Talking Point: Digital shift to benefit APAC enterprises

“With digital transformation on the top of the CIOs (Chief Information Officers) agenda the world over in 2016, we expect enterprises to strive for digital maturity in 2017,” said Hubert Yoshida, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Japanese Hitachi’s data arm, in a statement. 

Releasing key business and technology trends for the region in 2017, Yoshida said productivity gains would be more about people, process and business outcomes as new processes have not kept up with new technologies. 

Hubert currently leads the company’s effort to help customers address data life cycle requirements and resolve compliance, governance and operational risk issues. 

“In spite of the new technology explosion over the past 10 years, productivity has declined compared to the previous 10 years, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,” he said. 

“In the hospitality business, Airbnb has had access to the same technology as traditional hotels, but it has created a new business model that has enabled it to grow to a market valuation of $30 billion in less than 10 years,” he said. 

Citing a similar Forbes insights research survey, Yoshida said enterprises in APAC were ahead in their digital transformation than their global counterparts. 

“Agile infrastructure, cloud, and the benefits of DevOps will gain greater attention to speed up the development and deployment of applications and services with less defects and wasted effort,” he said. On enterprises accelerating transition to cloud, Hitachi’s Chief Technology Officer for APAC Russel Skingsley said as the Asian market was quick to embrace the approach, the region was leading the world in the Cloud Readiness Index. “The predominant cloud model in future will be hybrid because of its agility benefits though many are not willing to move to public cloud at this point,” he said. IT managers in the region will focus on developing skills in cloud monitoring, cloud workload performance and security management and cloud capacity management. 

“Instead of buying infrastructure from different vendors and knitting them with management software, IT will want access to the converged systems required to deliver infrastructure-as-a-service,” added the statement.