Logo
Become a Client

Category: Uncategorized

As business across many industries struggle with supply chain disruptions, rising energy costs, talent constraints, and pressure to improve sustainability metrics, achieving operational excellence and resilience continues to be challenging. According to results in IDC’s recent Worldwide Future of Operations Survey, only about half of survey respondents saw improvement in operations over the past two years. In last year’s survey, 70% of respondents reported improvement.

Recognizing the need for new approaches and new technologies, IDC has developed the Data-Driven Operations (DDO) framework and maturity model. It helps organizations benchmark themselves and develop plans to improve operational performance across multiple dimensions – efficiency, productivity, quality, safety, reliability, and sustainability.

Becoming a data-driven organization is a journey that requires an honest assessment of current state and a willingness to embrace the changes necessary to improve operational performance.

The next five years will be transformational for operations as organizations find new and more effective ways to manage, analyze, and collaborate around their operational data. The impacts will extend beyond the data, impacting how decisions are made and who makes them. It will also impact which roles are needed, who fills those roles, and how organizations manage their operations.

The following 10 predictions delve in into some of the coming changes. From resources and talent to emerging technologies to the increased emphasis on sustainability, IDC predictions explores the implications and the timeline of major aspects of DDO.

Top 10 Predictions: Future of Operations

  • Prediction 1: By 2025, 50% of G2000 industrial organizations will make real-time decisions balancing economic and sustainability metrics, simultaneously improving both sets of metrics by 5% across the enterprise.
  • Prediction 2: By 2026, 40% of product-centric organizations will use digital tools to measure life-cycle carbon footprint, creating demand for better integration between PLM and operational data.
  • Prediction 3: By 2023, talent shortages and pressure to improve operational performance will force organizations to reevaluate their approach to digital transformation, resulting in greater use of outside services.
  • Prediction 4: By 2027, the use of extended reality technology, including AR/VR/MR tools, will increase by 40%, creating a new breed of digital worker and reducing operator/field worker errors by 30%.
  • Prediction 5: By 2026, the use of robots in nontraditional sectors, most notably remote inspection and maintenance, will increase by 35%, resulting in a 50% drop in inspection errors.
  • Prediction 6: By 2023, digital-first operations enabled by 5G connectivity will improve worker safety, resulting in a 20% reduction in lost time accidents.
  • Prediction 7: By 2027, 50% of remote operations will use satellite-enabled AI/ML technology to collect and analyze data at the edge, reducing costs and improving yields and energy usage in the natural resource sectors.
  • Prediction 8: By 2024, the cloud will surpass on-premises infrastructure as the primary location where operational data is stored, managed, and analyzed for 50% of G2000 organizations.
  • Prediction 9: By 2024, 30% of industrial organizations will have become leaner and more agile than their competitors as a result of making real-time operational insights available anytime, anywhere, to anyone.
  • Prediction 10: By 2025, 50% of organizations will increase the use of IoT and OT cybersecurity solutions at the edge, cutting OT cybersecurity breaches in half.

Interested in learning more? Watch our on-demand webinar, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Operations 2023 Predictions.

Watch Webinar

Extending and opening innovation, collaboration, and operation with partners across an ecosystem inside and outside any given industry has become a critical strategy for executives and their organizations.

CEOs and executive leadership recognize the critical supporting role that industry ecosystem partners play in ensuring the growth and stability of their businesses. Opportunities, disruptions, and delivering upon customer needs quickly with a high level of quality are complex pursuits and having a flexible industry ecosystem of partners — an on-demand set of talent, resources, and capabilities — is an important element of the digital-first organization.

According to IDC’s 2022 Future of Industry Ecosystems Global Survey, the next step in the industry ecosystem journey is to incorporate partners from outside the core industry, learn best practices, and add assets, resources, and knowledge that may not be present within a business’ own core industry.

The world and each industry landscape are too complex, dynamic, and disruptive for any one organization to address on its own. The pace of innovation makes it difficult for organizations to keep up. As such, every organization needs an external source of data, insights, applications, operations, and expertise to complement and grow their business. Expansion, collaboration, and innovation with industry ecosystems has become the next phase of digital transformation for every organization.

IDC’s top 10 predictions for the Future of Industry Ecosystem in 2023 are:

  • Prediction 1: By the end of 2023, organizations that share data, applications, or operations with their ecosystem partners through joint ventures will increase profitability by 5 percentage points.
  • Prediction 2: By 2028, consortium-based DAOs will be the de facto standard for complex industry ecosystem ventures that involve a combination of process, application, and data sharing for new revenue growth.
  • Prediction 3: By 2025, 60% of intercompany shared applications available on industry clouds will be built on blockchain technology, enabling a robust Web3 foundation for industry ecosystem activities.
  • Prediction 4: By 2024, although 80% of global organizations will leverage on-demand resources in industry ecosystems to improve supply chain logistics, only 40% will improve profitability.
  • Prediction 5: By the end of 2026, 40% of G20 governments will promote the global data economy through funding of technology infrastructure, enablement of legal provision, and active participation in data spaces.
  • Prediction 6: By 2025, 60% of G2000 organizations will form cross-ecosystem ESG teams that are accountable for sharing of data, applications, operations, and expertise that facilitates sustainable ecosystem practices.
  • Prediction 7: By 2023, only 20% of metaverse experiments for industry ecosystems will succeed, as organizations continue to evolve their ability to deliver products and services in a blended physical and digital way.
  • Prediction 8: By 2025, 25% of organizations that do not share operations and expertise across their industry ecosystems to address talent shortages will struggle to remain viable or be acquired.
  • Prediction 9: By 2027, 60% of industry ecosystems will be driven by regulations for data, IP, and cloud that require standards to be collectively adopted to ensure digital sovereignty and reduce cross-border risk.
  • Prediction 10: By 2024, organizations that automate IT processes for data model and application development as well as sharing across their industry ecosystems will deliver products and services 30% faster.

