Building a Solid Foundation for an Intelligent Future

New Connectivity, Computing, Platform, and Ecosystem

Introduction

As the impact of COVID-19 continues to spread around the world, technologies enable us to get back on our feet as individuals, but more importantly, is encouraging organizations to build the necessary digital resiliency to survive. Since the pandemic emerged, consumer demand for digital solutions has been on the rise. The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the value of IT and digital transformation and organizations should use this time to accelerate the transition.

Digital Transformation Past and Future

Over the last few years, digital transformation has become an industry megatrend. Legacy enterprises are forced to embrace this critical shift out of fear of becoming obsolete. Innovation and growth are no longer optional to the enterprise. Today, enterprises use ICT technology to improve working efficiency, create business innovations, and provide better customer service. 

Digital transformation has successfully helped smart entrepreneurs, pioneering executives, and visionary enterprises to change the established economic order. While many large corporations realize the need to embrace digital transformation, 2020 will continue to be a year of rapid scaling of digital initiatives across industries. Even as many enterprises scale their digital efforts, the new decade will present a moderate amount of reckoning for digital initiatives as businesses begin to question and reassess the true impact of digital transformation. 

The answer, as with many IT related initiatives, is predicated on scope, skill and the true bottom line business impact of embarking on such an endeavour. 

Now, with a decade of digital transformation already in place, the entire conversation has matured enabling the conversation to shift towards future predictions through the prism of understanding past challenges. Clearly, the core technologies that dominated earlier discussions will continue to serve as the foundation for any digital transformation endeavours. In 2020, and moving forward, all conversations will integrate a new cadre of initiatives that consider the initial transformational aspirations, while carefully planning and targeting broader benefits, well beyond the originally planned those originally imagined. 

What does the future hold for digital transformation in 2020 and beyond?

While many digital trends need to be considered, a few main transformations remain crystal clear. These digital trends are not only relevant for large corporations or start-ups, they are essential for businesses to survive through the next decade. 

Digital leaders should be prepared to lead their enterprise towards a greater culture shift, take data governance much more seriously, embrace AI and insight-driven innovation, and fully explore the benefits of adopting the public cloud. 

Global Industrial Digital Transformation Conference 2020

As many tech-focused trade shows over the past several months have been cancelled, many of the great technology companies were forced to share their visions for the future of digital transformation via teleconference. Among the presenting global leaders was Huawei who hosted its Global Industrial Digital Transformation Conference to reflect upon the past decade and present their projections through 2030. 

According to Huawei, the intelligent world of the next decade cannot exist without the digital transformation knowledge and experiences from a cross section of industries.

As Ma Yue, Vice President of Huawei Enterprise Business Group, stated:

The next decade will witness rapid development of new ICT. Huawei believes new types of connectivity, computing, platform, and ecosystem will build a solid foundation for the intelligent world of 2030.

Based on Huawei’s insights, here are key digital transformation trends for the next decade. 

Integrated Data to Drive Customer Experiences 

By definition, digital enterprises are data and demand driven, focused on maintaining the highest level of customer satisfaction.  Today, businesses are leveraging their data to improve customer experiences, streamline operations, and quickly launch new products and services. 

As we look towards the next decade, in a fully connected intelligent world, data will only increasingly become the most essential factor for any enterprise. In order to truly improve customer experiences, enterprises will need to truly unlock the power of data- the lifeline of digital transformation.

Currently, enterprises predominantly run on multi-cloud environments, which complicates management especially when it comes to moving application workloads between cloud environments. As we look ahead, companies will have to invest more in AI capabilities to expedite and personalize customer service, reduce human bias, and increase productivity. 

Data Centers: Innovative Architecture and Technologies

According to a recent IDC study, by 2025 digital data will reach nearly 180 ZB (what IDC calls the Datasphere) an increase of 445% from 2018.  With this drastic rise in data, traditional data systems will face architectural bottlenecks for data collection, storage, computing, management, and usage. 

New technology is leading digital transformation: AI, IoT, and 5G are being widely deployed, and various industry sectors, such as finance, governments, manufacturing, and media, are on a digital journey. As the intelligent brain of a digital enterprise, advanced data centers will be in high demand. With this in mind, and based on Huawei's years of practice in ICT,  at the conference Huawei officially released its Intelligent Data Center Service Solution. This service can help customers design, build and operate the world's high-reliability (Tier-4), green and intelligent data centers. With the aid of Artificial Intelligence, the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) can be reduced by 8%-15%.

Hank Stokbroekx, Vice President of Enterprise Service, Huawei Enterprise BG, explained the need for 

Large data centers will be both the focus and the challenge of the future. A super-large data center must have five features: resource convergence, high power efficiency, business continuity, technological innovation, and intelligence.

This full-lifecycle, one-stop service solution, provides customers with consulting & design, integration implementation, intelligent operation and maintenance (O&M), and operation support.

5G and In App Ecosystem

Moving forward, the partnership between IoT and 5G technologies will reveal the true value of digital transformation. 5G connectivity accelerates the data transfer and allows the process to scale even further. While 5G assures a higher ultra-reliable bandwidth, and low-latency communication, it serves as the basis for the next-gen of IoT devices- the driving force behind the digital transformation of many industries including banking.  

In the future, 5G will drive significant improvements in app capabilities that will help bring banking services into the digital world, helping branches and account managers regain engagement with retail and corporate customers much more regularly. 

During the conference, Chen Kunte, former Chief Information Officer of China Merchants Bank and currently Chief Digital Transformation Officer of Global Financial Services in Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group, cited China Merchants Bank as an example. The bank established a private cloud and mobile platform, and opened host functions to manage devices and users, and control mobile network security. Additionally, the bank built a big data platform with decoupled architecture and applied AI and machine learning to the entire business chain to enhance credit risk control. Furthermore, it deployed a financial transaction cloud and moved applications from the host to the cloud, enhancing customer experience and supporting continuous service innovation.

As a paradigm for the future, the ‘app’ will become an ecosystem that integrates retail and corporate customers, and serve as a technology platform to bring banking services into the digital world. The traditional concept of banks' digital transformation was only as a technology transformation for replacing core application systems. However, he believes that real digital transformation is a process of integrating IT and business teams and that rapid, step-by-step deployment, fast iteration, and technology agility will drive business agility.

The intelligent world of 2030 cannot exist without the digital transformation of industries across the spectrum. Based on their extensive experience in helping Huawei has been integral in achieving digital transformation for the present and the future, through new connectivity, computing, platform, and a robust ecosystem. Currently, more than 700 cities worldwide and 228 of the Fortune Global 500 companies, including 58 of the Fortune Global 100 companies, have selected Huawei as their partner for digital transformation.

While the digital transformation of the past 10 years focused on the promise of technology driving productivity, the next decade will focus on insight-first innovation. This approach looks not only on solving the immediate need, but also on maximizing the long-term potential of organizational data. By intentionally building in data capture, every digital initiative of the future presents enterprises with a tremendous opportunity to improve and democratize business intelligence.

Clearly, today’s businesses are driven by technology and innovation. In order to thrive, however, enterprises must embrace a digital transformation strategy that responds to the constantly evolving technological advances and embraces disruptive advancements, while remaining agile throughout to enable adjustments. In order to deliver a connected customer experience, companies must focus on cultivating a data-driven culture and use game-changing and disruptive technologies to accelerate and amplify co-creation of value within their ecosystems by strongly partnering with IT to better leverage the awesome power of applications networks.