The second wave of digital transformation is coming, and connectivity will play a vital role in enabling it over the next ten years, according to a new report from Ovum.
The report, Digital Economy 2025: The Future of Broadband, says that the digital economy will see the adoption of disruptive technologies - including the IoT, cloud, and analytics - impacting a far larger number of industry sectors. Processes across entire business ecosystems will be controlled, analyzed and optimized in new ways.
Steven Hartley, Ovum’s Practice Leader for Service Provider & Markets and author of the research, says that two key drivers will dictate the extent to which technology and commercial change over the coming decade will impact today’s players:
- the rate at which disruptive technologies such as IoT, cloud, analytics and artificial intelligence are adopted, and
- the degree to which that adoption will disrupt the status quo of today’s ecosystems.
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Telecom Asia e-Brief: Digital transformation
The key driver behind this second wave is the ability to cost-effectively connect more things through [the] IoT, which itself is enabled by low-cost sensors, processing, connectivity, and cloud computing. This in turn enables companies to control, analyze, and optimize more elements of their business processes,” he said in a blog post.
Combined with improved technological capabilities such as predictive analytics and artificial intelligence, the impact will be extraordinary,” wrote Hartley. “It offers players opportunities to be truly transformative in how their business functions and the business models they employ. This will enable them to transform the way their ecosystem functions - and even create completely new ecosystems.”
That will also drive demand for connectivity, he adds. “Demand for connectivity will soar as more devices demand more bandwidth in more locations. The challenge for communications service providers will be to deliver that connectivity to sufficient quality at a viable cost.”
This article was first published in Telecom Asia e-Brief: Digital Transformation