Five Key Enterprise Business Technology Predictions (And What They Mean For Enterprise And Service Providers)

Key Enterprise Business Technology Predictions (2023-24) and what it means for enterprise and service providers

(In continuation with last years predictions Key enterprise business technology predictions | Zensar)

By Rajat Sharma (SVP and Global Head of Technology Ecosystem and Growth)

Globally, we are facing a looming economic slowdown, the ongoing Ukraine war, and volatile tech valuations. So far, 2023 has started out as a year of uncertainties across all businesses, notwithstanding scale or operations.

To tide over this market dip, we expect an increasing number of global enterprises to revisit their digital transformation initiatives through a very different lens. Enterprises are likely to shift focus towards cost-saving measures; such as automation and digitalization. Overall, digital transformation will become even more crucial for companies to survive and thrive in the face of a recession as industries across the board will revert to basics with a focus on EBITDA and agility and sustainability.

I have laid down our top 5 predictions for the benefit of enterprise and technology providers. Here are some of the critical enterprise technology trends that we believe will shape the next growth phase. 

One: Enterprises will continue to think hybrid; however, the balance will shift to savings and value. 

After an era of continuously growing investments in discretionary projects centered on innovation and programs for experimenting with expensive new technologies, markets, and products, enterprises will start re-focusing on Operational Optimization and transformation (IT and business). The focus will center on high performance and productivity, across various business units and functional areas from supply chain to customer experience. The thrust will be towards higher productivity and efficiency.

Enterprises will increasingly focus on doing more with less across many areas in the coming years. This may involve adopting strategies and technologies that allow them to optimize their operations, technology, and resources to deliver more excellent value to customers. 

For Enterprise this will mean a shift driven by the need to remain competitive in an increasingly fast-paced and dynamic business environment and by the desire to minimize costs and maximize value for customers, employees, partners, and stakeholders.

Two: Digital synergy and convergence across functions will gain greater focus 

Investment in high-end technologies such as Web 3.0, metaverse, crypto, and quantum computing for individual functions will take a backseat. Instead, the focus will center on eliminating waste, redundancy, standardizing processes, and technology, followed by integration and convergence led by automation and governance. We can expect enterprises to pay greater attention to creating the right balance between flexibility and agility for achieving the required innovation, standardization, and management. Developing cloud-enabled enterprises with defined guardrails and optimized architecture will accelerate digital transformation, allowing organizations to access advanced technologies and fundamentally transform their operations. In addition, cross-skilling and upskilling resources will take precedence.  

For service providers, it is a wake up call that only focusing on expansive individual next gen technology and bulk hiring of SME’s may not be the right strategy instead a more holistic approach to re-skilling /cross skilling along with leveraging technology and process convergence will define the winners.

Three: Business priorities and criticality-based investments will take center stage 

Businesses will tend to prioritize investments based on the criticality of the area and its impact on the bottom-line rather than achieving best-in-class solutions in every area. This approach can be driven by various factors, such as financial constraints, the need to prioritize particular initiatives over others, or a focus on maximizing the impact of limited resources. From best-in-class to class-of-service model will emerge as a winner where clients will categorize investment tiers – platinum, gold, and bronze – based on business demand, criticality, and priority. Overall, businesses will be more strategic and selective in their investments, focusing on areas with the highest impact on their operations and success.

What this means for enterprise is that “One size does not fit all” when it comes to investing in business functions and product units.

Four: Enterprise velocity will have cost composability and monetization as key metrics

Organizations that emerge as winners in the coming 12-18 months will be high-velocity enterprises with capabilities in rapid innovation and deep tech skills. The ability to build and execute a composable design and orchestrate business-tech convergence from full-stack to hybrid with an agile startup culture will be an added advantage. While high-velocity will remain fundamental, cost composability and monetization will become mandatory. The cost composability will define the guardrails and FinOps to control costs for designing, enhancing, and running digital and traditional workloads. The composability and monetization will be achieved through procurement strategies, architecture design, capacity management, performance, and service design.  

For enterprise and service providers, FinOps will become an integral part of IT Operations outsourcing from just being an integral part of Cloud Ops. CMP (Cloud management platforms) will pivot to managing Hybrid costs.

Five: Capex scrutinization will become intense, and cloud will become table stakes

As the cloud transcends from being an item of infrastructure capex to becoming a delivery engine for the tech stack to now becoming an engine of growth and innovation, it will sit front and center of all growth initiatives. We still see “90” percent of infrastructure and platform workloads running on-premises while most enterprises embrace the SaaS licensing model. Several enterprise facilities, infrastructure, and platforms will come to their end-of-life making them ripe for a refresh. However, this refresh can be a direct move to well-architected, cost-composable, opex models on the public cloud with a containerization, serverless, and LC/NC-first approach, making cloud computing a table stake. As organizations pivot to a cloud-centric consumption-based model, show back and charge-back between IT/cloud brokers and business units will become a de-facto model.

What this means to enterprise and service provider is to also evaluate a new wave of migrations from one public cloud provider to another driven by fierce competition and better value for the spend.

These are exciting times for technology. However, enterprises will need to focus more on value, unification, class of service, cost composability, monetization, and charge-back mechanisms in a hybrid world through the new avatar of the high-velocity model.