Technology Trends for the Enterprise – What’s in Store for the Rest of 2023?

By Paul Bouchier, Sales Director at iOCO, within iOCO Software Distribution, an Infor Gold Partner

As we usher in the second half of 2023, enterprise cloud solution providers are looking to expand their focus to business buyers, not just IT/development teams.

Interestingly, Gartner® notes in its Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023 presentation[1], given by Gartner analysts at its 2022 IT Symposia globally, “senior IT and business leaders need to prepare to optimise, scale, or pioneer. To optimise resilience, operations or trust. To scale your vertical solutions, product delivery, or … everywhere. To pioneer customer engagement, accelerated responses or opportunity.

In addition, Infor is seeing a growing need for combinations of technologies to address disruptions in any given industry or market. With these market dynamics as the backdrop, here are four of our technology predictions for the remainder of 2023:

The Composable Reality

For the last few years, many of the top market research and analyst firms have talked about the need and recommendation for purchasing best-of-breed applications and “composing” them together in a harmonious way, known as the “composable ERP.”

This challenges the notion of a monolithic ERP system itself as the center of gravity for an organisation. However, what hasn’t yet been formally addressed is the means by which to accomplish this composition. While many pure-play vendors in the market have their specific versions of iPaaS (infrastructure platform-as-a-service), no-code development frameworks, machine learning platforms, and more, no one has fully expanded their portfolio to cover the complete breadth for an end-to-end innovation use case. This is where GSIs (global system integrators) have traditionally played a large role, but the demand from buyers will likely be that this is an easier and faster process to procure, personalise, and deploy. Many larger software companies have procured more capabilities, but the vast majority are not natively integrated yet with their existing cloud services. This will be the year to make that the reality through a true digital transformation platform that becomes the standard glue for any given organisation.

Mainstream Hyperautomation

With the continuous pressure on cost efficiency and market influence, there is a conflicting need for new business models & differentiation while also being cost conscious. Organisations need to prove ROI faster while also focusing on the areas of their business where the largest cost and risk occurs. More often than not this tends to center around operations and people.

What we should expect is that simply automating one given task is not enough. That may simply begin the journey. Instead, this will be a journey of continuous improvement even if a sense of automation exists. Can I make this faster, more accurate, more proactive, more intelligent? Can this continue to automate across disparate systems? Can this reach into my legacy on-premise systems and knowledge? This will become the expectation that IT teams request, as they are pressured by the business.

Enterprise Simulations

Similar to the hyperautomation trend, businesses will want to explore if new paths can help them receive inventory faster, sell more product, reduce waste, move into new markets, or even assess how they can react to new market situations. Performing large-scale simulations like this can certainly be done in test environments but that comes with an excessively large overhead of data migrations or refreshes, process refinements, and eventual porting of changes to production. My expectation is that business users will want access to simulations in the context of their daily work. For instance, if a procurement specialist is working on an order and thinks this might be her opportunity to work with a new vendor of choice, then perhaps technology will enable her to simulate that decision based on the mass data profiles and machine learning and optimisation models running in the background. If the user likes the result, then they can gain more confidence in the path and ultimately make better decisions that affect the overall business significantly. It should no longer be the bottleneck for changing a business process for better decision making.

Enterprises becoming Creative Agencies

As an aggregator of the previous trends, the overarching movement is that, as the workforce evolves and the business becomes increasingly more pressured for ROI-based innovation, the C-suite will want technology solutions that empower their workers for be creative in safe yet measured ways. They will want to exploit the creativity of every member of every department without having to procure a myriad of tools and put stress on IT to provide project spaces. Instead, this should be engrained into the enterprise software experience to encourage such behavior. Employees will be better able to manage supply chains, resolve issues and escalations, optimise planning and inventory, and more. Companies will look for a trusted partner in an enterprise software vendor to empower and embrace the fact that lack of standardisation in innovation can actually make you differentiated in your market.

Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Issued by Perfect Word Consulting (Pty) Ltd

For more information, contact perfectword@trinitas.co.za

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About iOCO

Established to simplify ICT, iOCO, a proudly EOH company, is Africa’s leading integrated technology services company, with the largest concentration of skills on the continent. As a Level 1 B-BBEE end-to-end ICT managed service provider and Cloud systems integrator, iOCO operates with over 20 years’ experience.  Its team of more than 4 500 specialists delivers custom development and integration, open source, enterprise applications, data and analytics, compute and platforms, digital industries and manage and operate solutions to over 1 000 top tier clients.

Inspired by digitally native internet organisations (iO) and creative organisations (CO) of the future, iOCO helps customers navigate the path to an exponential future. To achieve this vision, iOCO holds strategic OEM partnership agreements with more than 50 global leaders. For more information, please visit: ioco.tech          

About Infor

Infor is a global leader in business cloud software specialized by industry. We develop complete solutions for our focus industries. Infor’s mission-critical enterprise applications and services are designed to deliver sustainable operational advantages with security and faster time to value. Over 60,000 organizations in more than 175 countries rely on Infor’s 17,000 employees to help achieve their business goals. As a Koch company, our financial strength, ownership structure, and long-term view empower us to foster enduring, mutually beneficial relationships with our customers. Visit www.infor.com.

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[1] Gartner® “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023” presentation, Gilbert van der Heiden, David Groombridge and others, October 2022; given by Gartner analysts at its 2022 IT Symposia globally.