The technology space in South Africa has been inexorably altered as a result of the pandemic.
The way enterprises went about their business is simply not going to cut it anymore, with technology playing a significant role in making enterprises more competitive, provided they take the right steps.
With that in mind, Harish Lala, senior vice president and head of Zensar South Africa, has identified five key technology trends to watch out for in the local corporate sector.
Make it personal
The first technology trend highlighted by Lala is the transition from shift from simple personalisation to hyper-personalisation in terms of meeting customer needs.
The Zensar SVP specifically points to customers who have grown up in a digital environment and how that segment will dictate which customer-focused enterprises thrive or falter moving forward.
“Truly understanding a customer has always been the ultimate goal of any business since time immemorial,” he notes.
“If you thought customer understanding was already as personalised as it can get, businesses are going to leverage AI and machine learning, running aggressive analytics for new insights and taking personalisation to new heights, and to even create new business models,” adds Lala.
Next, according to Lala is creating a unified experience. Whether customers are engaging with a bank, an insurance company or a telecoms provider, today’s digitally driven, consumer-centric global economy demands a seamless experience.
“With hyper personalisation, recommendation engines, targeted marketing campaigns with relevance increasing the expectations of today’s consumer from their brand, on other side with so many and increasingly complex array of touchpoints available to our customers today, it’s not so easy to make it happen,” he warns.
Another consideration is unshackling from legacy systems. Here Lala highlights the fact that modernisation and digital transformation efforts are at an all-time high in SA, driven in particular by the pandemic.
“As more South African organisations make the move away from their legacy systems via many modernisation approaches, it is now not a question of whether they should do this – it only a question of how and how soon this move can be made,” he asserts.
“CIOs are trying to plan these initiatives carefully, while balancing various factors like getting ROI in the current business circumstances, gauging the right time to implement these strategies, and in which part of their asset portfolio where they will get the most impact from, while choosing the right approach and the technology,” continues Lala.
The role of hyperscalers
It would not be a discussion about technology trends if data did not feature somewhere and when it comes to this aspect of the business, Lala advocates for data democratisation within the organisation.
When it comes to this trend, Lala believes the hyperscalers operating locally have a big part to play.
“Considering the South African technology landscape and with global hyperscale cloud providers strategic investments in South Africa, we are seeing completely new avenues opening up for businesses to leverage and enable analytics and insights to be delivered to business users on demand,” he points out.
The last among the technology trends is one we have covered extensively at Hypertext over the past 18 months – cybersecurity. It remains a key concern for all businesses, especially as the current hybrid/remote working model leaves the enterprise more vulnerable than ever.
Ransomware attacks in particular are on the rise and show no signs of declining, which means cybersecurity should be a primary concern for any local organisation these days, lest you suffer like some large enterprises have of late.
“The Transnet cyber-attack is a prime example of this and how a successful intrusion like that can cripple the organisations and can impact economy as well. These ransomware attacks comes with a brute force and are carefully orchestrated to make the maximum impact. And this is not going to slow down,” he concludes.