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Governments have never been in a storm like the one we’re in today, and national and local administrations need to reinvent themselves as a new era is about to start.

In these unprecedented times, European governments are aiming to improve their ability to withstand long-term volatility and uncertainty, particularly through digital trust and operational resilience programmes.

In doing so, new business models will emerge to fulfil current and future challenges:

  • Allocating the Recovery and Resilience Funds to the right priorities and purposes
  • Selecting the right technologies to achieve short-term efficiency and long-term resilience
  • Improving the citizen and civil servant experience by making the most of technology but also implementing deep cultural and organisational transformation to enable them to reimagine service delivery

IDC conducted an in-depth survey, including 230 senior executives and directors, to investigate the strategic business priorities and key action plans for European governments. The survey looked at the technology solutions that governments are investing in to execute their strategy and action plans, and the challenges they face in their strategic technology innovation investments.

European Government Business Transformation and Technology Priorities

According to the 230 European government decision makers that IDC interviewed:

  • Their main purpose is to improve citizen experience and quality of life. By keeping this in mind, they might also facilitate other short-term initiatives. This goal must become a state-of-mind for every civil servant and government decision maker.
  • The main barriers to innovation are not only budget (with RFFs impacted by fast-growing inflation) but also citizen trust and outdated IT. Again, both technical and cultural changes should occur simultaneously to regain trust.
  • Redesigning services and business processes around the needs of citizens are key steps to achieve resilience. Technology is a critical part of this transformation, but it should go hand in hand with innovative approaches and a greater focus on change. European governments believe that governance, risk and compliance and data management tools are critical to execute digital trust programmes. Digital sovereignty is frequently discussed by European policymakers, but our survey shows that only civil servants in some countries, such as France and Germany, are already prioritising it to increase digital trust.
  • Emerging technologies such as 5G, AR/VR and edge computing are key areas of investment to imagine new ways of delivering public services.
  • European governments that want to master a citizen-centric approach are adjusting their KPIs accordingly and aggregating data to build a holistic view of citizen needs and implement the once-only principle.
  • Long-term challenges — especially sustainability — can’t be fought alone. Governments’ ability to work closely with an ecosystem, through data sharing and massive investments in data capabilities, will be key.

What Are the Key Components of a Disruptive Approach?

Check out the following IDC European government “PRIME” survey studies (subscription required) to learn more about how European governments are aligning technology investment to societal Purposes, strengthening Resilience, Imagining new service delivery models, Mastering citizen and employee centricity, and opening up to the Ecosystem:

Remi Letemple - Senior Research Analyst, IDC Government Insights - IDC

Analyst Profile
Remi Letemple leads IDC’s Worldwide Sustainable Transportation and Smart Vehicles Strategies service, where he provides strategic guidance and thought leadership on the future of mobility and transportation. Operating at a global level, he is recognized as a subject matter expert in smart mobility and transportation technologies—including connected, autonomous, shared, and electric mobility—enabled by software-defined vehicle (SDV) architectures, over-the-air (OTA) updates, cloud and edge platforms, and AI, including generative AI.

We define a digital business as a business in which value creation is based on the use of digital technologies, including:

  • Internal and external processes
  • How an organisation engages with customers, citizens, suppliers and partners
  • How it attracts, manages and retains employees and talent
  • What products, services and experiences it provides, and how

So, digital is central to organisations, from the business core to all the different parts that make up the wider business. But why are use cases important? What’s their role in the digital business?

The answer is simple. As use cases are discrete-funded projects to support a business’ goals leveraging key enabling technologies, use cases are the critical building blocks that help them to become a digital business.

IDC EMEA’s Future Enterprise Resilience Survey, October 2021 (n = 430) shows that 60% of EMEA companies say use cases are important to drive digital strategies and road maps, but that organisations need to understand how to build on them for their business and how to make them work.

While you are reading this blogpost, there are numerous executives lost the in the “use case ocean” asking themselves and their board questions such as:

  • What are the key resources we need to have in place?
  • Who should steer them?
  • What type of technology investments should we make?
  • How do we measure outcomes from this project?

How can organisations answer these questions? By using a framework that tackles all the issues, such as IDC’s “Use Case Canvas” (see Digital Transformation Use Cases in 2022: A “Use Case Canvas” for the Top 10 EMEA Use Cases).

The use case canvas is a framework designed to easily map top level use case requirements, from IT components and resources to measurable metrics, to evaluate the successful implementation and personas required to ensure a successful implementation.

To better understand this, let’s look at a practical example in the customer experience space.

360-Degree Customer and Client Management: An Example

If you’re working on a use case to better manage customers and clients (if you’re tech vendor building your tech road map or a tech buyer seeking to improve your digital strategy) you can find yourself stuck with the questions highlighted above, so let’s take a closer look:

  • The chief customer success officer, the customer experience officer and the head of customer service/support drive, influence and steer the use case. It’s important to first decide who is in charge of executing a specific use case and to talk to them about how to address their challenges.
  • Use case business tips. Highlighting the guidelines and best practices from a business standpoint will ease the adoption of the use case; for instance, for the specific use case under analysis, collaboration is pivotal and this can be achieved only with the adoption of adequate tools and systems to ensure collaboration across different functions working on it.
  • Use case technology journey. This is the step-by-step journey to evolve the legacy technology architecture to implement the use case. This means collecting customer data across multiple sources (physical or digital) and applying algorithms and AI to ensure real-time customer insight.
  • Critical tech components and requirements. This covers the tool kit to ensure the use case is executed successfully. In this case that means CRM application, social media and online messaging, AI models and so on.
  • Metrics and outcomes. Track the success of the use case with measurable metrics: net promoter scores (NPS), revenue per customer and customer churn rate. This should give you an idea of where the organisation is heading.
  • Second only to metrics and personas is the case study showcasing tech buyers’ success stories on how they implemented the use case, the challenges they faced, best practices and the benefits achieved to benchmark the results. For more information, please see the Kone example in IDC’s The State of Digital Transformation Use Cases for Customer Experience in EMEA: Digital Lane Report Series — 1 of 5.

