NEC identifies Top 10 Strategic Technology Drivers for the Smart Enterprise
IT & Communications core components for businesses enhancing productivity, services and competitive edge
Hilversum, 5 January 2022 – NEC Enterprise Solutions, global leader in Communications & IT solutions, today presented the top 10 technology trends that will be strategic for most organizations in the coming year. The ‘Smart Enterprise Drivers’ that NEC recognizes are becoming core components in the business landscape and will deliver superior customer experiences, a more flexible and productive work environment and a competitive edge to enterprises large and small.
Smart Enterprises leverage the best and latest technologies to optimize business practices and drive workforce engagement. With more than 120 years of excellence in Information and Communications Technologies, NEC is sharing its views on leading and emerging trends and technologies in order to help companies how to navigate through the disruptive changes and transform smartly instead of being left behind.
"We have identified the top 10 strategic drivers that organizations cannot afford to ignore in their strategic planning processes", said Ronald Schapendonk, Global Director of Marketing at 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", he adds.
For 2022 NEC identifies the following top 10 Smart Enterprise Drivers:
Digital Transformation
The integration of digital technology into all areas of an enterprise is fundamentally changing how organizations operate and deliver value to customers. Digital Transformation is key for enterprises to enrich their operations with innovative solutions and technologies like cloud computing, IoT, data analytics, mobile internet, artificial intelligence, voice recognition and application convergence.
Ubiquitous Connectedness
Making staff omnipresent and ‘always on’ is key for smart enterprises to operate efficiently and effectively in today’s business environments. Organizations are capitalizing on mobility solutions that enable employees to work from just about anywhere, at any given time whether on-site, at home, between appointments or while traveling.
Smart Collaborative Workspace
Hybrid working being the new normal urges enterprises to keep remote workers engaged. Smart Workspaces allow disparate teams to work together in real time and provide easy access to tools such as click-to-call and conference capabilities, file sharing and digital white-boarding and embed these capabilities within business workflows.
From Experience to Engagement
The battle among enterprises for tomorrow’s customers is fought and won on customer experience. Smart enterprises push hard to deliver connected Customer Experiences (CX) across channels, processes and departments - making contact easy and pleasant, lowering thresholds, presenting options most relevant to the customer and ensuring swift response to queries.
Dynamic Delivery as a Service
Modular services and flexible deployment models allow businesses to invest in just what is needed now, trimming up-front costs with full options for future expansion. Smart enterprises take advantage of Cloud solutions that are scalable and offer a pricing tier that charges only for the resources used. Programmable communications enables companies to embed voice, messaging and video into business applications and workflows via simple-to-use APIs.
Cloud Centric Accelerates
Moving IT & Communications provisioning to the cloud – be it in a public, on-premises or hybrid model - helps organizations reduce risk, reduce costs and increase revenue. Cloud-based deployments can adopt new technologies much faster and more easily, with new functionality and applications driving rapid innovation. To fully leverage existing on-premises infrastructure many enterprises will adopt hybrid and multi-cloud models.
Ensuring Data Security
The power of capturing and analysing data offers tremendous opportunities to drive business intelligence and services. Our dependence on IT systems however make cyber security a key topic. Embedding work from home also creates a greater need for security management during online collaboration. As data sets grow, organizations find it increasingly complex to manage all collected information and need flexible and scalable storage solutions.
Holistic Business Continuity
Today’s high performance enterprises require a robust communications and IT infrastructure providing always-on availability. The upsurge of remote working makes it all the more urgent for enterprises to ensure infrastructure and application security. Fault tolerance solutions that deliver Five 9s uninterrupted service, virtualized infrastructures and geo-redundancy technology protect critical data and ensure business operations.
Augmented Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence and machine learning enable systems that are self-educating, self-healing and proactive. AI tools will become widely available through cloud platforms and open-source software. Augmented Intelligence focuses on enhancing rather than substituting human involvement. Extended reality (XR) combines real and virtual environments with human-machine interaction.
Digital Inclusion
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how important digital connectivity is when physical presence is not possible. Virtual and augmented reality technologies are removing distance between people, information and experiences, transforming the ways people live and work. As technology advances, digital inclusion will encourage all people to participate in society, offering more potential for individuals to bloom and realizing a brighter future for all.
Combining its capabilities and rich portfolios in Communications and IT, NEC is unique in being able to provide enterprises, government authorities and individuals with solutions that cover the full spectrum of their operations. The level of integration of NEC’s network, server, storage and communications solutions highlight the power of these technologies and their application to benefit customers.