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When Tim Potter, principal at Deloitte Consulting,surveys the current enterprise software and services landscape, he sees potential for IT organizations to spur both innovation and rapid growth.

“Enterprises continue to seek software and technology solutions to improve services, deliver more compelling products, streamline internal processes, and increase productivity,” he says, adding that new technology advances are continually being introduced to help meet enterprise demands.

“Supporting the business while protecting corporate data will continue to be a challenge for CIOs,” Potter notes. “As such, IT leaders have, and will continue to, seek software and services that enable them to manage this increased complexity.”

Here is a look at the latest trends in the enterprise IT software and services market, to help IT leaders make the most of what’s emerging today.

AI takes aim at the enterprise

From front-office transformation to new go-to-market strategies and business models, artificial intelligence is poised to reshape the enterprise, says Michael Shehab, innovation leader at PwC US. He advises IT leaders to examine their current operations to identify issues that can be resolved with AI. Doing so will require building new skill levels across the organization to ensure that teams are able to successfully deploy AI systems and design software and data environments that are fully compatible with the new strategies.

Shehab observes that enterprises are already making massive investments in AI. According to PwC research, AI has the potential to provide $15.7 trillion in global economic growth by 2030. “With the recent influx of new AI-driven tools and solutions, such as generative AI, most enterprise organizations today want to get their hands on the advanced tech to transform how their company does business,” he says.

ChatGPT captures enterprise imagination

Given the incredible virality ChatGPT has experienced since its launch, generative AI is currently at the forefront of many people’s minds, observes Brandon Jung, vice president of ecosystems at Tabnine, which is developing an AI-code writing technology. “There’s a lot of chatter around its future applications, its potential, and what this means for the future of AI, some of which is accurate and some of which is false.”

The potential enterprise applications for conversational AI tools are vast, and enterprises are exploring the possibilities of generative AI, albeit cautiously. “The more structured the content, the better these tools will perform,” Jung says. “Programming code is an example of a structured language that has excellent opportunities available.”

Customer-service chatbots are also improving rapidly, Jung says. “We will also see applications in basic boilerplate HR templates, legal documents, news reports, instruction manuals, and so on.” Algorithm creativity is currently limited by the limited state of training data sets. “While the AI output might be unique, it will likely follow the style, word choice, and construction of the underlying training data,” he explains. “It won’t be writing award-winning fiction novels any time soon.”

Edge computing arrives

The edge economy is one of the most important trends this year in the enterprise services market, says Ken Englund, technology, media, and telecommunications leader at EY.

With the internet of things (IoT) expanding, enterprises are finding themselves processing increasing amounts of data. “Transferring this data back and forth to large enterprise cloud platforms for processing is very costly and time consuming,” Englund observes. “Therefore, enterprises need intelligence in their network at the level where the data is collected — locally — at the edge of the network.”

Englund advises CIOs to consider investing in edge ecosystems, given their ability to streamline processes and improve customer experiences. “It’s important for vendors to explore opportunities with edge ecosystems to disrupt existing business models, even if it puts them in competition with their own legacy business,” he adds, noting that the benefits edge ecosystems provide customers are worth the investment. Englund also believes that the payback window will eventually compress, potentially fueling even more innovation and technology investments.

Private wireless picks up steam

Private wireless adoption is accelerating, providing enterprises with an increasingly attractive and viable communication option, observes Roy Chua, founder and principal at research and analysis firm AvidThink. “Recent technology improvements, increasing awareness of 5G’s benefits, and more open government spectrum policies have increased the adoption of private mobile networks.”

Private wireless networks deliver both low latency and high throughput. The technology also allows enterprises to add new services quickly while responding to data traffic growth. “Transformative use cases include Industry 4.0, smart agriculture, campus automation, smart cities, autonomous robotics, and telehealth,” Chua says.

Chua notes that research firm Analysys Mason estimates there will be more than 20,000 private wireless networks — both LTE and 5G — by 2026, and that enterprises will spend more than $5 billion on these networks in the next four years. Innovative CIOs see the promise of private 5G and want to get ahead to ensure early learning and understanding of how private 5G innovation can drive business value, Chua says.

“They start with an innovation lab or starter network with a few 5G base stations and 5G access devices — phones, tablets, 5G modems, and routers, to connect with industrial devices,” he explains. Private wireless networks can be rolled out within just a few weeks, but it’s important to find a service provider has expertise in shared spectrum technology, network deployments, solution integration and 24/7 network monitoring and support, Chua adds.