What Should You Do as a Tech Vendor?

With business leaders increasingly involved in tech matters and projects, technology projects need to focus on shifting from tech talk to business talk as they tend to see the business story behind the technology investments. How can you do that? By:

  • Leveraging IDC’s use case canvas to guide customers along their digital transformation journeys and understanding exactly what your customer is asking you
  • Tying your go-to-market strategy and language to personas and moving outside your IT comfort zone
  • Using the canvas to enable your sales reps to drive conversations around use cases
  • Doubling down on your efforts to bring peers’ case studies and examples to the table — sometimes a face-to-face customer lab is the best way forward

What’s Next?

Please read the document that this blog refers to (Digital Transformation Use Cases in 2022: A “Use-Case Canvas” for the Top 10 EMEA Use Cases) and check our Digital Business Strategies page for new research covering a range of topics such as customer experience, operations and workforce. If you’d like to know more about this report or to discuss anything with us, please contact us, especially if you’re a tech vendor prioritising your digital use case road maps and sales strategy or a tech buyer if you’d like a better understanding of the steps you need to take to implement a solid digital use case strategy.

Erica Spinoni - Senior Research Analyst, European Research - IDC

Analyst Profile
Erica Spinoni is a senior research analyst for the European Research Team. Based in Milan, Spinoni supports IDC’s European Digital Business Strategies and IDC’s European Future of Work practices. In her role she advises ICT players on European digital business and future of work market trends, supporting them in their planning, go-to-market and sales cycles with market research, custom projects, as well as honoraria.

From Digital Sovereignty to Data Spaces

Digital and data have transformed enterprises and changed consumer experiences and society. According to the European Political Strategy Centre, “In the 21st century, those who control digital technologies are increasingly able to influence economic, societal and political outcomes. In this context, the growing ‘geopoliticisation’ of technology implies a paradigm change for the notion of strategic autonomy … the EU’s ability to defend and promote its interests — as well as its credibility as a strong foreign policy actor — is ever more a function of its cyber resilience and technology leadership.”

The European Union has responded to the challenge with the ambitious Digital Decade plan to “pursue a human-centric, sustainable vision for digital society” and increase the EU’s “strategic autonomy in tech and develop new rules and technologies to protect citizens from counterfeit products, cybertheft and disinformation.” One of the eight objectives of the 2030 Policy Programme Path to the Digital Decade is to “ensure digital sovereignty notably by a secure and accessible digital infrastructure capable of processing vast volumes of data that enables other technological developments, supporting the competitiveness of the Union’s industry.”

The programme also proposes to establish multicountry projects to develop “European common data infrastructure and services”. In combination with regulations such as GDPR, the upcoming Digital Operational Resilience Act and Data Act, the Digital Decade programmes and projects aim to put Europe at the forefront of reshaping the global data economy along two closely intertwined axes: digital sovereignty and data spaces.

How Are Digital Sovereignty and Data Spaces Paving the Way for the Data Economy in Europe and Beyond?

IDC defines digital sovereignty as the capacity for self-determination by nations, companies and individuals. Digital sovereignty is more than just data sovereignty or data localisation. It entails cloud platforms, workload software, datacentre assets, communications infrastructure, processes, and operations used to control and manage digital infrastructure, services, and access and identity.

It underpins a digital-first Europe where governments, enterprises and individuals have genuine choice to control their data and digital destinies. But digital sovereignty alone is not enough. It’s a means to achieve outcomes, such as realising the value of data and data spaces through interoperable, innovative, easy to operate and control, secure, energy efficient, regulatory compliant and resilient next-generation infrastructure and platforms.

The European Union’s European Strategy for Data sets a bold vision “to create a single European data space — a genuine single market for data, open to data from across the world — where personal as well as non-personal data, including sensitive business data, is secure and businesses also have easy access to an almost infinite amount of high-quality industrial data, boosting growth and creating value, while minimising the human carbon and environmental footprint.” That bold vision is far from accomplished. IDC’s research shows that a unified data space for Europe, let alone the globe, will not exist in the near future. There are too many digital sovereignty, governance, semantic and technical interoperability challenges to overcome. Nonetheless Europe is setting a direction of travel that other regions and countries are watching.

Private and public sector entities understand that data sharing is a critical success factor to accelerate their success in the data-driven economy. And they understand that to realise the benefits, data sharing needs to happen not only within each organisation, but also with external partners, including beyond one’s industry.

In fact, our research on the future of industry ecosystems found that over 90% of public and private sector organisations globally share data with external partners, although around 60% do it only in a limited fashion or when strictly necessary. Europe’s strategic data spaces vision is the next stage of evolution, where data sharing can happen at a greater scale and beyond industry boundaries, thanks to:

  1. Federated architectures that dynamically match data demand and supply
  2. Governance policies and processes where matching of demand and supply takes place thanks to trusted rules and intermediaries that enable secure, transparent and fair participation of both data users and data providers
  3. The ability to provide and use data to and from the common space, either for non-profit/altruistic purposes or for-profit purposes, or both

What Can European Public Sector Leaders do to Benefit from the Digital Sovereignty-Data Spaces Twin Transition?