Interested in learning more? Watch our on-demand webinar, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Industry Ecosystems 2023 Predictions.

Learn More

Jeffrey Hojlo - Research Vice President - IDC

Analyst Profile
As Research Vice President, Future of Industry Ecosystems, Innovation Strategies, & Energy Insights at IDC, Jeff Hojlo leads one of IDC's Future Enterprise practices at IDC - the Future of Industry Ecosystems. This practice focuses on three areas that help create and optimize trusted industry ecosystems and next generation value chains in discrete and process manufacturing, construction, healthcare, retail, and other industries: shared data & insight, shared applications, and shared operations & expertise. Mr. Hojlo manages a group focused on the research and analysis of the design, simulation, innovation, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) market, including emerging strategies across discrete and process manufacturing industry such as product innovation platforms and the closed loop digital thread of product design, development, digital manufacturing, supply chain, and SLM. He also manages IDC's North American Energy Insights group, with a focus on key topics such as energy transition & sustainability, distributed energy resource management, and digital transformation in the Oil & Gas and Utilities industries.

This year’s Enlit Europe, which took place between November 29 and December 1 in Frankfurt, attracted almost 18,000 visitors and 1,000 exhibitors from 100 countries — proving once again to be a reference point for the European (if not worldwide) utility sector.

Sessions on flexibility, energy transition, and digitalization, as well as numerous hub sessions, provided a great opportunity for knowledge sharing during the three-day event. Here are our key takeaways from discussions and debates with technology providers and utilities.

  • European power DSOs are feeling the pinch due to accelerating demand for electrification and distributed generation. One DSO from the DACH region we talked to said it expects requests for PV connections to increase fourfold this year over 2021 in power terms. A Scandinavian operator said it needed to deploy as much capacity by the end of the decade as it had built over the past century. This was expected, of course, as distribution is where most of the energy system transformation is taking place. But things have now spread to a large and diverse cross-section of the power distribution world and DSOs don’t want to become the bottleneck of the energy transition. Distributors urgently need tools to shed light on the LV level of their grid — for planning, operations, and maintenance purposes — and marketplaces to access and procure flexibility in coordination with fellow DSOs and TSOs.
  • Despite the events of the past 10 months, consumers still appear to be an afterthought for most energy suppliers and utilities (and numerous governments) across Europe. With energy and related energy costs top of mind for most customers, it was a great opportunity for companies to create awareness and educate customers on the energy transition, and the critical role they play in making it a reality. But that opportunity has been squandered, with companies failing to deliver on what matters most to customers: high-bill alerts and personalized, meaningful energy efficiency advice. Due to skyrocketing energy prices, energy suppliers are significantly worse off than before in terms of customer satisfaction and net promoter scores. By failing to support customers at a time of need, utilities have failed to change the narrative around them and become trusted energy advisors in the energy transition.
  • As the energy transition accelerates, partnering and co-innovation are becoming critical tools to accelerate the development of solutions designed to respond to this acceleration. These are no longer buzzwords on slideware. Co-innovation between utilities and solution providers is happening on the ground and it is slashing time to market by a factor of three on average. There are hardly any strategic product initiatives by established software providers in this space that are not driven in cooperation with a carefully curated group of end users, leveraging design thinking and agile principles. Partnering between the incumbent enterprise and operational software vendors in the utilities space and their specialty counterparts has also accelerated significantly, offering a new procurement paradigm that combines what we call a platform approach to operations with a new wave of best-of-breed.
  • The industry mantras of electrification, decarbonization, and energy transition continue to be recited despite the impact of the ongoing energy crisis. While the criticality of climate change can’t be neglected, it appears to some extent that the energy crisis has dampened the urgency for some companies and the industry as a whole to invest in making grids reliable for what’s to come. This is a concern, as some areas are already at risk of bottlenecks, as uptake of EVs, heat pumps, etc. increases. There are numerous European initiatives to foster electrification, such as “Fit for 55,” which will end the sale of new CO2-emitting cars in Europe by 2035, and “REPowerEU,” which aims to install 50 million heat pumps by 2030. But this begs the question: Where are we going to get all this power from”

The overall impression is that of an industry chugging along, conscious that it can’t do it alone and increasingly reliant on its partners and innovation with other sectors. We have seen pockets of real disruptive innovation, but for the most part the industry feels a bit weary, and understandably so.

Here’s to brighter times when we meet in Paris at next year’s Enlit Europe.

Developing compelling content, messaging, and campaigns that engage your target audience and move your prospects and customers along the buying cycle is not a simple task. In another IDC blog post, we discuss the challenges of a hyperaware buyer, with a decreased attention span. It’s a time and cost struggle to create the varying content that your buyer is looking for at each stage of their journey.

