Research for Enterprises

As businesses are becoming software and data-driven, they need an infrastructure base that can adapt to the changing market conditions, be managed as a hybrid model and to always be accessible. Most data center outsourcing engagements now have elements of private/hybrid cloud and intuitive cloud management and cognitive platforms enablement.

With vehicles becoming more software oriented, from being hardware oriented, and digital thread use gaining traction in R&D, enterprises can benefit from using a single source of data. Thus, a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution should be clearly explained to software developers by mechanical and electrical engineers. Accordingly, stakeholders in the U.S. are exploring options for driving the value proposition through the convergence of PLM, service lifecycle management (SLM) and application lifecycle management (ALM) in smart manufacturing in North America.

The U.S. insurance industry, like other regions, continues to face challenges pertaining to losses resulting from pandemic-related claims, climate change risks, rising operation costs, claims inflation, and cyberattacks. These are compounded by energy scarcity, rapid inflation, geopolitical tensions, increased need for operational readiness for regulatory changes, and changing customer expectations. The world has entered a new era that has become structurally different over the past 30 years.

Global enterprises are building new digital platforms to implement automation solutions that can replicate human action and eliminate employee routine tasks to achieve higher outcomes across industry verticals. Automation creates a new paradigm of people, processes and technology collaboration that complements and enhances business outcomes.

Intelligent automation is now a mainstream technology spanning across enterprise portfolios. The evolution of RPA platforms in the past decade has been astounding, and the technology is now a vital constituent for driving digital business transformation. Core RPA characteristics are being integrated into platforms for building advanced products and capabilities. These platforms converge proprietary capabilities, emerging technologies and third-party solutions to develop a unique value proposition. This continuously evolving category acts as a differentiator and is one of the significant developments in the software vendor market.

In today’s world, to enable key business initiatives, cloud adoption plays a central and leading role in ensuring enterprise continuity. Enterprises are dependent on IT’s ability to deliver technology and solutions that provide differentiation in the market. The public cloud service market continues to grow as observed in previous years. This is mainly due to the acceleration of digital business transformation programs undertaken by enterprises to grow their businesses and improve customer experience (CX). Cloud migration and application modernization represent the leading enterprise initiatives. Data and analytics come third on the priority list, with cloud governance interest increasing in enterprises.

This ISG Public Sector Provider Lens™ research study examines public cloud service providers that develop, enable and deliver capabilities needed by these public sector organizations in the U.S. as they work to improve operations, reduce costs, address digital change, and improve their ability to serve constituencies and internal users alike.

The banking industry has been experiencing major shifts globally, driven by emerging technologies, innovations triggered by the COVID-19-induced movement restrictions, changes in consumers’ preferences and behaviors, and the increasing regulations in the industry. The adoption of the net-zero approach and emerging enterprise-level risk management and compliance requirements are also driving banks to change their strategies and businessoperating models.

As the contact center industry is rapidly evolving to address future consumers’ needs, businesses are beginning to realize the need for new technologies and operating models. Accelerating transformation has become a priority for all businesses. There has been a drastic change in the business approach in the last 30 months, and new trends, which are redefining this industry, are emerging.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the consumption of over-thetop (OTT) platforms, further accelerating the disruption of the well-established media and entertainment business ecosystem. In addition to streaming new content, many OTT players act as distributors, pooling content from different media companies and offering it to their customers seamlessly. End users in this rapidly developing ecosystem will require robust content management systems that automate the content supply chain and royalty rights without disrupting the quality of experience (QoE) of their customers.

After adapting to the changes brought upon by the pandemic in the last two years, enterprise clients in the U.S. are reassessing their strategies for transforming their workplaces. The Microsoft Future of Work study 2022 shows that many enterprises in the region are now embracing hybrid work models while maintaining the post-COVID norms.

Workplace changes that were already underway were vastly accelerated to address the needs triggered by the pandemic, and those organizations that were holding out have now realized that transformation is essential. Organizations have developed a new understanding of the importance of workplace resilience.

As global organizations are adopting future of work or the hybrid working culture, there is an increasing focus on retaining and attracting talent. This requires special attention on both end-user enablement and backend IT infrastructure management.

Networks and software-defined solutions and services encompass many technological topics, business coverage areas, organizational functions and business processes and methods. These are closely tied to the overall digital business transformation and cloudification trends of enterprises globally. This ISG Provider Lens™ study examines different kinds of network offerings related to software-defined networking (SD networking) globally. These include SD-WAN and associated core and mobility technologies and service offerings related to these segments, transformation services, and the increasingly crucial edge technologies and secure access service edge (SASE). This study considers the changing market requirements and provides a consistent market overview of the segments. It also gives concrete decision-making support to help user organizations evaluate and assess the offerings and performance of providers.

After several years of booming growth and attendant hype, cloud-native technologies finally seem to be coming of age. The number of cloud-native developers stood at 6.8 million in early 2021, according to The State of Cloud Native Development report published by SlashData, with 4.6 million developers using container tools and management platforms, and 4.0 million using cloud functions or serverless architecture. A more recent survey by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), of its own members, indicates that about 96 percent of those organizations are either using or evaluating Kubernetes, with approximately 93 percent currently using or planning to use containers in production. The growing maturity of cloud-native technologies is bringing both new opportunities and challenges.

The cybersecurity market in the U.S., witnessed exceptional growth in spending against the backdrop of a multitude of reasons threatening to impact businesses and economy. The U.S. market is reflective of global trends; U.S. is recognized for its high maturity in IT and security adoption and as the hub for centralized business decision making for several enterprises. The post-COVID-19 phase witnessed an unprecedent acceleration in digital transformation investments, uptake of remote and hybrid work models, incidents of sophisticated attacks and data leaks across enterprises of all sizes, and the (ongoing) Ukraine-Russia conflict. These reasons, combined with the surge in insider threats, lack of cybersecurity awareness with misguided perceptions and false sense of complete protection, have created further complexities, necessitating innovative, real-time and advanced security capabilities.

The banking platform industry is poised for an overhaul. Emerging technologies such as AI, machine learning, blockchain and others have revolutionized customer experience (CX) and brought banks closer to their customers. In a world severely impacted by the pandemic, contactless delivery, remote working and flattening hierarchies are becoming the new realities; banks have gearing up to deal with the challenge by leveraging technology platforms.

While the world is getting back to business-as-usual, there have been some permanent changes in the retail industry due to changed consumer behavior and expectations.

The global pandemic accelerated e-commerce adoption and saw retailers adapt, in a matter of days, to new sales channels such as buy online pickup in store (BOPIS); curbside pickup; lockers; social commerce; voice commerce; and “buy now, pay later.”

It is estimated that, worldwide, e-commerce sales grew by more than 40 percent in 2021, compared with 2019. By the end of 2023, online retail sales are expected to exceed $6 trillion and contribute to about 21 percent of total worldwide retail sales.

The rise in digital transformations initiatives among enterprises has jumped significantly in the last year, with private/ hybrid cloud solutions and services becoming central to these transformation efforts. Enterprises are also under constant pressure to reduce operational costs, including the cost associated with IT operations. In-house data centers are a huge expense for an enterprise, and a substantial investment is required to deploy and maintain a modern, energy-efficient data center. This, in turn, is driving the outsourcing engagements for data center managed services, which is a better alternative and positively impacting the growth of the global data center infrastructure outsourcing market.

Over the last few years, the growth of public/hybrid cloud adoption has increased significantly. Enterprises have been facing the need to adopt new technological advances due to cost pressure from their finance teams. Hence, engineering teams of enterprises have to find the best technological solution that can help in reducing technical debt and associated costs.