSSP’s will continue to invest in strengthening cybersecurity posture. Increasingly AI will play a critical role to help enterprises identify and respond to threats more efficiently, as they move towards a “zero trust” approach to further reduce risks.
- Data Fabric will fuel intelligent organizations: Emerging as the most innovative architecture, Data Fabric, allows companies to apply AI in one place without the need to move their data. It is agnostic to data processes, data use, data environment and geography and helps businesses to automate data discovery, governance, and consumption to deliver business-ready data for analytics and AI. Therefore, enabling organizations investing in AI, machine learning, the Internet of Things, and edge computing to get more value from their data.
- AI to accelerate insights at the Edge: With the convergence of 5G and edge computing, AI will help transform business across sectors by offering greater data control, faster insights, reduced costs and continuous operations. We will see Communication Service Providers adopting AI-driven automation to provide better and faster customer experiences.
- Businesses reduce costs by better predicting IT issues: The pandemic tasked CIOs to enable their workforces to operate remotely, manage new security challenges, derive insights from data generated across modern applications while leveraging new digital channels for employees and consumers. These conditions have intensified interest in applying AI to better predict IT issues, leading to an area called AIOps which enables organizations’ IT teams to proactively manage complex workplace environments, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of dollars that could have been lost. In 2022, AIOps will enable IT teams, to diagnose problems faster and reduce time-intensive tasks enabling them to focus on delivering higher-value work for the organization. In addition, AIOps will also help the IT teams to identify patterns indicating a potential issue before they happen.
