According to the most recent IDC European Vertical Market survey, there is a positive correlation between the willingness to allocate IT budget to innovation purposes and digital transformation, suggesting that industries with higher propensity to allocate IT budget to innovation will have more digitisation processes on the priority list. So, embracing DX implies to be innovative. The smarter, widespread, and combined is the use of new technologies, the greatest the impact businesses can have.
The two European Vertical Markets Surveys 2017 analyze IT investments trends and patterns across all key vertical industries in Western Europe and Central & Eastern Europe. It investigates how businesses are embracing innovation and renovating their IT strategies leveraging on IDC’s 3rd Platform Technologies. The surveys include nearly 2,500 companies in 15 geographies and in 18 vertical markets.
Innovation accelerators are technologies that empower companies to propel growth and take their next step along the Digital Transformation (DX) journey. Among the Innovation Accelerators, there are the following technologies: IoT, ARVR, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, 3D Printing. Moreover, the IDC Survey also cover emerging technologies such as Blockchain, Industry Collaborative Cloud (ICC).
IoT adoption is widespread, but nevertheless the challenge is to go beyond proof of concepts and mere data collection. Indeed, the survey revealed how IoT data are predominantly used for analysis with no impact on business processes. Top industries in terms of current and future adoption are telecom and media, manufacturing, and transport/accommodation.
What emerges from the EVM Survey is that industries are now completely familiar with ARVR and there is a lot of interest around this topic. However, adoption remains low, with 76% of companies not planning to us it. The market is largely consumer driven, however new opportunities and case studies are continuously emerging in the commercial market. Among the verticals with above average rates of adoption there are telecom/media, manufacturing and transport/accommodation.
Similar percentages of adoption can be seen also for Artificial Intelligence, where familiarity is now widespread while adoption and planning reach 16%. Compared with last year, there has been an increase in the number of companies using artificial intelligence. The market favors investment from big companies that have budget, large sets of data to manage and large potential gains from using them.
Robotics adoption continues to increase and uses expand beyond the traditional manufacturing space. Robots and drones are becoming more and more familiar, robots are intelligent, collaborative, and human friendly, enabling the usage of more innovation technologies at the same time, and finally accelerating business transformation. Drones are increasingly performing different as well as dangerous tasks, making end users work easier and more efficient.
3D printing is a well-known technology, that is continuously increasing in non-traditional sectors, such as healthcare and professional services. When 3D printing is not used inside the factory, the usage of outsourced services is now widespread. The adoption of this technology is driven by a constant research on new materials, as well as the improvement of speed and accuracy.
Despite financial sector is still the leading market for Blockchain, and despite the need for education across all industries, the adoption and investments in Blockchain are increasing at a high speed. Blockchain is really revolutionizing the traditional business network, and interest in blockchain is driven by the multiple applications this technology lends itself to. Blockchain is a great opportunity for many companies to transform inefficient processes into efficient and secure ones. It is seen as a broad digital transformation [DX] enabler that can empower new business outcomes.
As for Blockchain, we found still some major barriers in terms of wide understanding for industry collaborative cloud. It is a cloud platform where organisations within an industry collaborate to achieve a common goal while improving industry expertise and capability. It can be summarised as through collaboration it is possible to achieve more than in isolation. Currently 71% has no idea of what ICC is and what is the impact it may have on their organisation. Simply stated ICC provides the following benefits: cost-effective data maintenance, boost innovation, monetization of proprietary data and risk reduction.
So, which could be the recommendations for vendors and service providers?
Organizations embarking on DX are in most cases moving into unchartered territory and will be looking to technology suppliers and service providers for advice on assessing the best starting point for their DX process.
- Help your customers by positioning solutions that will align with a clear implementation road map of use cases and help develop DX capabilities.
- Help your customers get the first success story quite quickly. This will pave the way for the organization to embrace DX in other aspects and will avoid the digital deadlock.
Are you ready to know more on how innovation accelerators are reshaping European Industries? Don’t miss the opportunity and register now to the next IDC Webcast “How are New Technologies Fueling Digital Transformation across EU?”.
