As we enter 2022, it’s important to understand the current top technology trends and how they could impact your revenue streams and competitiveness in 2022 and beyond. Below are some of the top technology trends for 2022 that have been recognized by the world’s transformation leaders: Accenture, Forbes, Gartner, servicePath, TechTarget.
Accenture:
“In 2022, capital markets firms will be dealing with constant change—both in the world around them and in their own operations. In the past, firms have typically operated on a three-to-five-year planning cycle with a static end state. Today, we’re increasingly seeing developments and disruptions appear and scale well within that timeframe, making the end state a continually moving target.”
Cloud spending in the first quarter of 2020 was nearly three times that of the previous year, and by November, 70% of companies using cloud had plans to increase their spending due to the disruption.
These rapid transformations and the sudden influx of new technologies have ignited a new era of business—one where architecture matters more than ever, and industry competition is a battle between technology stacks.
Enterprises now also have more technology choices to make than ever before. The ability to sell, package and create solutions for your customers and for your own internal use can be problematic. The value of digital transformation and leveraging Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) technologies will provide your business with the agility to complete more deals.
“In a volatile world, agility is required to respond and adapt to a changing and uncertain environment. Our research shows that true enterprise agility delivers significant financial benefits, giving the organization more than double the probability of achieving top-quartile results compared to the industry average.”
Choice and options are only expanding. From the distribution of cloud deployments, types of AI models, and wide range of edge devices, to the design (and even basic physics) of hardware and computation—each layer of the stack is expanding into new dimensions. The abundance of “As A Service” solutions, improvement in technology standards, and growing cloud foundation throughout the enterprise has made taking advantage of this choice very doable.
Accenture calls Enterprise Agility “The New Strategic Imperative”. “Enterprise agility—the ability to respond rapidly to opportunities and disruption—is a strategic imperative for organizations.”
According to Accenture, “77% of executives state that their technology architecture is becoming very critical to the overall success of their organization.”
“Democratized technology lets people optimize their work or fix pain points on their own. Without having to request major IT projects, people can create a custom dashboard for a group’s finances, build an app to approve and automatically fulfill purchase orders, and much more.”
No-code/low-code environments are becoming increasingly important to organizations so that end users can configure systems without having to line up for IT approvals.
Suddenly, the ability to create technology solutions belongs to people all across the enterprise.
“86% of executives agree their organization must train its people to think like technologists—to use and customize technology solutions at the individual level, but without highly technical skills.”
Fjord Trends 2022 investigates human behaviors that will affect culture, society and business in the coming year.
“Flexibility and nimbleness would need to be built right into the DNA of every capital markets firm, with business and technical architectures that can deploy, adapt and scale new models virtually on demand. Central to this agility will be an efficient innovation process with effective investment, governance and execution. Firms must be able to not only unlock free cash flow from core businesses, but also evaluate opportunities as they arise, and adopt new execution tools and techniques to ensure they’re getting the biggest bang for every buck.” All of these requirements for flexibility and considerable agility will trickle into all industries and sectors. A key outcome of digital transformation is that it makes things faster; which in turn allows you to be nimble as long as your systems are architected in a way that they can be reconfigured quickly without heavy-duty technical talent.
According to the annual Fjord Trends report from Accenture (NYSE: ACN), “Nearly two years of disruption to the fabric of society has resulted in a collective shift in people’s relationships with work, consumerism, technology, and the planet, pushing companies to design new ways of doing business.”
The 5 trends highlighted in this Fjords report were:
- “ME vs WE” post-pandemic: Customers want solutions tailored to their individual specific needs and wants. Organizations selling to them therefore need to be able to create these customized solutions for them. These organizations then need systems that are nimble and configurable. This rising individualism in customers, according to the research, “has profound implications for organizations in how they lead their employees, how they shape a new employee value proposition, and how they nurture company-customer relationships.”