As for the rest of the economy, public sector organisations are trying to figure out how to leverage data to improve policymaking, service delivery and operational efficiency. Beyond EU-wide initiatives, public sector leaders across the region have a role to play to:

  • Incentivise the private sector to help achieve both for profit and non-profit outcomes, while protecting personal data, intellectual property and trade secrets
  • Work with the tech industry to promote the use of semantic and technical interoperability standards
  • Collaborate with the tech industry and academia to foster R&D to accelerate adoption of technologies, such as secure hardware architectures, probabilistic computing and homomorphic encryption, which in the future will enable trusted data sharing even on non-trusted systems
  • Invest in digital sovereign infrastructures and services, for the data spaces where digital self-determination can accelerate value realisation
  • Initiate data spaces that have immediate societal benefits, such as digital citizen wallets that ensure citizens have to provide data to public administration once only, and contribute critical data that they own, to data spaces that encompass a public-private ecosystems, such as health, mobility and the built environment

Join IDC experts and public sector leaders from around Europe at the IDC Government Summit to learn more about digital sovereignty and data spaces, and to share your experiences.

Massimiliano Claps - Research Director - IDC

Analyst Profile
Massimiliano (Max) Claps is the research director for the Worldwide National Government Platforms and Technologies research in IDC's Government Insights practice. In this role, Max provides research and advisory services to technology suppliers and national civilian government senior leaders in the US and globally. Specific areas of research include improving government digital experiences, data and data sharing, AI and automation, cloud-enabled system modernization, the future of government work, and data protection and digital sovereignty to drive social, economic, and environmental outcomes for agencies and the public.

How companies are partnering with a service for true end-to-end process support that brings full cloud cost savings

48% of enterprises plan to keep spending steadily on cloud, according to IDC research, making cloud costs a focus for IT leaders. And, the majority of organizations believe they’re overspending on cloud.

Many organizations are aware that they need to improve their cloud spending habits, but the process that it takes to get there often seems exorbitant, causing them to instead disregard the changes needed to turn their cloud spending around. This blog intends to show that the time and resources involved in executing shouldn’t deter companies from making the necessary changes.

From insights to process, these two companies found that hiring a partner to guide them through the work needed to transform their cloud costs, in ways that were custom to their needs, made all the difference in ensuring that they not only followed through on executing a plan of action but giving them a successful outcome.

An international telecommunications company has migrated its entire infrastructure to the public cloud (AWS and Azure) and uses a broker towards AWS and Microsoft, performing contract management and basic security services. For both providers, a System Integrator (SI) has been contracted to provide managed services (IM and TAM) on top of the cloud providers. 

During the migration, cloud costs rose above the available budgets that had been set, based on advice by the SI’s. During migration, the SI’s focused on the project deadlines rather than optimizing and saving on what was already running in the cloud. The telecommunications company turned to IDC Metri for independent advice on cloud cost savings.

IDC Metri has helped to improve tooling, and to define processes and ways of working, for this telecommunications company to analyze and manage cloud costs themselves. IT leaders can learn from their experience that recommendations from tools, including those from cloud providers, aren’t always realistic. They tend to be opportunistic, like suggesting that all instances should be reserved for three years, and that this will save over 50% of costs for those instances. That is the same as expecting your IT landscape to remain the same within that time – this is simply not true.

PostNL has been one of the first listed companies in the Netherlands to go ‘all in’ to the public cloud, starting in 2012. Nowadays, PostNL is in the second stage transforming all of its bespoke applications from IaaS to PaaS solutions, like BI/Analytics platforms, container platforms and serverless computing. When compared to IaaS, price models for PaaS are more usage based than capacity based. Saving costs on usage-based priced services means optimizing the software, rather than the underlying infrastructure.

Unlike the anonymous international telecommunications company in our example, PostNL doesn’t have SI’s in-between them and the cloud providers that offer managed services. The application teams, mainly DevOps based, are managing the cloud infrastructure themselves. Also here, cloud costs had an upward trend, from which PostNL has asked IDC Metri to bend it.

IDC Metri has made recommendations, which were much less supported by tools, since these focus on IaaS, rather than PaaS. With the top 10 teams concerning costs, alignment has been done on savings, which has led to about 8% savings. A must know here is that large scale optimizations, such as applying savings plans, had already been done by PostNL itself. The savings IDC Metri helped to achieve were more on architecture and licenses.

In conclusion, using tools that generate recommendations is only the starting point for achieving savings. First of all, the recommendations need to be taken with a grain of salt since they tend to be rather opportunistic. Furthermore, a list of recommendations is one thing, to actually achieve savings, hereby overcoming indifference or even resistance to save costs, is another thing. IDC Metri does support the full process, from analyzing costs through setting up processes to actually achieving savings.

Can’t wait until the next blog is published to learn more about cutting cloud costs? Contact us to schedule a conversation.

At its core, market intelligence helps organizations understand their customers, competitors, and markets better, and allows them to capitalize on changing conditions. As the interplay between these elements becomes more complex, organizations are investing more in aligning the innovation process with market demands. Leveraging market intelligence data, companies can better understand market size and growth opportunities, accelerate innovation, and identify key adjacencies.

