Before the holiday season arrives, IT professionals get their own holiday gift by way of IDC’s annual FutureScape, presented by their internal analysts. These predictions are meant to guide the industry through trends and issues of importance for the next 3 years ahead, including a strategic a blueprint for what CIOs and IT leaders will have top of mind.
October 31 was IDC’s first presentation, focused on IT trends. Some highlights from the presentation include:
- Chapter Two of the Third Platform Era: For viewers who have attended previous IDC FutureScape calls, they will know the third platform as mobility, cloud, social, and big data solutions. In the second chapter, IDC calls for multiplied innovation in the digital experience economy, including artificial intelligence, usage of APIs, human interfaces, and strengthening digital trust. According to IDC, organizations that engage in these areas stand evolve into Digital Native Enterprises that master code, data, and relationships.
- The Emergence of a Digital Experience Economy: By 2021, IDC expects 50% of gross domestic product to be digitized and nearly 60% of enterprises will have fully articulated an organization-wide digital transformation platform strategy. In short, this means that more organizations than ever will understand that transforming to digital is the center of revenue, and by not doing so means leaving opportunity on the table.
- Cloud and AI Will Lead Budgetary Spending: Though it seems like cloud and artificial intelligence appear to be overused buzzwords, IDC states that both will remain hot in spending. Cloud spending is expected to hit $530 billion by 2021 and artificial intelligence will be used by 75% of commercial enterprises and 50% of industrial robots. On the other hand, 90% of consumers will interact with AI-related solutions for customer service functions.
- Architecture and Infrastructure Adoption Grows: This year we saw the beginning of conversations around the adoption of microservices, platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and API solutions on human-driven interfaces. IDC expects the majority of enterprises to leverage all these areas for growth, away from traditional monolithic platforms. More than ever, traditional enterprises must consider adopting these solutions, or face being left behind by the competition.
- The Arrival of Non-Traditional Solutions: On the front-end side, blockchain and low code have also made waves this year, offering new financial means of doing business and innovation. Still in their early adoption days, IDC predicts that low-code will be used in 20% of business applications and 30% of new applications features. IDC also predicts blockchain usage to reach 25% of the Global 2000 by 2021.
So What Does This Mean?
For many of Perficient’s customers, adoption of the above predictions are under way. As much as digital transformation has served as a launching point for numerous enterprises, we believe that IDC’s predictions serve to show that we are just at the beginning.
- For organizations already taking action, IDC’s latest FutureScape should be an encouraging sign in taking the right path. With some of these technologies still early in adoption, getting ahead will be both beneficial in getting to market first, but also potentially problematic in running into early business challenges.
- For organizations still on the fence, IDC’s report should be ample motivation to finally make a move. Even for those who have adopted cloud in recent months, leadership should look to implementing internal accelerator and centers of excellence to catch up on lost time.
If you’re part of an organization wondering how you can leverage this work with IBM solutions, speak to one of our digital transformation experts today at sales@perficient.com today.
