Smart Enterprises leverage the best and latest technologies to optimize business practices and drive workforce engagement. With more than 115 years of excellence in Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), NEC shares its views on the developments that are unfurling to provide smart organizations with new opportunities.
"We have identified the top 10 Smart Enterprise Trends that organizations cannot afford to ignore in their strategic planning processes", said Ronald Schapendonk, Marketing Director for NEC Enterprise Solutions. "This does not mean that all of these trends are applicable to all organizations, but companies do need to investigate whether and how these areas impact their operations and investment planning in the upcoming years."
NEC identifies the following top 10 Smart Enterprise Trends:
Ubiquitous Connectedness
With the number of mobile workers growing and responsibilities in flatter organisations relying on individuals’ roles and expertise, mobile connectedness becomes key for smart enterprises to operate efficiently and effectively. Employees can be anywhere and increasingly the company’s network becomes the organisation.
Smart Virtual Workspace
Virtualized infrastructures improve business continuity and protect mission-critical applications, while minimizing capital expenditure and operating cost. Businesses are turning to hybrid cloud solutions to enable scalable business processes—using public clouds for less sensitive applications and private cloud for vital tasks.
Collaborative Communities
Present markets demand swift response to events and queries, requiring real-time interaction between employees wherever they may be. Smart enterprises are integrating Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) functionality into their business processes and reinventing their customer engagement models.
Open Philosophies
To deal with the complexity of globalization and competitive demands, a smart enterprise’s IT systems must be highly flexible and resilient to seamlessly interoperate with other disparate technologies and systems. This urges companies to integrate Open Architectures and Standards into their business.
Modular Services
Modularity of systems, applications and implementations allows investing in only what is needed at present, trimming up-front costs and leaving open the possibility of expanding or incorporating new technologies in the future. Enterprises seek simplicity, flexibility and high levels of scalability in systems and services.
Software Defined Anything
To effectively deal with business dynamics, organizations should abstract the programmable software control plane from their hardware infrastructure. Software Defined Anything (SDx) provides improved standards for infrastructure programmability and data center interoperability.
Business Continuity
It has become a matter of course for services to be offered 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and across countries. IT managers need to protect data and applications from hardware, OS and application failures to sudden disasters. Services assurance will drive numerous virtualization projects.
Contextual Analysis
Contextual data analysis provides new insights to guide public, private and business decisions. Enterprises are deploying Big Data projects to drive better business intelligence, product development and customer service. This includes data from mobile devices, social media, log files and emails to perform real-time analytics.
Sense and Sensibility
Cost reduction of sensors and performance improvement of processing technologies spur data collection and information extraction across many sectors. Sensing, location detection, pattern recognition and data matching empower accurate and swift decision making at the time and place of action.
Smart Society
Information and Communications technologies are vital in ensuring energy efficiency, sustainable development, safety and security. Virtualization, power-efficient equipment and smart distribution networks help enterprises save power, while real-time collaboration saves time, reduces costs and scope of physical transportation.