Digital transformation enters 2.0 phase

The way CIOs approach digital transformation programs is changing dramatically, says Shafqat Azim, a partner with global technology research and advisory firm ISG. He notes that transformation initiatives are coming under greater scrutiny as CIOs seek to drive real-world business value.

Azim predicts that enterprises will continue moving away from transactional-SLA-focused service projects that don’t include any transformative elements. “Digital transformation will get embedded within run-and-operate service delivery models, moving from a large transformation program mindset to a continuous transformation mindset,” he says.

Azim advises CIOs to begin viewing digital modernization investments through a value realization and cyber risk management lens, along with a traditional cost optimization focus. “Ensure that solutions for large-scale application and platform transformation … have an explicit overlay of end-to-end digital threads,” he adds.

Passwordless authentication goes prime time

The world has moved beyond the point where a simple password can provide sufficient protection, states David Burden, CIO with open-source identity and access management technology firm ForgeRock.

Spurred by the FIDO2 standard, the move to passwordless authentication is gaining momentum. It’s now the largest trend for enterprise software companies, Burden says. “The industry’s biggest players, including Apple, Microsoft, and Google, among others, have assisted with expanding the FIDO2 standard, announcing plans to enable passwordless authentication across multiple devices, browsers, and platforms.” He points to Gartner’s prediction that by 2025 over 50% of the workforce, and more than 20% of customer authentication transactions, will be passwordless — a major increase from the fewer than 10% today.

Passwordless authentication also promises to significantly enhance customer experience. “With an extensive enterprise authentication process, a user can log into an online account without having to enter a password,” Burden explains. “This eliminates the concern for forgotten passwords and the burdensome task of password recovery.”

Passwordless authentication also saves time. “It protects the most commonly used and vulnerable enterprise resources while also delivering an outstanding user experience and boosting workforce productivity,” Burden says. Overall, he notes, FIDO2 has the potential to improve both security and ease of use for online access while greatly diminishing the risk of stolen credentials by cybercriminals.

Cloud-native as platform of choice

Rajesh Kumar, CIO at digital transformation company LTIMindtree, predicts a bright future for cloud-native platforms, a way of building and running applications that takes advantage of distributed computing capabilities supplied by the cloud delivery model.

Cloud-native apps are designed and built to exploit the scale, elasticity, resiliency, and flexibility of the cloud, an approach that allows adopters to go live via platform configuration without the need for significant custom development. “Any extensions and customizations are built externally by integrating with the platform,” he explains.

Serverless applications running on cloud-hosted platforms differ from traditional enterprise software deployments, in which software is deployed on server infrastructure hosted either on-cloud or on-prem, Kumar says. “This trend extends to developing end-user applications using low-code platforms.”

The concept of developing systems based on requirements built from the ground up is becoming dated. “Today’s approach is to choose the right platform and plan the configurations or development project without having to worry about a deployment plan or scalability architecture,” Kumar says. “With the advent of widely available APIs and platform-driven solutions, CIOs can now focus on innovations that drive business outcomes rather than getting consumed in topics such as infrastructure, hosting, network, and scalability issues.”

Hyperscalers, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, have a major presence in this space, since they possess the horsepower needed to host large-scale platforms while offering massive scalability, Kumar observes. He notes that secondary market players include cloud-native platform providers such as Salesforce and ServiceNow.

Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Data and Information Security, Digital Transformation, Edge Computing, Enterprise Applications, Machine Learning, Private 5G

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By: Shruthi Kalale Prakashan, Sr. Manager, Product Marketing, Aruba Central.

For many organizations large and small, the COVID-19 pandemic was the tipping point for cloud adoption. Unsurprisingly, more than half of enterprise IT spending in key market segments will shift to the cloud by 2025, according to Gartner. [1] As the cloud continues to play a key role in building resilience and enabling agility, the role of the network is more critical than ever before. However, the transformative benefits of cloud cannot be realized (or may even be negated!) without a modern network to support it.

How should IT organizations modernize their network management in response to new market pressures and how can a cloud-based approach help?