Key assets for best-in-class market intelligence organizations are total addressable market (TAM) forecasts and market share data. These tools provide a clear picture of the current state of the markets a company participates including, who key competitors are and their market shares, the expected growth rates of those markets, as well as key adjacent markets that a company considers complementary, competitive, or otherwise ripe for expansion.  This forecast and share data is typically customized to:

  • Align to the taxonomic lens through which the company chooses to view the market (this may be on a number of axes from technology to geography to vertical and business size segments to unique sales territories and structures)
  • Provide the necessary resolution of data (e.g. at the geographic groupings that the company manages to or at the technology market detail that effectively informs product teams and individual product analysis)
  • Be delivered with the latest insight at the right time, so it can be fed into yearly or regular strategic planning cycles, sales operations decisions, capital allocation analysis, product management decisions, and other critical data-driven decision processes

Related Resource: IDC’s Custom Data & Research Capabilities

The goal of all of this is to create a single version of market truth that all internal parties including marketing, sales operations, finance, strategy, and senior management can use to inform critical business decisions about investment, product development, sales team focus and allocation, partnering, M&A, and more.

Building, regularly delivering, and continually evolving such a data set is challenging work. However, the payoff is significant:

Market intelligence tools allow you to:

  1. Focus on a single, credible data set  so you can reduce or eliminate internal debate over things like opportunity sizes and expected growth rates
  2. Build internal consensus and agreement on highest priority target markets for core business and growth opportunities
  3. Eliminate duplicate work that may be going on in regions/countries or teams evaluating similar opportunities
  4. Free internal resources to focus on making strategic decisions with the data not assembling it

Without regularly developed, consistent market data, mapped to your business, planning decisions can take longer or be based on ad hoc data or opinion. Market intelligence data provides quantitative analytic support to aid in business and investment management, product and market feasibility and competitive strategy.

Free Download: IDC’s Guide to Market Sizing

IDC has found the best organizations build this single version of market truth, build consensus that it should be used by all relevant teams, distribute it widely so it is well utilized, and rigorously and regularly revise and update its taxonomies, definitions, and data so it evolves with the company. If this is done, it enables C-Suite executives to identify markets where they can obtain and retain a competitive advantage. (i.e., how to do better in markets they’re currently in and how to identify new market adjacencies they should move into). Sales Operations can use market intelligence tools to incentivize their sales team and resolve conflicting views between, typically, anecdotal sales feedback and central estimates. Marketers benefit from identifying trends early, validating the market for their products and services and crafting messages that are fresh and relevant.

What Goals Can Market Intelligence Achieve?

  • Identify business growth opportunities
  • Provide quantitative analytic support to aid in business and investment management, product and market feasibility
  • Identify performance in existing markets
  • Identify compelling market adjacencies that can be entered via organic, acquisitive, or partnering actions
  • Confirm market for existing product, how to expand addressable market for current offers, and how to develop new products for existing and new markets
  • Target key geographies, verticals, and other segments
  • Identify key competitors in existing and planned market, their offers, market share, recent performance

Selecting the Right Market Intelligence Tool

You need to be sure that the tool you use maps the technology world, and creates extensive, insightful data, customizing it to support your critical decision making. To do that, you will want to understand the approach used to develop these custom data sets. What are the sources of data? How is the data validated and rationalized?

IDC maps the world of technology through extensive, well documented taxonomies in technology domains (hardware, software, services) as well as vertical, business size, and use cases. Through this rich set of regularly updated data and taxonomies, methodologies, and tools, as well as a worldwide network of analysts, we deliver these customized market views to the largest, most advanced, and innovative technology driven companies in the world helping them   better manage their business.

The right market intelligence data can help you overcome product and market complexities, more accurately forecast revenues and outpace competitive forces by providing current insights that feeds into your strategic planning as well as day-to-day operation of your organization.

IDC’s Custom Analytics practice and how it can help you with reliable market intelligence data.

DOWNLOAD NOW:

IDC’s Custom Research & Data Capabilities

One of the key measures I like to use when talking to the C-Suite about their digital transformation initiatives is to ask how much revenue do digital products, services and experiences bring to the business, as well as how much is expected. This simple, but telling, question lets me know how mature they are, and if they are well on their way to employing a digital-first strategy. 

Back in 2019, the percentage of revenue attributed to digitally enhanced products, services and experiences was less than 5% of total revenue. Today, our recent IDC CEO Sentiment Survey shows that it’s over 20%, and by 2027 it’s expected to be more than 40% of total company revenue.

How a business operates during its experimentation stages of digital transformation is vastly different from more mature digital businesses. As enterprises scale their innovation and transformation capabilities, a trigger point is reached that causes it to start to think about a digital-first strategy. We’ve seen this accelerate because of the pandemic, with examples from the health sector, port authorities, retail, financial institutions, as well as government services. Today, 90% of Asia/Pacific organizations are in various stages of executing their digital-first strategies.

At the same time, IDC’s Future Enterprise Wave 7 Survey (Aug 2022) show that CEOs who champion digital-first strategies are more concerned about reaching ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) goals and creating an innovation culture, and use these as critical levers in running a digital business compared to their peers.  Project failure rates also drop by as much as 13 percentage points as a result of a CEO champion.

While there are many benefits, one of the biggest challenges mentioned when running a digital business is transitioning to new metrics on how business value is measured. Even mature digital businesses say that business value realization can be difficult to achieve partly because of how legacy metrics and measures are used during this critical time of transition. 