An effective way of obtaining content for your marketing messaging is by licensing it from a research company. With this method, you obtain digital distribution rights to the research document so you can share it with your target audience in various marketing formats. Licensed content reach can be easily extended if you distribute it across multiple channels, in a variety of media, such as, data graphics, quotes, blogs, animated infographics, short videos and social media posts.

Benefits of Licensed Content

  • Lower cost
  • Short time to market (generally 1-2 days to delivery)
  • Analyst insights

Customized content is a more approachable way to building your content calendar. It involves leveraging expert opinion and adapting research into content that includes customized insight and commentary from an industry analyst that validates your marketing messages. Customized content will often come in the form of a white paper or industry spotlight.

Benefits of Customized Content

  • Developed around your message
  • Created for multiple formats
  • Flexible pricing
  • Leverage the brand equity and trust associated with the research

Marketing programming and operations have undergone a paradigm shift to focus on whole journey marketing, extend into post-sales loyalty, advocacy, and renewal, connect storytelling and content across connected channels, and blend digital into all marketing programming. To serve the digital-first customer, content needs to evolve to meet the needs of a buying cohort and support their full journey, rather than islands of episodic content creation we experience today.

Start with a deep assessment of your end-to-end content marketing practice including evaluating: strategy, talent, organization, governance, business processes, data and enabling technology.  The assessment will inspire a prioritized roadmap to systematically address gaps, challenges and opportunities. Licensed or customized content can fill in the gaps where gaps, such as talent and data, are identified.

To learn more about licensing or customizing IDC’s research content and how to leverage our global analyst insights, contact us today.

Watch our latest webinar where we introduce a new model for marketers and sellers to work within, for lead generation, customer creation, and value management efforts.

Introducing a new lead generation service! To make it easier for marketers to gain the most value of their IDC MarketScape and truly drive qualified leads, we have worked with Foundry to create an enticing lead generation package leveraging their media brands that capture proven customer engagements.

Learn More About IDC’s Lead Generation Package

Digital businesses depend on digital infrastructure – compute and data management horsepower; network connectivity; operational support; and management – to power business applications, analytics, and activities.

What comprises digital infrastructure?

It includes dedicated on-premises datacenters and edge systems, as well as shared public cloud services. It spans compute, storage, network, infrastructure software (including virtualization and containers) and the automation, AI/ML analytics, and security software and cloud services needed to maintain and optimize legacy and modern applications and data. Ecosystem partners, including systems integrators and channel partners, are also important contributors to the future of digital infrastructure.

IDC’s research shows that 80% of decision makers worldwide recognize that digital infrastructure is important or mission critical to enabling the achievement of business goals.

Organizations that can best optimize multicloud and hybrid digital infrastructure environments consistently realize higher levels of operational resiliency, security, revenue growth, and overall productivity at scale. This IDC FutureScape highlights key trends for the future of digital infrastructure that will have the greatest overall impact and presents the top 10 predictions and key drivers for the next five years:

  • Prediction 1: By 2026, 65% of tech buyers will prioritize as-a-service consumption models for infrastructure purchases to help restrain IT spending growth and fill ITOps talent gaps.
  • Prediction 2: By 2026, 65% of IT organizations will only purchase infrastructure solutions that incorporate predictive cyber-resiliency mechanisms proven to reduce post-cyberintrusion recovery efforts.
  • Prediction 3: By 2027, AI-enabled automation will ensure consistent digital infrastructure configuration, performance, cost, and security by reducing the need for human operations intervention by 70% and improving SLOs.
  • Prediction 4: By 2023, amid ongoing IT supply chain disruptions, 80% of G5000 infrastructure customers will adopt proactive multisourcing strategies to protect themselves against future IT supply risks.
  • Prediction 5: By 2024, 40% of digital business apps will depend on contractually guaranteed cross-provider data transfer and operational/financial data sharing agreements between public clouds and on-prem tech partners.
  • Prediction 6: By 2026, 95% of companies will invest in fit-for-purpose, heterogeneous compute technologies that deliver faster insights from complex data sets to drive differentiated business outcomes.
  • Prediction 7: By 2025, 70% of the G2000 will prioritize the trusted infrastructure of sovereign clouds to ensure consistent security and local/regional regulatory compliance for specific sensitive workloads and data.
  • Prediction 8: By 2025, to ensure data and workflow integrations spanning distributed clouds and edge environments, 50% of enterprises will deploy multicloud networking, bringing consistency and simplicity to NetOps.
  • Prediction 9: By 2027, the need for faster, higher-quality data-driven decisions will cause 80% of G2000 CIOs to mandate companywide data logistics strategies for data management, protection, and integration.
  • Prediction 10: By 2024, due to economic pressures, 50% of G2000 will prioritize infrastructure vendor selections based on tech partner ecosystems that offer cost savings provided by preferred pricing and support deals.

Interested in learning more? Watch our on-demand webinar, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Digital Infrastructure 2023 Predictions.

Watch Webinar

Mary Johnston Turner - Research VP - IDC

Analyst Profile
Mary Johnston Turner is Research Vice President within IDC's worldwide infrastructure research organization and global research lead the Digital Infrastructure Strategies practice. Mary's coverage tracks enterprise tech buyer sentiment related to compute, storage, edge, operations and cloud platforms and deployment models. Current research priorities emphasize the impact of rising requirements for data-driven AI-Ready Infrastructure, Fit-for-Purpose Hybrid and Multicloud Architectures, Autonomous Operations, Edge Integration, and collaborative business and IT governance. Her practice emphasizes the voice of the enterprise customer, based on surveys and in-depth analysis of best practices and infrastructure investment priorities. Mary's research emphasizes consideration of topics related to AI-ready infrastructure, tech debt avoidance, data center modernization, mainframe modernization, infrastructure governance, staffing and skills priorities, and infrastructure operating models. Within the infrastructure research organization, Mary collaborates with other practice leads to ensure coherency and alignment of insights and published research.