Four modern network management challenges

Today’s network is facing new market pressures, including:

Hybrid work becomes mainstream: According to Gartner, if an organization were to go back to a fully on-site arrangement, it would risk losing up to 39% of its workforce. [2] Enabling secure and efficient hybrid work is now table stakes for IT teams.Growing network complexity: Networks are growing in size and complexity, often leading to siloed network management with multiple, disjointed tools that result in a high rate of manual errors, alert fatigue, and downtime.Compliance and security: Securing the network is harder than ever before due to the rapid implementation of cloud-based services in response to the pandemic and the increasing adoption of IoT.Critical talent shortage: Organizations are increasingly struggling to recruit and retain talent with specialized skills. Only 12.5% of enterprises believe it is very easy to hire and retain skilled networking professionals. [3]

It comes as no surprise that network operations professionals believe they could reduce problems by nearly half if they had better network management tools. [4]

How can cloud-based network management help?

Cloud-based network management solutions are gaining traction as organizations seek to consolidate their tools, drive better efficiencies, and lower costs. In fact, IDC projects that half of all new implementations will rely on cloud-based network management.

Aruba’s cloud-based network management solution –

Aruba Central – is a powerful, scalable solution that offers a single point of visibility and control to oversee every aspect of wired and wireless LANs, WANs, and VPNs across campus, branch, remote, and data center locations. Built on a cloud-native, microservices-based modern architecture, Aruba Central is an AI-powered solution that simplifies IT operations, improves agility, reduces costs, and minimizes risk by unifying management of all network infrastructure.

Benefit 1: Improved agility

Zero-touch provisioning accelerates the process of onboarding, configuring, and provisioning network devices with a guided setup wizard, flexible configuration options, and an intuitive installer app.‘Single point of control’ that enables IT to stage configuration changes just once, instantly validate them and push the new settings to every applicable device across the network, eliminating device-by-device updates.Enhanced programmability with open APIs and webhooks makes it easy to integrate with other tools in the technology stack such as ServiceNow, Ansible, Slack and much more.

Benefit 2: Enhanced efficiency

AIOps and automation eliminate manual troubleshooting tasks, reduce average resolution time by as much as 90% for common network issues, and increase network capacity by as much as 25% through peer-based configuration optimization.User experience monitoring provides user and IoT device application assurance and rapid troubleshooting through easy-to-deploy Aruba User Experience Insight (UXI) sensors that simulate end-user activities with admin-defined frequency.Natural language search allows administrators to use natural language to search for and quickly find relevant contextual information, enabling rapid first-level triages of issues.

Benefit 3: Reduced cost

Unified management of wired, wireless and WAN networks eliminates the use of multiple management tools, additional appliances and associated administrative and licensing costs.Training and development costs are reduced as network teams do not need to learn different tools or spend cycles on patching and maintaining the solutionCost of Downtime and truck rolls are reduced through AI-based proactive identification and root-cause of issues before they become actual problems with business impact.

Benefit 4: Minimized risk 

AI-powered IoT visibility eliminates network blind spots and reduces the risk of cyberattacks by using ML-models to accurately identify and profile hard-to-detect IoT devices.Simplifies policy management and streamlines the adoption of Zero Trust security at global scale by using overlays based on widely adopted protocols such as EVPN/VXLAN.High availability with live firmware upgrades that can be scheduled during non-peak operation hours to reduce maintenance windows and ensure continuous operations, eliminating potential downtime.

Getting started with cloud-based network management

120,000+ customers worldwide are already making significant improvements to their network management and operations with Aruba Central. In a customer survey we conducted with TechValidate, nearly a third of Aruba Central customers reported that they’ve halved their previous networking costs and nearly two-thirds of surveyed customers are able to resolve network or user issues at least 50% faster.

Learn how you can modernize your network and evolve network management strategies with the Aruba Unified Infrastructure and Aruba Central.

References:

[1] Enterprise IT Spending, Gartner, Feb 2022

[2] 9 Future of Work Trends Post Covid-19, Gartner, Jun 2022

[3], [4] Network Management Megatrends 2022, EMA, Apr 2022

This blog was published on blogs.arubanetworks.com on 01/16/23.

Cloud Management

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Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group (EBG) arrived at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year with a proposition fit for the times, emphasizing the value created by digital transformation across multiple industries and use case scenarios. Huawei has developed more than 100 scenario-based solutions, covering over 10 industries. EBG’s strategy of ‘Weaving Technologies for Industry Scenarios’ paid off — the business has been growing rapidly with Huawei’s overall revenue reaching about 636 billion Yuan in 2022.