A more holistic approach is to use a mix of internal and external oriented metrics to align financial performance in the short term, and ecosystem and sustainability impacts over the longer time horizon. The same Future Enterprise Survey shows that close to half of organizations who consider themselves a digital business agree that ESG impacts, and ecosystem contributions constitute part of the enterprise business value. Yet, in practice, only 28% of the same organizations are using sustainability metrics and 26% are using ecosystem metrics as success measures.

Over the last 12 months we have seen measuring ESG impact and value generated from digital ecosystems rise above more traditional and lagging financial metrics. I think these measures will only rise in importance, as purpose-driven culture and shared values across the digital ecosystem creates new businesses that have social, economic and sustainable outcomes.

One such example is Tsingtao Brewery in Qingdao, China, which has not only successfully deployed digital solutions to reduce lead time to address consumer demands for customized orders but is also looking at using technology to achieve sustainable business growth.

Kexing Huang, Chairman and CEO of Tsingtao Brewery, said “Consumers expect a good product, but also a company that has values and produces in a green and simple manner. By using new technology, we can improve our efficiency and reduce energy consumption and incorporate green and sustainable development to the whole value chain.”[1]

In transforming into digital business that can align both short- and long-term goals, it’s not only business models that are undergoing complex changes, but as a result, organizational and operating model changes are occurring to support a more agile, data-driven and collaborative culture.

The same Future Enterprise Wave 7 Survey mentioned earlier shows that Asia/Pacific organizations’ top challenges in running a digital business are (1) building a data-driven business and culture, (2) engaging with new digital ecosystems, and (3) modernizing their operating models. Digital ecosystems are integral to digital business models where value creation activities are orchestrated across the value chain using technology, connectivity, and shared data. This brings in cascading ramifications to the enterprise’s operating and organizational models which needs to change in a lockstep fashion to be executed successfully.

It is in my belief that building up next generation digital business platforms forms the core part of the solution in addressing these complex and interconnected challenges.

To become a digital business, organizations must orchestrate change – rebuild one’s digital foundation, while competing and innovating in the digital marketplace. I akin this to an orchestra where each part of the symphony plays an equally undismissible role. The foundational bass, the harmonic brass, and the melodic strings each represents the sturdy digital foundation, compelling digital offerings, and delightful innovations required to bring a masterpiece composition to life. With its data fabric, the platform represents an orchestration point in harmonizing change so as to manifest the melody of a purposeful business.

I hope to showcase to you leading organizations in the Asia/Pacific region at IDC’s Future Enterprise Awards 2022, where we have seen how these changes resulted in new direct-to-consumer experiences, radically overhauled HR practices, recalibrated finance systems and data-driven supply chain visibility.  I hope to see you all in Singapore as we unpack the Digital Business Era and announce this year’s Future Enterprise Award winners for the Asia/Pacific region.

Learn More About Awards

[1] Lighthouses Live: Reimagining Operations for Growth (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/lighthouses-live-reimagining-operations-for-growth/)

Linus Lai - Group Vice President, Research - IDC

Analyst Profile
Linus Lai is a distinguished member at IDC Asia/Pacific, in which he spearheads research in digital business, trust, infrastructure, and services. With over 25 years of industry experience, Linus is based in Sydney and serves as the chief analyst for Australia and New Zealand (ANZ). He is a founding member of IDC's Emerging Technology Advisory Council and a respected senior member of the region's CIO100, CSO, and Future Enterprise awards. In his role, Linus provides strategic insights for digital leaders and the technology sector, focusing on sourcing strategies and emerging technology across Asia/Pacific. His expertise has earned him numerous accolades for his contributions to country, regional, and quality research. Previously, as the head of research in Southeast Asia, Linus was instrumental in expanding IDC's presence and influence in the region. His thought leadership is frequently sought after through regular features in various publications and media outlets. He is also a prominent speaker at industry forums, keynote events, and strategy workshops. Before joining IDC, Linus worked with a leading outsourcing service provider with a digital banking focus. He holds a Master of Science degree from the University of Lincoln, United Kingdom.

There is no doubt that we live in the age of video. IDC research shows a 32% increase in video usage since the start of the pandemic. Whether it’s watching YouTube clips to research a product or service, attending B2B meetings and events live online, or watching news reels on Instagram, the use of this medium has grown in all areas of communication. Other than a live personal interaction, nothing tells a story, communicates, informs, or entertains better than video.  

“Every industry has the opportunity to use video to educate, persuade, and communicate with its customers. Defining and implementing a cohesive content strategy can be a game changer in how an organization connects with its employees and customers in a more engaging and immersive manner.” (Marci Maddox, research vice president, IDC Digital Experience Strategies) 

All generations and demographics prefer to interact with video and other rich media over any other content.  While in the past consumers would look at online reviews, read blog posts, or watch commercials, now they are relying more heavily on this type of content in their research phase.  

B2B customers use video for many professional reasons. 

Which of the following types of technology-related video content are you likely to watch for business purposes? 

Source: Foundry Role & Influencer of the Technology Decision-Maker Survey, 2022 

Lights! Camera! Leads? 

A recent study from Wyzowl found that 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. But does this mean that they all make a significant impact? Can you even remember the last marketing video that really impressed you and made you act?  

Most marketing videos are light on information and heavy on repetition. You can and should do better, as a well-planned video can create a powerful, lasting impact, create brand awareness, and ultimately leads.  

You are ready to invest in video. Read on to learn how to create a video that really delivers results.

The Makings of a Great Video 

You might want to delve straight into pre-production, but have you thought about the reason you want to use video and who it will address? What’s the story you are telling, how do you want to tell it, and who do you tell it to? And, most importantly, will it satisfy your audience’s needs and pain points? Only then you can decide on what video format, if any, you want to use.  

