Research for Enterprises

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.

Some of the pandemic-induced consumer behavior changes, such as the upsurge in e-commerce, social commerce, voice commerce, buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) and buy-online-return-in-store (BORIS), are becoming mainstream, while consumers are returning to brick-and-mortar stores for their usual shopping needs.

The digital engineering space is witnessing a wide adoption of various technologies, spurred by the digital revolution in the manufacturing industry with its strong potential to drive productivity. Digital technologies that are used by production and manufacturing companies help create a data lake at all phases and stages of the production line, capturing every piece of information that can optimize or improvise the process in every dimension. On the other hand, traditional engineering methodologies are human intensive and offer reserved guidance and insights from the transactional data generated at every point.

The last 18 months has witnessed one of the largest workforce population movements. This shift in ways of working was the hypersonic acceleration of the future workplace implemented in a matter of weeks. Organizations were categorized into digital categories depending on how they had planned and adapted to the future of work, as well as how their services and industries were consumed by the end customer in 2021.

Our 2022 research agenda will provide continuous research and covers both ITO and BPO areas. To view and participate in this program, click here to download the 2022 Research Agenda.

The connected enterprise space has been expanding since the cloud adoption drive, especially in the U.S. Software providers are building business specific and industry verticalized solution. Enterprises are driven by a broad set of services in every portfolio and domain, generating data that eventually transforms into knowledge. These services create and store business information produced by many teams and stakeholders involved at every touchpoint.

The pandemic impacted the insurance industry in many ways. Many carriers suffered dramatic business interruptions by shifting the workforce to a remote model. Agents could not meet in person with clients, and many lost sales. Sales in some categories like travel insurance plummeted as people stopped going on vacations and business trips. Life insurance claims soared. IT departments in many insurance organizations scrambled to quickly put the right processes in place to keep their internal workforces and distribution channels plugged in, both online and on-site.

Are you under pressure to reduce your mainframe costs? Several service providers are addressing the increasing demand to free business data that resides in mainframe systems. From a high-level perspective, all companies are moving their data from on-premises to the cloud for leveraging advanced analytics, AI, machine learning and data lakes. When data sits on a mainframe, companies find that the need for data access drives modernization.

Software platform renovation or replacement has become the de facto first step toward effective, sustainable digital business transformation for procurement organizations worldwide. Most platforms and providers can help optimize core procurement functions and operations, reduce costs by 30 percent and improve efficiency by at least as much. The most effective, market-leading platforms can elevate and integrate entire procurement organizations and operations to a level of capability and efficiency not previously possible.