- Farewell to “abundance thinking”: Another challenge that organizations are lately being burdened with is supply chain shortages. “The impact will persist and lead to a shift in ‘abundance thinking’ – built on availability, convenience and speed – to greater consciousness about the environment. Businesses must address the availability anxiety experienced by many around the world.” But with every challenge comes an opportunity. If your systems quickly configure solutions with substitutes to address shortages, you will give your customers options to buy. Therefore you will drive revenue and beat your competitors. If your systems are not nimble, you’re going to lose business. We must now transform our systems to deal with a world of shortages. Systems to be nimble in order to offer substitutes to give customers other viable options that they can solve for today.
- Metaverse is the talk of the town: First introduced in 1992 and now discussed or criticized by everyone – the metaverse is seen to be our future. “The metaverse will be a new frontier of the internet, combining all the existing layers of information, interfaces and spaces with which people interact.” The metaverse can be seen as the real-life projection of “digital meets physical world.” “It offers a new place to make money, is creating new job types, and offers infinite brand possibilities that people will expect businesses to help build and navigate. And it won’t just exist through screens and headsets — it will also be about real-world experiences and places that interact with the digital world.”
- People demand immediate answers/solutions: As mentioned earlier when talking about supply chain shortages, there is a shortage and people need their answers/solutions. We have all become spoilt in that, we demand all information, entertainment and support at the touch of our fingertips. “The fact that it’s so easy and immediate means people are asking more questions. For brands, the range of customer questions and the number of channels for asking them is growing constantly.” This poses an additional challenge for organizations; how they answer people’s queries and how promptly, largely determines their success. “How to answer them is a major design challenge, a critical driver for trust, and a future source of competitive advantage.”
- Handle with care: Because our world as we know it, has become so intricate, “care became more prominent this past year in all its forms: self-care, care for others, the service of care, and the channels to deliver care, both digital and physical.” While this is creating opportunities, it is also giving rise to challenges for employers and brands.
Accenture goes on to add “Technology is a lifeline for economies, governments, companies, and people.”
Additionally, Accenture talked about another trend that is seen to be gaining ground: Headless Commerce;
“The headless architecture promises better readiness for any future additions or changes to your digital platform.” That however does not mean that you absolutely have to employ it right away, without doing your research. “A headless architecture gives you more flexibility in building customer experiences and ensures easy adaptations and transitions for future changes. On the other hand, it requires a group of experienced technical professionals to build and manage it.”
“Keeping up with the latest trends and technology is not an easy task for many companies. It’s not enough to be up to speed about new possibilities that are relevant to your company but deciding which ones are valuable to your organization and being able to adapt them quickly will plan a key role in ensuring your competitive edge. To stay ahead of the competition, agility and adaptibility are a must.”
More services, more solutions, more data.
Forbes:
Artificial Intelligence Services
“Artificial intelligence is rapidly gaining a foothold in the corporate world, with over half (54%) of financial services firms planning to increase investments in AI, according to the Next-Gen Technology Survey. That’s expected to lead to a huge increase in the number of goods and services that are connected to the internet and woven into the IoT. The infrastructure and base code to develop AI is very difficult to manage and expensive. Cloud providers are increasingly providing AI as a service, so it’s no different than using a public cloud provider to stand up a Unix or Windows OS.
There will be growth in AI platform services that you can subscribe to that promise ease of use because they’re already configured and up and running. Users of the service can then focus on writing their own unique code to solve their business problems. This is changing the way we write AI code and getting it to market quicker. It’s about ease of use, speed to market, and agility, and it’s almost mutualizing the commodified, non-differentiating pieces.”
Securing AI
“As AI becomes more common, the need to protect AI-powered systems will grow. As AI generates more code, this increases the amount of surface area for hackers to attack, particularly with highly connected systems in smart spaces where the IoT is especially active. One important aspect of the IoT which security experts need to keep sight of is that it increases the number of vulnerabilities an organization must deal with.
AI will increasingly be used to enhance system security. Machine learning will be used to understand patterns, uncover attacks and automate some cybersecurity processes while augmenting the actions of human security analysts. Part of this process includes anticipating how AI might be trained to penetrate a system and to identify and protect against these efforts.
These new AI services are just a new set of solutions organizations need to package and sell as part of their platforms. These new services need to be woven into existing service offerings with a tool that’s quick and nimble.”
