London Tech Week & TechXLR8 Industry Survey Findings
In partnership with London Tech Week and its flagship event TechXLR8, Omdia conducted a survey of 150+ enterprises to understand enterprise buying trends in the UK around emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and Edge services.
In the digital era, technology is often the most powerful weapon in the enterprise arsenal to improve competitiveness and embed innovation into the business. Many enterprises have used technology to redefine themselves within their respective industries and successfully compete with digital natives. Enterprise adoption of emerging technologies such as Edge services and AI continues to accelerate as businesses look for ways to lower cost, create new services and business models, and enhance operational effectiveness.
Most enterprise digital strategy currently revolves around some incarnation of the cloud, data/analytics and automation, and while these technologies are important to reduce costs, improve customer experience and operational efficiencies these are basically foundational technologies for the enterprise of the future.
The report, released today (21st May 2020) presents the findings and highlights, including:
- While Edge services and AI find prime position in digital initiatives, interest in blockchain continues to revolve around niche applications in the absence of large, enterprise-wide implementation success-stories.
- Acceleration of Edge services uptake in the enterprise is driven by its applicability in processing and analysing data at the edge, thereby improving data visibility and real-time analytics, and its ability to secure information.
- Leveraging AI to drive decision making, improve customer experience and innovate around products and services are key drivers that are spurring enterprises to invest in the space
- There are several hurdles that businesses face as they try to find ways to further adoption of emerging technologies the chief of which is the lack of adequate skills in the workforce and the challenges of articulating and measuring the value that these bring.
Among the recommendations, Omdia suggests crafting a detailed technology adoption roadmap with objectives and key KPIs that can be linked back to a tangible business outcome/value laid out from the start to make it easier to determine if the technologies are suitable. Small pilots or quick starts that involve stakeholders from the IT and business side are recommended as a way to test innovative solutions aimed at enhancing workflows and business processes.