At IDC’s European Manufacturing Digital Summit 2022, on November 15, 2022, over 79 “live” attendees from across 21 countries discussed the key theme of the event — “Thriving in Manufacturing with PRIME — Purpose, Resilience, Imagination, Mastery and Ecosystems”.

The summit featured an impressive panel of speakers from our partners and the manufacturing CxO community, complemented by insights from the European IDC Manufacturing Insights team.

Based on the presentations and roundtable discussions from 14 sessions, our top 10 manufacturing trends in Europe are as follows:

  1. Manufacturing organisations must leverage IT to achieve quick wins and build long-term capabilities

The current storms of disruption in Europe may not change manufacturing organisations’ approach to everyday work, but they had led to a greater focus on solving immediate challenges while keeping an eye on longer-term strategic investments. Immediate initiatives focus on increasing efficiency (to reduce costs), flexibility and agility (to better master unpredictability). IT can significantly help the business to weather these storms of disruption, be it supply chain challenges, inflationary pressures, cyberattacks, skills gaps or escalating energy prices. But IT must also ensure that long-term business needs can be met — key to making manufacturers more resilient in the long term.

  1. Automating and sharing data in an integrated and trustworthy way is a challenge

Often the technology itself is not the challenge — the challenge is having a robust model and approach that enables different technologies and the data they generate to be integrated in a secure way without creating silos so they can provide value to users inside and outside the company.

  1. A zero-trust approach to cybersecurity

Manufacturing organisations must be consistent in providing access and security in every connected environment: from factory-level IT and OT to plants being globally deployed. When mapping the security architecture, manufacturers need to look at the overall security posture. In OT and IT, they need to be careful about both known and unknown threats. They need to build rules to block known threats and warn of suspicious behaviour. The key is to recognise the nature and impact of potential threats and risks, and articulate their vision in a way that is relevant to C-level business leaders.

  1. Location data for process automation can empower OT and relieve IT

Location-based process automation can make IT’s job easier and empower OT to tackle automation projects themselves. Improving transparency and driving process automation on the shop floor is about bridging vertical IoT system silos, including different location technologies (e.g., GPS, RFID, UWB) and respective middleware.

  1. “Phygital” (IT/operational) convergence to avoid business performance divergence

Operational equipment instrumentation is steadily increasing along with factory connectivity, driving the growth of data in the manufacturing industry. Companies that see data management as an issue to solve, rather than an opportunity to exploit, will have a problem keeping their processes up to speed. IT and OT convergence through integrated governance models is a vital step in this journey.

  1. Industry ecosystems will rely on IT-OT integration

Bridging the gap between IT and OT will be essential in the context of industry ecosystems, which are increasingly generating value. A core pillar for this is operational data exchange, but this requires trust, appropriate platforms, infrastructures and applications that support use cases.

  1. Best-in-class companies use intelligent automation to transform their business holistically

Intelligent automation can provide value in several scenarios, such as rethinking products and services, automating operations, streamlining supply chains, engaging customers, empowering employees and reimagining manufacturing. The ability to apply intelligent automation holistically (end to end) will be a key differentiator and source of competitive advantage for manufacturing companies.

  1. Data can be a foundation for sustainable manufacturing

Data will continue to be a key driver of sustainable manufacturing due to decarbonisation, the battle for talent and the need to increase supply chain resilience and optimise production to maintain competitiveness. It has long been said that “data is the new gold” — when it comes to manufacturing, it’s quite simple.​ On the shop floor, making data visible is the key. According to Peter Drucker, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”​. Manufacturers are therefore turning to digital twins to make their factories more resilient overall. For instance, solutions using existing technologies — such as sensors, PLCs and IIoT devices to detect vibration, temperature, moisture, noise, etc., or machine vision — are all available.

  1. Finding the optimal interaction between humans and machines

It’s important to use technology to raise worker productivity and offset the critical skill shortages on the shop floor. It will be crucial to get the right degree of interaction between humans and automation technologies (such as AI, RPA and AR/VR) to maximise employees’ potential and avoid conflict. Using low-code and self-service platforms also helps to make data streams human-friendly.

  1. Doing more with less

As rising costs, supply chain issues and other challenges continue to mount, manufacturers are applying more intelligent solutions and technology to do more with less. It will be vital for organisations to optimise decision-making processes to enable data-driven decision making by utilising industrial IoT, cloud, AI and mixed reality, and infusing them with more intelligent and collaborative business applications.

 

Getting Ready for the 2023 Manufacturing Summit in Germany… But First, Some Thank Yous

The IDC European Manufacturing Digital Summit 2022 was very well received by our manufacturing CxO community and our partners, as it provided the opportunity to get the latest insights from IDC and its partners, discuss industry challenges, share lessons learned and network with peers.

We’d like to thank all our sponsors — Citrix, Fujitsu Uvance, Elastic, Kinexon, Nozomi Networks, Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Radiflow and UiPath — and our Advisory Board Members for making the summit such a success.