It is expected to see that there will be huge permutations of products. Therefore, the ability to package these and get them to your customers to help them with their challenges will help you with your success.
The As-A-Service Revolution
“As-a-service – the provision of services that we need to live and work through cloud-based, on-demand platforms – is the key that has put the other tech trends we talk about today in reach of anybody. It’s the reason why AI and robotics are a possibility for just about any business or organization, regardless of their size or budget. Thanks to cloud offerings from companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and an ever-growing horde of startups and spinoffs, innovators in all fields can deploy cutting-edge tech with little upfront investment in tools, equipment, or specialized people.”
Organizations, therefore, need to be ready to change customer consumption models to reflect this new reality. For example, in the medical field, one-time purchases of large capital equipment are now changing to capital Equipment-As-A-Service and the ability to quickly model and share, and quote these for your customers will be essential. In the medical field for example, MRI As A Service.
Forbes also highlighted that the year 2022 is the year of CX. “For businesses worldwide, a key effect of the pandemic was a mad rush into cloud. Last year, our experts said that COVID was compressing years of digital transformation into months. We’re still living through that acceleration, but it’s not playing out evenly. As a result, first movers in cloud and observability are able to provide better digital experiences — and it’s really starting to show. Digital channels will remain red-hot in 2022, so expect customers to vote with their feet (virtually speaking).”
“Automation shouldn’t be left out of the discussion. For many entities, the ability to efficiently streamline the deployment of a process can be massive on the top and bottom line. Intelligent Automation has been a focal point of companies like Microsoft, with its Power Platform and Red Hat’s Ansible, both serving as examples of software solutions that have been built to enable the deployment of automation to streamline business processes from small simple tasks being built by citizen developers to robust financial services automation for large banks.”
Peak Everything-as-a-Service
“We have all witnessed the impact that the public cloud and SaaS has had on all technology procurement. One-time capital expenditures for software and infrastructure have been increasingly traded for subscription and OpEx based technologies that can be procured on a consumption basis.
This has led to a shift away from traditional buying cycles, and if we learned anything from the pandemic, enterprise technology consumers (and all tech consumers) want what they want, when they want it. As a result, in 2022 we’ll reach peak Everything-as-a-Service with pay-as-you-go models becoming increasingly popular for everything from data software to desktop virtualization.”
Gartner:
Internet of behaviors (IoB)
“As demonstrated by the COVID-19 protocol monitoring example, the IoB is about using data to change behaviors. With an increase in technologies that gather the “digital dust” of daily life — data that spans the digital and physical worlds — that information can be used to influence behaviors through feedback loops. The IoB can gather, combine and process data from many sources including; Commercial customer data; citizen data processed by public-sector and government agencies; social media; public domain deployments of facial recognition; and location tracking. The increasing sophistication of the technology that processes this data has enabled this trend to grow.”
Distributed Cloud/Edge
“The distributed cloud is where cloud services are distributed to different physical locations, but the operation, governance, and evolution remain the responsibility of the public cloud provider. Enabling organizations to have these services physically closer helps with low-latency scenarios, reduces data costs, and helps accommodate laws that dictate data must remain in a specific geographical area. However, it also means that organizations still benefit from the public cloud and aren’t managing their own private cloud, which can be costly and complex. Distributed cloud is the future of the cloud.”
“Solutions such as the servicePath CPQ+ software enable an organization to leverage very powerful technologies that will help them future-proof their organizations while leveraging their legacy investments and architectures and giving them an ability to keep up with current trends and give them time to plan the evolution of their future architectural strategies.” – Daniel Kube, CEO servicePath
Leading organizations are increasing revenue and improving customer experience by becoming more collaborative, unified and digital-optimized across all of their customer interactions. Application leaders must make strategic technology investments that transform digital selling functions.
Another noteworthy trend is the metaverse. “Although metaverse experiences will not completely replace current digital interactions (via apps, websites and so on), they are likely to displace many of them while opening up new types of interactions and business models to optimize on these new use cases.”
