Tag: Digital Transformation

What was physical is rapidly becoming digital, as every industry undergoes a digital transformation. Digital wallets, with details about your identity and your credit card information encrypted somewhere in the cloud, are replacing credit and debit cards, which have largely replaced printed currency and checks. Newspapers, magazines, music and movies are consumed digitally. Robotics eliminate manual assembly processes and deliver consistent quality at lower cost. The notion of driving a car may soon become as outdated as dialing a phone.

The edge is where it’s all happening in today’s digital world. It’s where distributed people and things moving around the globe come together via a variety of interconnected devices. At Equinix, we see the evolving edge taking clearer shape as businesses create new applications and business models that integrate the physical and virtual worlds on our global interconnection platform.

In part one of this two-part series I shared some key takeaways from the recent forum, “Digital Asia: Asia’s Digitally Transforming Economies”, hosted by The Economist Corporate Network in Hong Kong. As discussed in my last post, digital transformation is growing fast around Asia-Pacific, thanks to the explosive growth of the internet, mobile penetration, FinTech and big data. In this blog post I want to highlight some of the things companies need to think about when it comes to responding to the huge opportunity presented by digital transformation in Asia-Pacific. Here a few things to consider:

The report points out that adapting to this new world of digital applications and data-driven insights requires flexible and reliable technology infrastructure. This is the key to realizing the true potential of digital initiatives but this is where most enterprise networks fall short. They’re simply not able to guarantee the required levels of availability, performance or security.

We frequently see IT teams that own the Orchestration phase are not highly engaged in the Strategy and Business Model components. Nor are they empowered to align business units to cleanly execute the IT projects that deliver transformation—applications, IT systems, operating models, people and culture. We see this is a factor in the underperformance, or even failure, of many digital transformation initiatives.

Digital technologies increase business efficiency in infinite ways in all industries, all around the world. For example, just think of the time-consuming and costly processes that have been eliminated by businesses deploying cloud, collaboration, robotics and data analytics platforms. CAPEX is reduced, while scale is increased. Supply chains bring solutions to market more effectively and faster. Repetitive tasks are expedited, making room for new value creation. And greater insights can be revealed in real-time, making a real difference in customer satisfaction.

Every day we talk to enterprises across a variety of industries who are working hard to build best practices for doing business in an everchanging digital world. Our place at the intersection of all of these industries and trends gives us a unique perspective into how digital is impacting the way we all do business today, and what's coming next.

Digital transformation is building a new global economy. Just over the last decade, McKinsey Global Institute has seen global trade in digital services double, raising the world GDP by at least 10%. Today, digital represents half of total global services exports.

The prospect of a global cashless economy is not too distant a reality. Global digital payments are predicted to increase on average by 10.9% reaching close to 726 billion transactions by 2020, according to the World Payments Report 2017. The world’s top cashless economy is currently Canada, with Sweden coming in at second and the UK at third (Forex Bonuses). Chinese cities are already emerging as early examples of cashless economies, with digital payments on mobile apps such as WeChat and Alipay taking precedent for mobile payment transactions. And Sub-Saharan Africa is a huge market for mobile payments — the GSMA reports that more than 40% of the adult population is using mobile money on an active basis in seven Sub-Saharan African countries.