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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.

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

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.  

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. 

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.

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?

The buzzwords frequently used to depict today’s turbulent business landscape—inflation, supply chain woes, recession, rising energy costs and political unrest—paint a cautionary picture for all businesses around the world.  But for small and medium-sized companies, today’s rocky business terrain is particularly concerning.  

Many SMBs do not have a deep well of reserves to sustain their businesses for years during tough economic times. And that makes it critical for them to apply technology smartly and zero in on efficiency, cost savings, productivity and automation—and fast—to weather today’s economic storms.

But what are SMBs grappling with, specifically, from the long list macroeconomic woes circling the globe today? The answer, IDC finds, depends on where an SMB resides. New IDC research into the macroeconomic challenges of SMBs across the globe, unveiled through our BuyerView Cloud Pulse program, illustrates that while SMBs worldwide are dealing with intensified macroeconomic issues, the specific concerns vary greatly by region.

The research is based on a May survey of IT decision makers, developers and line of business cloud influencers at companies that had already, or are planning in the near future, to adopt cloud technologies. Respondents had to prove familiarity of cloud infrastructure and applications and be familiar with their organization’s cloud strategy.  More than half of all respondents—742—were small- to medium-sized businesses with 1-999 employees.

The survey findings show that APAC SMBs are highly concerned about economics such as inflation, exchange rates and low economic growth. North American and European SMBs, meanwhile, rank energy costs as top concerns. Supply chain concerns rank high in North America. While SMBs in Europe and APAC note that the conflict in Ukraine is causing more business and IT supply chain disruptions. And, SMBs in the U.S. and APAC are more likely to be impacted by their customers losing business/sales than SMBs in Western Europe.

Our study also evaluated the impact of COVID-19 across global SMBs and found that while COVID is still impacting SMBs worldwide, the COVID impact is 20 percentage points greater in APAC than other regions as lock-downs prompted APAC SMBs to consider new ways of reaching customers and carrying out work.

By size, smaller SMBs say supply chain issues are leading to a lack of IT equipment/materials. This is likely because the smallest SMBs use fewer cloud technologies and rely on more basic and physical IT, such as laptops, mobile devices, printers and servers. Therefore, the material and hardware shortages are impacting them directly.

SMBs on the larger end report that supply chain disruptions are extending the time it takes to complete IT projects. Larger SMBs are likely using a mix of cloud and on-premise/in-house IT and are suffering directly from supply chain issues, including higher costs and longer delivery times for hardware. But many are also impacted indirectly as major cloud suppliers pass on increased data center energy, hardware component and employee costs to them. A common global thread across all SMBs is inflation. Two-thirds of global SMBs report that they are currently impacted in some way by inflation.

When we asked about the technology improvements and enhancements SMBs made in the 12 months leading up to Q1 of 2022 to boost resiliency, the results showed SMBs lag behind their enterprise counterparts. SMBs ranked behind enterprise businesses in eight of 12 areas where we asked about investments to improve business resiliency. One caveat: a greater percentage of SMBs invested in ecommerce capabilities than enterprise companies, suggesting SMBs are working to meet the wants and needs of today’s more digitally savvy consumers—a trend induced by COVID, and one that we believe is here to stay.

So how can tech suppliers connect with and sell to leery SMBs hamstrung by a range of macroeconomic challenges? They must communicate that now is the time — a time when many SMBs aren’t clamoring for air to keep up with staggering growth — for them to stop and rethink their approach to technologies and boost business resiliency. SMBs should take this unique time to pause and investigate the wide array of technology offerings on the market that can help them be more efficient and productive.

SMBs need to boost resiliency and to move to technologies that will power their businesses for growth — before they get so large that change becomes highly complex, and before they become entrenched with legacy systems and processes that are difficult to replace. The SMBs that take these steps now will weather today’s economic storms—and continue to grow once they pass.

I encourage you to read our research covering macroeconomic challenges at global SMBs. It’s a topic we will monitor closely as the business landscape and headwinds continue to evolve.