All the recordings of our keynote presentations and panel discussions are now available at our on-demand centre.

We have already started prep work for next year’s event, which will be a physical event scheduled for May 22–23 in Cascais, Portugal. We look forward to continuing the dialogue with our 2023 theme, “The Purpose-Led Manufacturer: Thriving with Impact, Scale and Trust”. Please stay tuned.

If you’re interested in joining our manufacturing CxO community or if you’d like to help us to create and shape the agenda for next year’s event, please reach out to Stefanie Naujoks (snaujoks@idc.com) or to anyone on the IDC Manufacturing Insights EMEA team.

Gunjan Bassi - Research Manager - IDC

Analyst Profile
Gunjan Bassi has more than 14 years' experience working in the logistics and transportation sector. Before joining IDC, she worked with Transport Intelligence (Ti), a transportation and logistics research firm based in Bath, England, where she was responsible for vertical sector research covering qualitative and quantitative reports. She was also actively involved in the development of new research capabilities and product features of Ti's flagship market intelligence portal. Previously, based in India, she was leading the global logistics research team at Evalueserve where she was responsible for running custom research projects commissioned by leading logistics service providers (LSPs) and focussed on strategy/GTM, sales enablement, and market and competitive intelligence. Bassi holds a bachelor's degree from Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC), Delhi University, and post-grad studies in management.

The need for a unified approach to disruption of any kind is key to success in the future of work. With global attention divided between many disruptors, the future of work is fraught with many unknowns, from where and how work will be done to how economic pressures will change job opportunities to how social, skills, and climate concerns will have a broad impact.

The reality of our current global economic, climate, and business challenges requires workers to be a part of dynamic and reconfigurable teams that can quickly adapt to business demands and new market requirements — anytime, anywhere, and from any physical location.

Hybrid work – once thought to be a temporary fix throughout the COVID-19 pandemic – is now a mainstay in the global future of work landscape, despite public focus on return to office initiatives. 

The future of work will be one that is defined by a variety of work approaches capable of supporting the ebb and flow of change as the world learns to navigate new challenges.

The promise of such hybrid work models is clear. Rapid adoption of more automated, cloud-based, and artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled work practices increases work productivity and introduces new, more agile ways of working. Insights from more digital-first ways of working are enabling organizations to be responsive to the needs of customers and employees alike, driving improvements in talent acquisition, employee retention, and customer satisfaction.  They also underscore the need for greater focus on skills development in the flow of work itself at a time when many workers struggle to keep pace with new features, functions and applications designed to make work “easier”.

Organizations sufficiently prepared to find and capitalize on opportunities in spite of current and future disruptions will be the ones that define the next future of work.

IDC’s top 10 predictions for the Future of Work in 2023 are:

  • Prediction 1: To address health, sustainability, travel, and other disruptions, 30% of G2000 organizations will adopt immersive third-party metaverse conferencing tech services to enable client engagement by 2027.
  • Prediction 2: By 2024, the business developer role will be ubiquitous, with 60%+ enterprises training and supporting business users to build their own applications and automated processes using low-code tools.
  • Prediction 3: Driven by skills shortages, CIOs that invest in digital adoption platforms and automated learning technologies will see a 40% increase in productivity by 2025, delivering greater speed to expertise.
  • Prediction 4: By 2024, organizations deploying employee micro-monitoring measures (camera/keystroke) will see a 20% decrease in actual employee productivity.
  • Prediction 5: G2000 companies that deploy reactive and tactical hybrid work models will see a 20% revenue loss in 2024 due to job attrition and underperforming teams.
  • Prediction 6: By 2025, organizations that have created dedicated hybrid security policies and developed a culture of trust will be 3x less likely to suffer a security breach.
  • Prediction 7: By 2024, companies offering frontline workers democratized access to digital collaboration, process automation, and similar tools will see 20% increase in revenue due to improved productivity.
  • Prediction 8: Holistic and integrated analytics within an intelligent digital workspace (IDW) ecosystem will drive a 70% increase in differentiated business outcomes for adopters by 2026.
  • Prediction 9: Effectively blurring space and place, by 2025, 65% of G2000 companies will consider online presence to be at parity to “in real life” across their engaged workforce.
  • Prediction 10: By 2024, 55% of C-suite teams at global enterprises will use intelligent space and capacity planning technology to reinvent office locations for gathering, collaborating, and learning.

Interested in learning more? Watch our on-demand webinar, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Work 2023 Predictions.

Learn More

Amy Loomis, Ph.D. - GVP, Research - IDC

Analyst Profile
Amy Loomis is Group Vice President for IDC's worldwide Workplace Solutions. Amy leads a team of analysts focused on the evolving nature of human resources, skills development, collaboration, and leadership across the employee lifecycle. Her research into the Future of Work explores the influence of hardware and software technologies such as artificial intelligence, data analytics, augmented and virtual reality and automation on the changing the nature of work. Her research also explores how technology and business strategy influence workers' skills and behaviors, organizational culture and how the workplace itself is enabling the future enterprise.

At IDC, we believe that understanding the consumers’ mindset around technology is vitally important to all tech companies, regardless of whether your business is B2C, B2B, or B2B2C. This is because irrespective of what type of technology you deliver—be it hardware, software, or services—what your end users want and need is increasingly dictated by their experiences as human beings, not employees. In a world where consumers’ experience with new technologies drives the trends impacting IT decision makers, we increasingly expect the consumer tail to wag the enterprise dog. Grasping this distinction is essential, as is the fact that we expect significant disruptions in the way consumers engage with and spend on technology in the coming years.