On day two of the mobile conference, four of EBG’s senior executives took part in an hour-long panel discussion in front of journalists and partners. Their aim: to explain how EBG is playing its part in Huawei’s larger effort to help industries go digital as technology plays an increasingly important role in economy, culture, society and environment.

Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group is the one of Huawei’s three major divisions, sitting alongside its carrier business and its consumer electronics unit. EBG’s core business is the infrastructure that enables digital transformation and “scenario-based technologies” created in collaboration with a fast-growing partner ecosystem. To better meet customer needs, EBG has established business units (BUs) dedicated to certain industries such as Government Public Services, Digitalization BU and Digital Finance BU which integrate resources to efficiently serve and create value for customers, helping industries digitally transform.

To date, Huawei’s enterprise group has worked with more than half of the Fortune Global 500. Moreover, 54.8% of Huawei employees are engaged in Research and Development (R&D), which over the last decade has been supported with US$132.5 billion investment. Bob Chen, EBG Vice-President, also announced the new Small and Medium Enterprise business strategy at the MWC, which will see Huawei step up investment in this market to support these businesses as they seek to transform. EBG is also transforming its organization, channel, and IT equipment to extend its breadth in the SME-dominated markets.  Six distribution product R&D teams have been set up and more than 200 new products and solutions will be released to the SME market this year. Huawei will continue to work with partners to help more SMEs achieve digital transformation and business success.

For all of these numbers though, this was a panel discussion frequently dominated by the qualitative impacts of digital transformation. Chen cited technology deployments that have revived regional economies, limited the devastation caused by forest fires and brought high-quality teaching resources to impoverished rural neighborhoods. According to Chen, digital technologies now play an essential role in “driving the development of the economy, culture, society and environment towards an intelligent world”.

Historically, Huawei has thrived on big visions and big projects. Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Global Digital Finance, highlighted that mobile and intelligent financial services are more and more popular, and the core fields are highly digitalized. Huawei strives to accelerate technology application in six fields, including shifting from transaction to digital engagement, developing cloud-native applications and data, evolving infrastructure to MEGA, industrializing data and AI application, enhancing real-time data analysis, and moving towards a cutting-edge AI brain. In this way, we help financial customers accelerate changes, innovatively improve productivity, and make productivity visible, and speed up evolution towards the future.

Cao was one of two vertical sector specialists on the panel. The other was Hong-eng Koh, Huawei’s Global Chief Public Services Industry Scientist. With an MBA from Leeds University in the UK, Koh rose to play a leading role in Singapore’s e-Government program and spent 16 years in government roles at Oracle before joining Huawei.

Instead of driving revenue and profit, Koh told the audience that the public sector has to use what he calls “people-centric services” to remove the friction from the relationship between citizen and state. “For example, a businessman wants to open a restaurant. . . Regulations require him to transact with numerous government agencies to get the necessary permits. Digital transformation can help make this reluctant businessman more willing [to accept digital channels].”

Koh took the audience on a four minute summary of the way in which digital government can, and should, enable “digital economy and digital society”. Stops along the way included government-owned broadband and cloud services providers in Nigeria and UAE, an intelligent university campus in Macau and e-government systems in Spain and Sweden.

Much of this work is achieved in collaboration with EBG’s 35,000-strong partner ecosystem, represented on stage by Haijun Xiao, President of Global Partner Development and Sales. Xiao’s worldwide brief is vast: 25,000 sales partners, 8,000 solution development and services partners, 2,400 training courses, and ICT academies working with 2,200 universities.

Here, too, discussions about value are noticeable. EBG has invested significantly in its partner ecosystem in recent years, signaling continued commercial momentum and increasing maturity. Xiao knows the value of his partners, and wants to keep them onside. “We adopt mutual benefits through open collaboration,” he says. “We adopt fair, just, transparent and simple partner policies.” This year, Huawei is building end-to-end capabilities from R&D, marketing, sales, supply, and service systematically, centering on “partner-centricity”.

In Huawei’s corporate calendar, the congress is one of the last big public events to take place before the privately-held company reveals its annual financial performance. Chen hinted at what we’re likely to hear in the near future: continuing rapid growth at EBG. EBG will be working with partners to help more SMEs go digital and succeed in 2023.