Also, remember to make the video timely as well as respectful of other people’s time. Don’t waste your time with lengthy introductions. Instead, get straight to the point.  

Finally, what’s the rationale behind the video? How does it fit into your overall content strategy? What’s the messaging? Where will you promote it? Is it part of a series? 

To sum it up: Remember the three Rs – reason, respect, and rationale – before you even start pre-production. This will save you time as well as money in the longer run. 

5 Steps to Successful Video Marketing 

Define the audience 

Knowing who you market to is the key to a successful campaign. Use reliable data to identify your target audience and create personas to express clearly who you have in mind when creating your content. 

Set a timeline and budget 

Even though we are not about talking Hollywood-like productions, the creation of video content can be time-consuming and expensive. That’s why it’s important to create a clear timeline for every step of the process and plan for occasional delays. Even a small production relies on the skills of many different people, so using basic project management tools will save you time and money. 

Choose the best hosting platform  

Before creating your video, think about where you will be hosting it and research platform-specific requirements. You will want to consider what people on each platform are looking for. Also, take into consideration that a video doesn’t promote itself. You will have to put in some time and effort to make sure your video gets seen by the right people.  

Develop messaging and choose the right type of video 

Your message should always be tailored to both personas and the platform. For example, longer formats work well on YouTube, while other social media channels like Instagram prefer short-form content. 

Decide which metrics you will track and what success looks like 

Before you start production, you must be clear about what success will look like. The best place to find out which metrics to use is to define the video’s place in the marketing funnel.  

For example, if you address the top of the funnel, and your aim is to introduce your brand to potential customers, your KPIs will be related to the discovery of the brand, not sales. Examples of this are total views, view duration, or 3-second views.  

If you are looking to deepen the relationship with potential customers mid-funnel and create consideration content, you will be looking at metrics like click-through rates or view length.  

Only at the conversion stage at the bottom of the funnel, your KPIs should be related to sales outcomes.  

Interested in learning more? Download IDC’s Tech Marketer’s Guide to Video Marketing today. 

Download Now

Beyond high availability and disaster recovery, cloud infrastructure provides the capital markets with scalability and versatility that standalone organizations would typically struggle to replicate with traditional computing, networking, and storage solutions. These attributes of scalability and versatility are foundational to sustained real-time connectivity and interoperability needed for open and resilient capital markets. The resiliency of the capital markets rests on their capacity to sustain internal and external stressors while meaningfully adapting to new operating parameters, from the economic to the regulatory and everything in between. Cloud infrastructure is an excellent means of strengthening the capital markets’ adaptive capacity.

What’s next for the capital markets and cloud services?

Industry ecosystem collaboration around shared cloud native utilities is an essential next step toward maximizing the benefits of cloud within the capital markets at scale. Narrow, use case-specific cloud initiatives have demonstrated, replicable outcomes for institution-specific processes. Growing product and service commodification within the markets is making the broad adoption of shared utilities and business-process-as-a-service (BPaaS) offerings an apparent inevitability. This trend towards shared utility platforms is anticipated to be self-reinforcing and perpetuate ongoing industry consolidation.

As firms adopt cloud infrastructure en masse and the capital markets ecosystem embraces public and private shared utility platforms, competition is expected to solidify with a few large firms competing on volume and a raft of smaller firms providing specialized services, or competing in narrow market segments. So, while cloud infrastructure will help cultivate openness and resiliency in the markets that global industries rely on, it will also diminish traditional competitive attributes. Investment in non-differentiated business processes, including those executed on the cloud, will increasingly fail to provide a defensible competitive positioning.

How can capital markets firms differentiate themselves considering these potential outcomes?

A great first step is to identify and eliminate technical debt in the process of comprehensively leveraging cloud infrastructure elements towards a digital-first business model. Next, firms might consider how mutualized industry infrastructure is going to change the value of their competitive differentiators. Are the profits stemming from superior speed to market sustainable or will technology have eliminated informational asymmetries and associated profits? Are the industry channel partners going to be around in five years to provide deal flow or will access have been democratized by a variety of agile new market entrants? For those firms unable to consolidate deal or order flow and operate profitability across commoditized product and service classes, the answer may lie in how they can generate and monetize data. Presumably, there will always be a marginal competitive benefit in customizing technologies like cloud services faster or better than the competition, but ultimate differentiation will likely originate from firms’ capacity to generate or acquire and then either sell or act upon quality data.

As discussed, cloud architecture lends well to shared industry utilities and is generative to openness and resiliency which the public and therefore (hopefully!) regulators demand. A natural evolution of this impending market development is the adoption of distributed ledger technologies (DLT). DLT further enhances the openness and resiliency cloud architecture provides by introducing an immutable quality of transparency. The trusted capital markets ecosystem model of tomorrow rests on the successful co-adoption of these technologies. Firms and technology vendors in the space are encouraged to think critically about their current business models as tomorrow’s market structure is expected to exhibit markedly different competitive dynamics.

To learn more about the ways in which technologies like cloud are expected to affect the capital markets, click the button below to access IDC’s new eBook, Planned Adoption of Private Cloud within the Capital Markets.