To address these fundamental beliefs, IDC has embarked on a multi-year journey to build out new research to drive a better, more profound understanding of the consumer. At the center of this research is our Future Consumer Framework, which consists of eight primary segments that, when taken together, represent a holistic view of how consumers leverage technology across the many facets of their lives. The eight primary categories of the framework include Entertainment, The Home, Money, Shopping, Personal Mobility, Travel & Dining, Lifelong Learning, and Well-being. For those familiar with IDC’s Future of Enterprise research portfolio, it’s helpful to think of that as the yin to the yang of Future Consumer. See the image below for a view of the Future Consumer Framework.

IDC leverages the framework across three primary research areas: The Consumer Pulse, which surveys consumers in seven countries about their current and near-term attitudes toward the eight segments, with particular attention paid to the concept of brand trust. The Consumer Market Model (CMM) leverages the framework to create five-year forecasts of consumer internet penetration, online activities, eCommerce, and other services spending across 51 countries. Finally, the Future Consumer Agenda seeks to provide a futurist’s view of significant trends and technology shifts across the consumer spectrum.

All three programs leverage data to help guide near- and long-term thinking and endeavor to drive thought leadership across the consumer technology category. They build upon and synthesize data and insights from our existing consumer portfolio of products that include device coverage (PCs, Tablets, Smartphones, Smart Home Devices, AR/VR Headsets, and Wearables) as well as market-specific categories (TV/OTT Video and Gaming and eSports). 

Early Consumer Pulse Insights

IDC officially launched the Future Consumer programs in early 2022, and all three programs already drive significant new perspectives. For example, our initial Consumer Pulse Entertainment survey yielded dozens of important insights about consumers’ use of technology to engage with new and evolving content, create content themselves, and even monetize their work. A few essential insights:

  • Social media sites now constitute the biggest source of video content watched by consumers, even bigger than linear TV or streaming.  
  • Each successive generation spends more time on entertainment than the previous, meaning that Gen Z spends demonstrably more time engaged with entertainment than Boomers or older.
  • Gaming represents a larger percentage of the time spent on entertainment among younger generations, too, but that number is sizeable across all generations.
  • Content creators who say they don’t make money from their work tend to use their smartphones for content creation most of the time. In contrast, those who do earn tend to leverage a wide range of devices more evenly, including smartphones, tablets, PCs, and standalone cameras. 

These data points are just the tip of the Consumer Pulse iceberg. Because we’re leveraging a robust survey methodology across seven countries, we’re able to slice and dice our results to surface particularly useful data points that inform both our near-term and long-term views of a category. And remember, this is just one of the eight category-based surveys.

Assessing TAMs with the CMM

Another major launch this year was our Consumer Market Model. Built upon a decade-old service (formerly called the New Media Market Model), the CMM team leveraged brand new IDC survey data, existing IDC device installed base data, and numerous third-party sources to create a massive new dataset that examines total available markets (TAMs) across a range of categories. The CMM aims to be the one-stop shop for consumer-centric forecasts that you can’t find anywhere else, backed by data and analyst insights.

After a year of new research and a taxonomy overhaul, the new CMM has now launched and is driving key insights. A few from the U.S. include:

  • Despite predictions that online fitness would fall off fast after the pandemic, the CMM projects a 13.3% CAGR in total spending on online fitness services from 2021 to 2026 in the U.S. spending through mobile and non-mobile devices (PCs, set-to-boxes, etc.) is expected to reach $2.2 B in 2026, an 87% increase from 2021 at the height of the pandemic.
  • The CMM now has new line items, such as consumer AR/VR services. The model projects that there will be 8.3 million new AR/VR-related services users in the U.S. by 2026. Spending on mobile and non-mobile devices for those services is expected to hit $1 billion between 2024 and 2025 and will carry a robust CAGR of 16.6% through 2026. 
  • The CMM projects that sleep-monitoring/tech services total spending in the U.S. will grow by almost $2 billion between now and 2026. This new line item is increasing at a 12.6% CAGR, with the CMM projecting that 22.5 million new users have been added since 2019.

This is just a taste of what the CMM can provide, and the above numbers are all U.S. only. Remember, we have this data across 51 countries and seven regions and can deliver worldwide rollup.

Predicting the Future

Both the Consumer Pulse and the CMM are data-driven products enhanced by our great team of analysts’ insights. The Future Consumer Agenda program looks to leverage these great insights and follows the resulting near-term trends and hypotheses out even further. The goal is to equip tech companies, governments, non-government agencies (NGOs), and others with insights that drive their long-term strategies. A few predictions from our recent Future Consumer FutureScape illustrate the point:

  • By the end of 2025, more than 20% of consumers worldwide will have begun using device-as-a-service subscriptions for their personal electronics and smart home needs instead of buying devices outright.
  • By 2025, younger diners will help drive 65% of restaurant orders to be for takeout (delivery, pickup, or drive-thru), accelerating the growth of kitchen-only locations and third-party food ordering apps.
  • By 2027, 35% of consumer flagship phone buyers will use a Smart Set (smartphone, watch, and earwear) for entertainment and getting around, pushing leading brands to build content for Smart Sets.