This year’s theme of the value generated by digital transformation is designed to perpetuate that track record of success in what seem likely to be more uncertain times.

Find out more about Huawei’s MWC program here.

Mobile World Congress

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By Olaf de Senerpont Domis, senior editor at DataStax

Premji Invest is an evergreen fund formed to support the Azim Premji Foundation, which was founded by Azim Premji, the former chairman of IT services consultancy Wipro. Premji Invest deploys a “crossover format” (investing in both private and public companies) across the technology, healthcare, consumer, and FinTech landscapes; it has backed market leaders like Outreach, Sysdig, Heyday, Anaplan, Coupa, Moderna, Carta, Flipkart, Looker (acquired by Google), and DataStax. Premji Invest-US managing partner, Sandesh Patnam, established Premji Invest’s US presence in 2014 in Menlo Park, California.

We recently spoke with Sandesh to learn more about the firm’s investment strategy and his excitement about the database market.

What’s Premji Invest’s investment strategy?

We deploy a direct crossover investment strategy with a roughly equal split between mid- to late-stage growth equity and public equities. Our evergreen structure informs and supports our long-term duration investment approach: We think in 5- to 15-year horizons. While many investors view an IPO as a potential point of exit, we see the opposite. We’ve often participated meaningfully in the IPO events of standout members of our private portfolio and continued our partnership well beyond going public. We have a team in India and a team in the US, which I set up about 8-and-a-half years ago. We’re active investors and look to partner with the founders and management teams that are on a mission to create enduring companies.

What qualities do you look for in investments?

We want to invest in companies that thrive in the public markets. On the flip side, our public portfolio in many ways reflects our private practice conviction. We have deep private and public practices that operate under one hood, so it’s through this continuity that we understand the durability of a business model, pricing, quarterly cadence, value creation, and the rigor of a team. All these metrics are easier said than accomplished, but they’re a clear proxy for quality.

We also want to see significant product-market fit. I usually use the term “wild market fit.” A lot of companies can spend a lot of dollars and get a “push-based” model, but that can generate false positives. We want to see significant market “pull.” That requires some level of codification of the go-to-market strategy and process. A lot of companies have heroic sellers or unique customers — but still fail after lots of misspent dollars.

Why invest in the database market?

We’ve all heard software is going to eat the world. But more importantly, I’d say that AI [artificial intelligence] and ML [machine learning] are going to eat software. There are a lot of companies that build software that are often fairly basic workflow tools. For software to be actionable, data must be at the center. If you think of the way the world is headed with AI and ML, how is that going to get more intelligent? What is the basis of ML? In these cases, the most important aspect is: Can you organize your data and can you learn from it and piece together information in real-time that can take real action on that data?

There’s a second element that we look for: With the speed and volume at which we are accreting data, can it be stored in an efficient way? If so, your AI and ML can get better over time, so all software should be predictive in some way.

Why is the database market more interesting today than ever before?

The need for real-time information. Ecommerce, ad spend, and real-time events that happen once need to be moderated. If you don’t have the right instrumentation and analytics, provided on a real-time basis, you’re going to fall behind. 

Think about the companies that have taken share and disrupted industries; think of all the things Amazon has done and Netflix has done — all the things that the tech challengers have done to existing businesses. They all stem from the fact that they were able to instrument their business much more so than others.

At Amazon, the office of CFO is, in many ways, more like the office of the CRO [chief revenue officer]. Amazon can instrument its business at the SKU level. Think about toothpaste with a particular flavor that’s sold in the Northeast. Amazon can tell you what the profit contribution is, what the cycle of buying is, who the potential buyer is, what the supply chain logistics look like. You start breaking that down at the SKU level, and that enables the promotion of certain products in certain geographies and enables you to make specific contribution margin decisions and make near-perfect promotions.

When you think about how that’s even possible, then you start understanding the power of AWS. But you also understand that underneath AWS is the power of a very dynamic, highly distributed database. The relevance of the right data model and the right database and the impact it has on businesses is much more pronounced today. You can say that data is destiny, but I’d add that the right database is destiny — it really impacts the business model in a very profound way.

Learn more about DataStax here.

About Olaf de Senerpont Domis:

DataStax

Olaf is senior editor at DataStax. He has driven awareness via content marketing roles at Google and Apigee. Prior to that, he spent two decades as a journalist, reporting on the financial services industry and technology M&A.

Data Management, IT Leadership