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Thomas Shuster - Research Director - IDC

Analyst Profile
Thomas Shuster is Research Director for IDC Financial Insights responsible for the Worldwide Capital Markets, Wealth, and Digital Asset Strategies program. Mr. Shuster's core research coverage includes the transformation of the capital markets industry, particularly sell-side investment banking, and the use of technologies to modernize and leverage opportunities in the market. Previously, Mr. Shuster was Vice President of Sales with Alpha Ledger Technologies, a digital asset origination platform startup, where he advised the founding team on capital markets processes, financial technology product development, and go-to-market strategy. Prior to Alpha Ledger, Mr. Shuster led new deal origination as Director of Business Development at Charter Asset Management. Earlier, Mr. Shuster was a Director, Investment Banking with UBS Financial Services where he originated underwriting business, a Vice President with Blue Rose Capital Advisors where he advised clients on capital markets access, and a Financial Research Analyst with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) where he structured sovereign debt arrangements during the 2007-2009 Great Recession. - B.S. in International Business from Northeastern University

5G, IoT and Edge Driving Telcos to Embrace Platform Architectures

The overarching theme in the telecoms marketplace is that the rise of 5G, IoT and edge is driving telcos to consider new platform architectures and ecosystems to deliver the right solutions for their customers. Telcos are searching for more intelligent ways to monetise their network data and to create value beyond connectivity as we surge towards an increasingly connected world.

Increasing connectedness also increases the amount of data that telcos must support. IDC’s Global DataSphere Forecast projects that data created and consumed will grow at a rate of 26% through 2024, topping 142EB.

To support the vast increase in data, and to successfully monetise adjacent services, telcos must embrace intelligent automation, containerised architectures and cloud-native principles to modernise and simplify operations for business agility and faster time to market. This will be facilitated through cloud platform solutions that can scale in line with continuously changing market demands and requirements, and which necessitate a new class of digital ecosystem partnerships.

Driving Revenue Growth Through Programmable Networks

Telcos globally are at different stages on their journeys to becoming cloud native. Some are aggressively pursuing a public-cloud-first strategy while others are taking cautious steps away from on-premises by having a hybrid cloud focus.

Most telcos are taking a pragmatic approach and have begun their migration from legacy and network functions virtualisation (NFV) platforms to container-based, cloud-native platforms. These shifts are driven by the lower cost of ownership and elastic scaling of the network.

Cloud-native network functions (CNFs) are being progressively deployed alongside virtual network functions (VNFs) so that customer-centric services can be scaled, updated and orchestrated more easily. However, the vast majority of telco cloud workloads still leverage VNFs and we expect the overall spending on telco cloud software to grow from $7.5 billion in 2020 to $29.0 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 30.9%.

Cloud and the convergence of compute, storage, networking and edge will enable CSPs and enterprises to offer their customers completely reimagined user experiences. The openness and programmability of telco cloud will also give rise to further industry collaboration — Vodafone teamed up with AWS in 2021 to launch Europe’s first public multi-access edge computing (MEC) deployment providing a platform for applications developers to deliver low-latency use cases leveraging the full breadth of AWS cloud services, right at the edge of 5G networks.

This enabled AWS Wavelength customers to explore new business opportunities, build applications and services that were not possible before, and transform user experiences. Unlocking 5G revenues will also depend on a major shift towards adaptable operations and monetisation systems.

Across EMEA, particularly in Europe, partnerships between telcos and public cloud providers to support OSS/BSS deployments continue to strengthen as operators seek to implement deep digital transformations to drive revenue growth. Examples in the first half of 2022 include Vodafone’s deal with Oracle in June 2022 to migrate many of its IT systems to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and BT’s five-year deal with AWS announced in May 2022 as the telco seeks to modernise its IT infrastructure.

Three Emerging Business Models for Telco Cloud

The relationships between telcos and their cloud/technology partners are complicated and still evolving. CSPs are still refining their own network transformation and road maps, while having to decide between using their own private network cloud solutions versus working with public cloud providers.

We have seen the formation of three business models between the CSPs and cloud providers:

  • Outsourcing back-office and IT functions: CSPs runs back-office operations like billing, service management and customer relationship management in a public cloud environment.
  • Enabling service channels, partnerships and application creation: The telco and cloud providers work together to deliver end-user services (sell-with model), mainly to enterprise customers.
  • Migrating network workloads: This involves shifting the core, RAN and other essential networking components of the telco to the cloud.

Of the three business models, telcos using cloud to host network workloads is the newest and the riskiest. This model received mainstream attention when AT&T announced it would use Microsoft Azure to host its mobile core network.

The purpose of this action is to enable the migration of AT&T’s 5G core workloads to Azure as AT&T continues its transformation into a cloud-native 5G mobile operator. AT&T is not the first mobile operator to do this — DISH had already announced plans to work with AWS to host its network functions.

The difference here is that AT&T has an established network with traffic and DISH is a greenfield network operator. Outsourcing a core network competency requires significant trust and confidence between the telco and cloud provider as any notable disruption or interference could negatively impact operations and cause outages, seriously harming the business reputation of the telco.

To provide relevant 5G solutions to the market and drive revenue growth, telcos must go beyond connectivity and focus on delivering outcomes. The deployment of 5G core will further anchor the importance of having a cloud platform solution in place since the standard defines a service-based architecture (SBA) and implements IT network principles with a cloud-native design approach.

These deployments were ongoing in 2020 and will continue into 2022 and beyond.

What’s Next for European Telcos

Telcos are increasingly embracing disaggregated, cloud-native architectures as part of their next-generation network deployments — mixing bare metal, Kubernetes containers and IaaS solutions.

Our 2022 IDC Telco Transformation Survey listed cloud and cloudification as a top transformation activity to implement for CSPs on their journey to becoming DSPs, and we are witnessing telcos adopting new methodologies, practices and tools to underpin their cloud-orientated digital strategies. These strategies also depend on what they deem as best in class to meet their expectations.