It’s early days in the Agenda program, but to drive our thinking further, we recently created a taxonomy document for this program that adds additional granularity to our Future Consumer Framework.

The Coming Disruption

At the top of this post, I alluded to the idea that we see major disruptions in how consumers engage with and buy technology coming down the pipe. This is based on our recognition that younger generations view and use technology in radically different ways than older ones, and they will retain these unique dispositions even as they age. As these cohorts shift to become a majority of consumer spending, they will drive major sea changes in the consumer and commercial technology markets. Once you see it—as illustrated below—you can’t unsee it.

Source: IDC estimates

This is why IDC has dedicated research dollars, analyst resources, and a number of upcoming special events to cover the consumer space and the changes we see coming. So regardless of whether you’re a technology company focused on B2C, B2B, or B2B2C, it’s vitally important that you understand the coming wave. One way to begin this education: Contact your IDC salesperson, or Future Consumer Sales Specialist Brad Kennedy (bkennedy@idc.com), to set up a free presentation with the Future Consumer team. Or attend our in-person breakfast briefing at CES called Rise of the Future Consumer: Are You Ready for the Seismic Shift? If you won’t be in Las Vegas in early January, contact Brad, and we’ll follow up with a recorded version of the presentation after the show.

Tom Mainelli - Group Vice President - IDC

Analyst Profile
Tom Mainelli heads the Device & Consumer Research Group, overseeing a wide array of hardware and technology categories that cater to both home and enterprise markets. His team's research spans PCs, tablets, smartphones, wearables, smart home devices, thin clients, displays, and virtual/augmented reality headsets. He also co-manages IDC's supply-side research team, which monitors display and ODM production across various categories. IDC's consumer research, anchored by the Consumer Market Model, employs regular surveys and proprietary models to forecast numerous consumer-focused activities and spending across hardware, software, and services. As Group Vice President, Tom collaborates closely with company representatives, industry contacts, and other IDC analysts to provide comprehensive insights and analysis on a diverse range of commercial and consumer topics. A frequent speaker at public events, he travels extensively, enjoying every opportunity to engage with colleagues and clients worldwide.

Marketing and sales teams have been made to be hyperaware of the fact that consumers and buyers are inundated with content. This information overload and increasing channel mix and outreach mechanisms has been argued to have decreased attention span. What we have is a situation where sales needs leads, marketing needs to drive those leads, consumers have too much to pay attention to and an unforgiving economy created a decline in buyer response. It’s less than ideal.

You can’t alter the economy. You can’t change attention spans. So, what can you do? The answer always is look internally at what you can control. You can control your brand voice. The answers, however, always seem so simple, but the execution is the major challenge.  

Brand Voice and The Acceleration of Marketing’s Digital Transformation

Content marketing is a customer-centric marketing approach focused on creating and distributing relevant, engaging, connected and edible content across channels, to help buyers achieve their objectives, paving the path toward profitable customer action. For years, the marketing industry has been talking about one voice. But it’s not one marketing voice—that would mean there should be one sales voice as well. It’s just one voice, marketing and sales. Too often, organizations can’t align the two. Essentially there is the digital dialogue that gets created by someone in a marketing function and that needs to tie into sales, who are having a more interpersonal dialogue. The promises marketing makes in their digital dialogue are the promises that sales have to keep. Yet, the interpersonal dialogues that are taking place by the sales team may be conveying different value and propositions. This problem has been accelerated through marketing’s digital transformation and with everyone living mostly online now.

To capture today’s buyers, digital and interpersonal engagement strategies must be aligned

Conversations to buyers today are happening in parallel, and what results is critical—the buying community doesn’t receive the message they need or expect from the organization (or brand). You may witness this through lack of engagement. Here you have an abundance of marketing content that is in market, several sales pitches and yet no one is engaging at a volume that matches the effort.

There is a significant gap in communication during the sales process between marketing and sales. Marketing data is not used. Sales is frustrated with support from marketing. Ultimately, the sales and marketing “disconnect” prevents revenue generation from being optimal. There is a critical need for marketers and sales, together, to engage more effectively with their audience, and align on the same value proposition.

Learn More: IDC’s MarketScape Lead Generation Package

image depicting marketing buyer engagment and sales enablement and then one dialogue in between the two streams, that needs to start happening today.

Buyers are simply trying to do two things: 1. explore and evaluate solutions, then 2. purchase and optimize them.  Sales is trying to adapt to selling in this hyper digital world as B2B commerce moves increasingly online. It’s a marketer’s job to understand the buyer’s intent signals as they move along in their journey. While marketers have to activate these buyers at the right time, many will find success when they figure out how best to support their sales teams. Because as you engage your buyer, you are trying to educate them by demonstrating value statements that tie to their pain points and needs. As marketers nurture this type of dialogue digitally, the buyer’s interest in the solution grows and the marketing moves them to a position where an opportunity is created for a discussion with sales. Now sales must keep the promises made in the value statements presented by marketing. If the promises don’t align, or aren’t kept, the relationship is lost.  

Related Reading: How to Overcome B2B Digital Marketing Challenges

A New Marketing and Sales Model

The digital and interpersonal dialogue (marketing and sales) exists to align with the customer journey. In our ACE Framework, we introduce a new customer journey and present a new marketing and sales model, based on IDC’s latest research and deep dive into tech buyers and the transformation of digital marketing. The Adaptive Customer Engagement (ACE) model acknowledges that today’s buyers are digital-first; they are embracing digital channels for more than information gathering. Today’s digital buyers are diving into chat applications to complete buying tasks like getting quotes or attending virtual events.

