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Asian businesses looking to drive revenue growth will only consider partnering with consulting firms that combine strategy, creativity, and IT services.
That’s according to new findings from IDC, which predicts that more than half of the 1,000 companies surveyed across the region will require a combination of skills from the technology channel.
“Digital transformation is about people, culture, process, and business change,” said said Cathy Huang, senior research manager for services and security research at IDC Asia Pacific.
“Organisations need advisory and implementation partners that understand the importance of their digital transformation vision, ideas, culture as well as have the technology expertise.
“This year our predictions on new ecosystems and vendor sourcing priorities have highlighted growing importance of business capabilities, such as product/services re-imagination, experiential engagement, privacy management and ecosystem capabilities for a services partner.”
Of note to channel partners, Huang said most companies will choose to engage a service firm to help fulfil IT and business agenda and aspirations within the next four years.
However, new ways of contracting, new types of capabilities, and new delivery models will be sought in the next three to five years, according to the advisory firm.
“Not only do providers need to be able to co-create with the customer or ‘plug and play’, bring the right technology partners capabilities and talent to the different ecosystems they join, but clients increasingly demand an accelerated pace of innovation, which will be extremely difficult to deliver without using ecosystem partners," added Huang.
“IDC tracks the expanding breath of ecosystems by looking not only at how many more services contracts contain multiple providers, but also at buyers' perceptions of the importance of suppliers in helping them create their own product/service ecosystems.”
Delving deeper, Huang said businesses will want a “more proactive, agile, and entrepreneurial” IT organisation to support more “aggressive demand” from existing and new customers and clients.
For enterprise-wide IT initiatives aimed at growing corporate revenue, IT departments will need to demonstrate a mixture of often revolutionary creativity; understanding of leading-edge technologies and their business impact; and ability to drive people, process, and technology change (e.g. change management).
By 2021, Huang said 90 per cent of Asia Pacific organisations will have adjusted project plans, delayed product/services releases, or incurred costs because of lack of IT skills, with losses totalling over $150 billion annually across the region.
Furthermore, by 2023, IDC sees 80 per cent of regional organisations carrying out IoT initiatives partners with a services firm able to offer key skills and capabilities to strategise, plan, implement, and/or manage the IoT initiative.
The use of DevOps is also expected to grow significantly with an estimated 70 per cent of organisations opting for such a development methodology or a hybrid DevOps/Waterfall approach by 2022.