One conclusion that can be drawn from these Gartner predictions could be that all organizations will be investing in technologies more than ever before. The reasons for this could range from the increased need to stay connected, evolving customer needs, to exploring all fronts for gaining competitive advantage, and beyond.
Gartner also pointed towards the fact that CIOs must find the IT force multipliers to enable growth and innovation, and create scalable, resilient technical foundations whose scalability will free cash for digital investments. These imperatives form the three themes of this year’s trends: engineering trust, sculpting change and accelerating growth.
“CEOs know they must accelerate the adoption of digital business and are seeking more direct digital routes to connect with their customers.” – David Groombridge, VP Analyst, Gartner
TechTarget:
Service providers should prepare to navigate industry consolidation, an uneven vertical market landscape, rising digital transformation demand and new partnering models.
According to TechTarget, “Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can expect a multidimensional business challenge in 2022 as they navigate market consolidation, a laundry list of industry-specific requirements, and new ways of working with customers and vendors.”
TechTarget opened with some good news for the Managed Service Providers. The economic outlook for MSPs, consultants and other service providers, they remains generally favorable. Gartner Inc. expects the worldwide IT services market to expand 8.6% to $1.3 trillion in 2022.
However this forecast still comes with considerable uncertainty; actual results will depend on a range of influences, which include rising COVID-19 cases and inflation.
The 4 trends TechTarget highlighted are:
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The big get bigger: MSP platforms consolidate
- Consolidation among MSPs and cloud consultancies will continue apace in 2022. MSP platforms, sizeable service providers to which smaller add-on acquisitions attach, attracted an abundance of private equity dollars in 2021. Cloud professional services firms likewise saw a spike in investor interest. Both types of businesses will become larger still in the coming months. MSP platforms seek to expand their geographic reach as they buy smaller service providers.
- The next round of consolidation will involve the national MSPs. Experts are predicting that Private Equity backed MSPs will be emerging in the year 2022. PE firms are looking to cash out faster than in previous years. Creating bigger platforms with higher valuations is one approach. As for cloud consultancies, look for further activity among companies that specialize in the major SaaS providers such as Salesforce and ServiceNow.
The ability to combine sales teams and product portfolios for combined success will differentiate who wins and who loses in the consolidation game. So, when buying Sales enablement technologies, it is recommended to work with vendors who understand the challenges with consolidation and M&A.
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Vertical market needs loom large
- MSPs find selling to vertical markets rather challenging, and the pandemic has not made things any easier. Service providers that organized around key verticals in recent years could see that strategy pay off next year — but they’ll need to address the specialized needs of industries still battling the pandemic. TechTarget brought attention to the fact that COVID-19 and the need to rapidly digitalize operations will continue to influence customer projects in 2022. Employee and customer engagement and experience are some of the key areas, experts have advised, that could require urgent attention in the business remodel.
- Digital transformation is the “big change” everyone is talking about – but initiatives typically focus on retooled business processes and updated technologies.Pariveda’s Rogers suggested such projects may overlook the individuals asked to execute those alterations. In order to prevent the commonly faced problems such as resistance to change, slower adoption and increased iterations, they recommend customers undergo a change readiness assessment, which considers an organization’s adaptability and resilience.
“With the Great Resignation, not considering your capacity for change increases the probability that employees will likely hop rather than stick around to see how things go” – Margaret Rogers, Pariveda
Sales Engineers are a crucial part of an MSP and their departure can impact the organization in more ways than one. Click here to learn ways in which you can limit the impact on your organization when a sales engineer leaves.
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Customers seek deeper thinking on digital transformation
- Just like the employees, customers are also seeking to fully understand digital transformation. SMBs, for example, need to pursue digital business to stay competitive, but typically lack the strategic IT thinking needed to get projects off the ground. Service providers offering virtual CIO (vCIO) services may find themselves in a position to help. Customers, however, will be demanding more from them.
“A true virtual CIO understands the customers’ business, their goals and risks” – Gary Pica, President & Founder, TruMethods
With that insight, a vCIO can make useful recommendations as clients migrate key applications to the cloud, build a hybrid work environment or develop a cybersecurity plan, he noted. SMBs need that type of guidance but can’t afford to hire a full-time tech maven.
