75% global organisations estimated to digitalise systems by 2020

… as only 30% will be successful

In the next five years, 75 percent of global organisations will be digitalised or in the process of having their operations digitalised, but only 30 percent of these companies will be success- ful, according to Wendy Mars, Cisco’s vice presi- dent for enterprise business group, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia region.

Mars, who spoke at the just concluded Cisco’s One Africa Partner Summit in South Africa, said the reason majority of those companies, which cut across various sec- tors, “will not be successful in the digitisation is because they will fail to re-imagine their business processes around digitisation from top to bottom before they begin.”

On how the estimated fail- ure number of organisations could be successful, she said “what they can do is to really understand how they can see the value of technology through transforming their business by planning ahead now to obviate future challenges.

“Becoming a digital busi- ness requires an agile IT model, and the ability to rethink core processes for the digital era. Embracing new security, cloud, mobile, social and analytics tech- nologies required to fully digitise takes imagination, investment and expertise.”

The other element is to deliver on the digitisation, and she said Fast IT was the operating model to do that which CIOs need to engage on to drive business trans- formation; enable business innovation at a faster rate, and compete for the organisation’s share of Internet of Everything (IoE) value put at $19 trillion in the next decade.

According to her, “Fast IT is a transformational new mod- el that Cisco is using to help our customers and partners to transform and simplify IT operations.

It evolves and uni- fies infrastructure, platform, and applications to reduce complexity, accelerate service deployment, and increase security.

It embraces today’s major technology transitions: cloud, mobility, and security, along with data analytics, new applications, and IoE.

It ad- dresses the requirements IT has to align to today’s business changes and organisational requirements.” She described Fast IT as simple, smart and secure.

“It simplifies infrastructure and integrates across silos. It is smart, by creating intelligent capabilities and services that fuel growth, and it is secure as it defends against attacks and mitigates threats dy- namically,” she said.

To her, Africa is a shining light for the power of digitisa- tion and the IoE, and “through digitisation, the continent is already outgrowing and outperforming many other global regions by transform- ing education, healthcare, job creation and societal stability.”

It is calculated that imple- menting IoE in Africa will gen- erate about $490 billion out of the estimated $19 trillion.

The value in the public sector is estimated at $128 billion while the private sector would generate about $362 billion.

Implementing IoE for the private sector in Nigeria could generate an estimated $32.4 billion of value, Kenya $6.3 bil- lion, South Africa $84.7 billion over the next 10 years.

“Over the past decade and a half, Africa has demonstrat- ed a remarkable economic turnaround, growing two to three percentage points faster than global GDP, and Cisco is committed to sup- porting Africa as a significant contributor to Cisco’s overall business success,” she said.

Also speaking at the three- day summit, David Meads, Cisco’s vice president, Af- rica Emerging Theatre, said “companies that adopt Fast IT can reduce IT operating expenses by 25 percent.

DANIEL OBI