Caspar Herzberg |
This article first appeared in the
Winter 2017 issue of The Record.
When Netflix launched its DVD-by-mail business in 1997, Blockbuster ignored the new kid on the block. But then Netflix developed a platform offering an all-you-can-watch, on-demand approach to ‘streaming’ entertainment. The rest is history.
The repercussions of this kind of disruption cannot be underestimated. For nearly every industry the impact of new digital technology is business critical, even existential.
Like Netflix, this may be great news if you are a startup looking to redefine the market. But for established businesses with older systems, the plotline isn’t so simple and overnight digital transformation is rarely an option. For many, incremental change and continuous improvement is a more realistic approach.
This is one of the main themes to emerge in Claranet’s recent Beyond Digital Transformation survey of 750 senior decision-makers. In the survey, top priorities for 2018 include improving security (43%), application performance and reliability (34%), and better business agility (29%). Increasingly, DevOps is seen as the way for businesses to experiment, “fail fast”, and become more adaptable to changing market needs.
Providing a seamless, responsive, always-on digital customer experience is the ultimate goal. But with two thirds of our survey participants saying they fail to meet customer expectations, there’s still a lot more for many businesses and their IT partners to achieve to get their hosting, networks, communications, and security procedures running at full capacity.
Michel Robert is managing director at Claranet UK