74% of B2B tech buyers will buy more through eCommerce and work less with an in-person sales representative from here on out.   (source: IDC Perspective. The Digital-First Era Demands a New Marketing and Sales Model: Introducing Adaptive Customer Engagement ACE))

Related Reading: Client Engagement and Meaningful Dialogue, Virtually

Marketers and sales teams today aren’t talking to just one buyer, they are now talking to an entire buying cohort. In fact, more than a dozen individuals at an organization could have a need, based on their jobs to be done. For the longest time, sales and marketing operated in a linear model, “the funnel”. But it’s not about one person progressing through a linear journey any longer. The funnel lacks customer centricity and is perhaps why marketing and sales have failed to be able to nurture and build relationships among all the members in the buying committee.

The new ACE model was created by IDC because tech buyers expect value-based solutions to their pain points and business outcomes they’re accountable for. To achieve this, there needs to be marketing and sales messaging alignment.

Through this holistic adaptive customer engagement model, you want to be able to have a closed loop relationship with buyers who become clients. Essentially, once those promises made turn into promises kept, you need to be able to measure and articulate the value that you promised. That’s when you achieve the ultimate goal, customer loyalty.

Have a question about this topic and how you can build a customer-centric plan that accounts for sales enablement along the way? Let’s Talk

Introducing a new lead generation service! To make it easier for marketers to gain the most value of their IDC MarketScape and truly drive qualified leads, we have worked with Foundry to create an enticing lead generation package leveraging their media brands that capture proven customer engagements.

Learn More About IDC’s Lead Generation Package

Related Resources:

  1. Download: The New B2B Marketing Playbook
  2. The Digital-First Era Demands a New Marketing and Sales Model:  Introducing Adaptive Customer Engagement

Proactive Approach to Monitoring and Responding to Digital Regulations

In a fast-moving business environment, having actionable information about the external drivers shaping economies in both the short and long term is key to success. New regulations and major policy changes can shake up markets and hurt businesses, while informed and resilient organizations will ride those waves and seize opportunities to become more competitive.

There was a compliance rush when General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) entered in effect in 2018, with companies looking for last-minute guidance and quick solutions to comply and avoid hefty fines and other legal actions. Unfortunately, most organizations adopted this reactive approach. But others attended to the new requirements in advance — in particular, some tech vendors created new products and services to address this new market created by GDPR.

Since then, the digital economy has become even bigger — according to the World Bank (2022), the digital economy represents 15% of the global economy. Consequently, there has been a proliferation of digital regulations and policies worldwide, with more than 100 countries mirroring GDPR.

And in the EU, dozens of new regulations have been created to address ever-more relevant digital markets. Beyond mapping more than 30 EMEA new or updated regulations, IDC’s EMEA Digital Regulations and Policies Radar examines 10 of the most relevant regulations and policies in EMEA and analyzes their impact on European ICT markets.

10 Key European Digital Regulation & Compliance Developments

 

  1. DORA

The Digital Operational Resilience Act addresses the concerns of a possible systemic risk stemming from the prominent role of critical ICT service providers in the financial industry

  1. DGA

The Data Governance Act is expected to make more data available and facilitate data sharing across sectors and EU countries

  1. AI ACT

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act is a legal framework proposed in response to ethical challenges presented by AI

  1. eIDAS

The EU Electronic Identification Authentication and Signatures Regulation created a Europe-wide legal framework for electronic identification, transactions, and signatures

  1. NIS II

The EU Directive on Security of Network and Information Systems Directive II requires Member States to have in place resilient and effective national cybersecurity regimes.

  1. DMA

The Digital Markets Act is the EU’s legislation to make the digital sector fairer and contestable, it establishes new rules to limit the market power of big online platforms

  1. DSA

The Digital Services Act (DSA) is meant to protect the fundamental rights of EU-based users of digital services and create new opportunities for digital-first businesses

  1. 5G Regulations

All regulations related to 5G network capacity and spectrum allocation

  1. CSRD

The European Commission Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive mandates large organizations in Europe to report on sustainability standards

  1. EU Chips Act

The “EU Chips Act” is a competition policy aimed at bolstering the regional internal production of semiconductors

 

The European digital regulatory landscape has unique characteristics that must be addressed for a proactive digital regulatory strategy. The many acronyms and complex scenarios derived from the many acts, directives, and policies from the EU can be daunting at first sight, but to future proof your organization, we recommend three actions to proactively approach your digital regulatory strategy:

  • Monitor closely the regulatory landscape to anticipate current and future challenges
  • Link your go-to-market strategy and product development (e.g., adding new features and controls) to upcoming regulatory requirements
  • Work with the tech vendor ecosystem to buy or develop the right technologies to achieve short-term compliance efficiency (via automated compliance software from RegTechs)

Please contact us if you’d like to know more about this research stream, especially if you are a tech vendor interested in developing solutions in the RegTech market or a tech vendor that can be directly impacted by new digital standards in the European market. You can access our new subscription product, featuring European regulations and policies, here European Digital Regulations and Policies Radar (idc.com) or contact Anielle Guedes at anguedes@idc.com.