In today’s fast-paced digital business era, digital leaders face the constant challenge of uncertainty. Navigating this landscape requires an effective digital-first strategy to maintain organizational competitiveness. However, CAPEX budgets are tight, technology brings complexity and there is a shortage of skilled professionals. Moreover, the threat landscape is ever-changing and end users have higher expectations. While digitization presents great opportunities, it also brings disruptive challenges. Digital leaders who can skillfully manage uncertainty have the potential to create a competitive edge for their organizations, fostering growth and driving innovation.
Equinix strives to equip enterprises and service providers with the tools and context they need to navigate their digital transformation, transitioning their operations into fully fledged digital businesses. At our Digital Leaders Live 2023, a series of in-person events featured compelling speakers across the data industry that provided forward-looking leaders with leading customer examples on how platform technologies can be leveraged to drive new digital services and strategic opportunities for enterprises. The event was hosted across six key metropolitan city hubs across Asia-Pacific and attracted over five hundred digital leaders and 16 customer and partner speakers.
Transitioning from digital transformation to being digitally mature
An effective digital leader takes a digital-first approach to bring business and technology strategies together. This strategic endeavor relies upon secure digital infrastructure delivered as a service through a modern network, encompassing a core-to-edge strategy. IDC predicts that by 2027, 45% of enterprises will have mastered the use of GenAI to codevelop digital products and services leading to double the revenue growth compared with their competitors.[1] In other words, corporate innovation cycles become accelerated, digital service launches are more frequent and supply chains offer end-to-end transparency. This in turn allows digital leaders to make evidence-based decisions with information that is bite-sized and delivered in real time.
Sandra Ng, Group Vice President and General Manager, IDC APJ, highlighted why enterprises need to become digitally mature as it gives them the ability to fully contextualize and create new digital value at scale, with a significant portion of their revenue being driven by their digital operations. She also pointed out that leaders must navigate their businesses through several stages of digital transformation until they become fully digital enterprises. The initial stages involve digital experimentation, focusing on making an initial financial impact with digital innovation. Once businesses begin to scale their digital transformation, they can enable new business models that move beyond financials, creating new capabilities and revenue opportunities.
An effective digital leader takes a digital-first approach to bring business and technology strategies together. This strategic endeavor relies upon secure digital infrastructure delivered as a service through a modern network, encompassing a core-to-edge strategy. IDC predicts that by 2026, 40% of total revenue for A2000 organizations will be generated by digital products, services and experiences. In other words, corporate innovation cycles become accelerated, digital service launches are more frequent and supply chains offer end-to-end transparency. This in turn allows digital leaders to make evidence-based decisions with information that is bite-sized and delivered in real time.
Watch keynote by Sandra Ng, Group Vice President and General Manager, IDC APJ
Expanding business operations by deploying to the edge at software speed
Simon Lockington, Senior Director of Solutions Architects for Equinix Asia-Pacific, emphasizes that the digital business engine has now become a cohesive integration of different systems and applications that allow businesses to flexibly scale up or down and enable use cases that ensure business competitiveness and innovation. Enterprises will need to integrate within a platform that provides on-demand access to an interconnected ecosystem of customers and suppliers while meeting evolving sustainability targets. Neutral interconnection platforms like Platform Equinix® are driving the future of connectivity, bringing together both capabilities of the network and cloud to create environments that allow digital-first enterprises to thrive while accelerating progress towards climate neutrality.
According to Equinix’s Global Tech Trends Survey of 2023, 69% of IT leaders in Asia-Pacific plan to expand their organization in the next year. To meet their expansion goals, they need a platform that gives them the ability to deploy infrastructure where business operations are connected and in destinations that matter most. Instead of strictly deploying traditional physical infrastructure to achieve this, virtual points of presence allow enterprises to deploy in key locations through a mix of physical and digital infrastructure at software speed via Network Edge, Equinix Fabric® and bare metal physical colocation infrastructure like Equinix Metal®. By adopting a hybrid approach, enterprises can expedite their digital transformation journeys in a manner that fits their data and digital requirements, providing them with the flexibility to deploy bandwidth at the edge and data processing capacity at speed.
Networks are the foundation of digital transformation
Rajaneesh Kurup, Director, Equinix Research Group, Asia-Pacific, spotlights a world that is becoming increasingly digital, with the World Economic Forum forecasting an estimated 70% of new value created over the coming decade being based on digitally enabled platform business models.[2] This has led to an explosion of data in both volume and variety. Enterprises must be prepared to act on this data and synthesize it into actionable insights while overcoming the distance between disparate geolocations where data is being generated. Prior to interconnection, digital leaders were unable to address the challenge of moving vast quantities of data across great distances in real time. Traditional infrastructure was siloed, rigid and inflexible, limiting customer interactions and restricting innovation. As data becomes more distributed, your digital architecture should also reflect this change and be deployed closer to the edge where critical data is generated and processed. Effective digital leaders understand that if they wish to maintain a low-latency environment, their infrastructure must move from being centralized and siloed to becoming distributed and flexible.
Equinix’s digital services are enabling enterprises access to new digital services through secure, reliable and scalable interconnection without uprooting their existing multicloud infrastructure. Integrating into ecosystems will allow enterprises to move away from building their digital capabilities in-house, reducing costs and speeding up their digital transformation. Instead, they can immediately leverage new technologies from service providers in a rich digital ecosystem by interconnecting with the right partners and digital services they need to thrive and innovate.
Making digital transformation a continuous organizational priority
Digital transformation is an ongoing, ever-evolving journey that demands continuous adaptation and innovation. To navigate this path effectively, digital leaders require a global interconnection platform that grants them access to a wide array of physical and virtual solutions, all available through flexible CAPEX and OPEX models. This empowers them to make informed decisions regarding whether to build or buy the optimal digital infrastructure for their specific needs. By mastering the art and science of digital transformation, digital leaders propel their organizations to new levels of maturity. Gain invaluable insights and take your organization’s digital transformation to the next stage of success by exploring Equinix’s Digital Leaders Live 2023 event. Together, we can shape a future of digital excellence.
[1] IDC Press Release, AI Adoption to Soar in Asia/Pacific Japan: IDC Predicts 80% of CIOs Will Harness AI by 2028, 09 November 2023
[2] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Digital_Transition_Framework_2023.pdf
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