- Resource-constrained businesses ask Pariveda for help reevaluating their business models, Rogers said. They want to know, for example, how to build digital offerings that accommodate consumers’ shopping preferences.
- Just like the employees, customers are also seeking to fully understand digital transformation. SMBs, for example, need to pursue digital business to stay competitive, but typically lack the strategic IT thinking needed to get projects off the ground. Service providers offering virtual CIO (vCIO) services may find themselves in a position to help. Customers, however, will be demanding more from them.
“For B2B consumers, platforms like servicePath CPQ+ digitize product creation, buying and selling processes to automate guided selling, configuration, financial modeling of products and solutions. This digitization enables organizations to accelerate the sales process driving higher quality, faster turnaround and higher customer satisfaction. The result is new people entering the organization can easily launch and sell new products and solutions. Existing employees can engage more on high value added services and customer engagement versus carrying out the former mundane tasks of the former analog world” – Mike Molson, Co-founder & VP Operations, servicePath
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Emerging partnering models gain momentum
- Co-innovation is a relatively new trend. With co-innovation, a service provider collaborates with a technology vendor to create an offering for customers. The co-created product could be a vertical niche application built on top of a public cloud provider’s platform, for example. Co-creation also takes place between partners and their customers, particularly when a client seeks to launch a new product or service faster than it could on its own. To that end, partners offer tools such as software accelerators, which jumpstart application development. With co-innovation, a service provider collaborates with a technology vendor to create an offering for customers. Co-creation also takes place between partners and their customers, particularly when a client seeks to launch a new product or service faster than it could on its own. To that end, partners offer tools such as software accelerators, which jumpstart application development. In the omnichannel world, the way customers and partners should collaborate with the sales process needs to be more personalized and iterative. your digital infrastructure needs to be agile to enable these paradigms plus the future paradigms as they evolve.
Summary:
In summary, as the world continues to change, the requirement for speed and ease of use is greater than ever. Not only are new spaces emerging with new solutions and products that give organizations more options to create new solutions for their customers, but as mentioned, we are now dealing with reversal of the abundance economy. Organizations require even higher levels of agility to create solutions and products that were previously easy to acquire. Those that embrace this change and solve for this challenge will win.
Based on the above trends for 2022, there are some calls to action you should consider. Due to multiple trends like the death of surplus economy and rise of automation and AI, it is clear that presenting more options requires agile systems that are able to configure them quickly. Users are also demanding the ability to change systems on their own without IT to give them agility they need to be able to respond to the market. Solutions like servicePath help solve for your revenue. Most people didn’t know what N95 was two years ago but now, there’s hardly any human being who does not own one – just goes to show that the world continues to change.
“With more solutions and options today such as distributed cloud, edge, and new offerings and technology constantly evolving, being added to the digital ecosystem, it is imperative to establish revenue infrastructures that quickly enable organizations to blend, merge and replace existing offerings and solutions. Moreover, the intention information in buying needs to be leveraged to optimize successful sales outcomes. Organizations that embrace this reality will be able to outflank and maneuver the competition and further future-proof their organizations” – Daniel Kube, CEO, servicePath
Digital Transformation and Sales Enablement are still some of the most impactful revenue and profit drivers you can invest in. Solutions like servicePath CPQ+ help you in your digital transformation journey and enable you to stay ahead of the competition.
Click here to learn more about what CPQ is and how it can impact your organization.
Source:
https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/technology/technology-trends-2021
https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/public-service/technology-trends-2021-i-technologist
https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/technology/technology-trends-2021
https://www.accenture.com/gb-en/insights/technology/technology-trends-2021
https://www.accenture.com/us-en/about/events/ces
https://www.accenture.com/nl-en/blogs/insights/headless-architecture-why-its-becoming-the-new-normal
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2021/10/13/top-10-digital-transformation-trends-for-2022
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-strategic-technology-trends-for-2021
https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/4009112/predicts-2022-buyers-dictate-your-selling-strategy
https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/insights/top-technology-trends
https://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/feature/4-key-managed-services-trends-to-watch