This will require a complex web of alliances and partners ranging from legacy vendors to hyperscale cloud providers to other software vendors. While there are challenges to overcome, there are many technological, commercial and strategic advantages to be gained.

IDC’s Telco Digital Summit, on November 22, will look at these themes in more detail. The summit will feature Europe’s leading telco analysts and senior telco executives and will include keynotes from industry leaders to help attendees chart a path through the storms in the European telco market.

This is the second blog in IDC’s Telco Digital Summit Series. The first blog — How Telcos Are Transforming in Europe: Technology, Services and Customers — is available here.

Have you noticed how often we reference maps, floor plans or other location and geospatial tools in our everyday lives? Did you monitor the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 map early in the pandemic? Look at photos of the Ever Given ship trapped in the Suez Canal and try to figure out if that was going to impact your supply chain? Start anticipating your delivery when Door Dash showed you your driver’s progress?

No matter what industry you are in, it is time to make location and geospatial intelligence a part of your enterprise strategy so that you can realize the benefits there too. IDC has a growing body of research to show how this capability adds value to software and to the enterprise overall.

Are you capturing ‘place’ with any of your current enterprise sensors and software?

Everything that happens in your enterprise happens somewhere. Whether it is a worker at a certain spot in a manufacturing facility or a data center where you are storing data or an address where a customer’s order is supposed to arrive, that physical context of where the action takes place impacts the action. Any type of IoT sensor is ripe to be analyzed by its placement, and could be analyzed against other factors of that immediate environment such as weather, air quality, or the number of other devices nearby. Maybe you just want to check that physical assets are where they are supposed to be. Your asset inventory probably specifies where each item is, but there’s a lot you can do beyond just basic tracking of whether an asset is in its correct position.

Recent IDC research on data buyers showed that 74% are using location data today, whether they source it internally or externally. Across every industry we studied, at least 25% of enterprises are using more location data than they did just 1-3 years ago. The usage by those in transportation and logistics has soared by nearly 60%; while finance and retail/wholesale upped their already-leading usage of this data type by nearly 50%.

Not every analytical package, developer tool or even database can handle the varied types of location and geospatial data that exist. In order to turn this data into insight, you need fit for purpose tools that can assist with data preparation functions such as geocoding, normalizing and cleansing what can be massive datasets. More and more database vendors are including geospatially compatible structures at no additional cost, even if many of their users are not taking advantage of those features.

Are you using enterprise SaaS that has location and/or geospatial capability?

Business process enterprise SaaS has not incorporated location and/or geospatial capabilities to the extent that some database tools have to date. This is likely to be on the horizon though because recent IDC research shows that 76% of SaaS buyers would be willing to pay more for applications that include location and/or geospatial capability. That is huge – and a greater percentage than would be willing to pay extra for almost any possible add-on capability.

There wasn’t huge variance across enterprise applications either. While subscription management was the highest at 86%, the least appealing offer would be with Talent Management, and 73% of SaaS users were willing to pay more for additional location capabilities in that application.

In another study, 40% of external data buyers said that they were sourcing location data from within their enterprise applications. Clearly, there is a lot of draw for enterprise applications that are making use of location and geospatial points to enhance the value to their users.

This doesn’t even touch upon the use of a variety of spatial analytic and data science applications that you may be able to deploy. From traditional GIS (that is moving to the cloud) to open source tools to no-code and low-code platforms, the market has been exploding with new offerings and extended capabilities from more mature vendors. However, the efforts to equip more data scientists and data analysts with spatial skills (and have historical GIS departments partner with a broader range of business functions) have been slow to gain traction.

Are you missing out on opportunities to glean better insight into your processes and assets?

This is a bit of a rhetorical question, since I firmly believe that the context of where something is happening (or should happen, or might happen) unlocks greater value by unlocking meaning that hadn’t been taken into consideration previously. We are finding that enterprises with even a low level of geospatial capability improve their performance across a wide spectrum of metrics – and those at the top of the geospatial maturity scale have a 50% greater benefit. The areas these enterprises can improve are quite diverse, from things that are fairly obvious like managing facilities and routing deliveries, to less expected areas such as developing business plans and pursuing new markets. As just one example, indoor space planning has become much more sophisticated with BIM integration, indoor wayfinding, and applications that helped to register and monitor how space was being used under pandemic restrictions and for ongoing benefits.

Can you really make the best possible decisions and have keen insight to your processes and assets without considering WHERE they are?

As I’ve written elsewhere, I believe that using ‘place’ as a context in business processes and analytics is going to become as commonplace as using ‘time.’ While it is true that your use cases might drive you to new technologies, analytical tools and new people and skills for your organization, adding (or fortifying) location and geospatial as part of your data strategy is an investment that will not take long to pay off.

Want to chat about how you have been using – or getting ready to use – location and geospatial dimensions in your data and applications?

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Lynne Schneider - Research Director - IDC

Analyst Profile
Lynne Schneider is Research Director leading IDC's Data Collaboration & Monetization, and Location & Geospatial Intelligence market research and advisory practices. Ms. Schneider's core research coverage in DaaS includes data sourcing and delivery services from traditional and emerging data providers along with evolving data aggregation and dissemination platforms. The breadth of coverage includes services that enable an organization to externally monetize data generated as part of the organization's ongoing operations, value-added information derived from this data, and the marketplace for combining data with other solutions. This research analyzes the supply and demand side business and technology trends of this emerging category.