Johannesburg, 20 Oct 2021
Anthony Marshall, Senior Research Director, Thought Leadership at the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), says new research by the IBM IBV has found expanding interconnectivity between ecosystem partners.
Says Marshall: “We are seeing real change in business philosophy and innovation, with a trend towards more openness and the construction of broader business ecosystems. This has been prevalent in the banking sector for some time, where banks have transitioned from building innovation internally to building up ecosystems with far more open engagement and freer flows of data with new organisations, allowing them to move faster to innovate. So governance, security, hybrid cloud and integration are important focus areas.”
Lisa-Giane Fisher, IBM IBV leader for the Middle East and Africa, says: “South African CEOs are focusing on rebuilding their business models and more than half say they see an increasingly important role for platforms. They are interconnected with the ability to securely share data across an ecosystem of partners, suppliers and other stakeholders. This growing trend would partially explain a growing focus on integrating data and securing it,” she says.
Dave Albert, Global Business Partner Segment Lead, IBM Data and AI Apps, says IBM is seeing many more customers leveraging business partner environments. “Integration has always been a challenge, so we are seeing more modernisation with solutions like IBM Cloud Pak for Data becoming more important. Amid these changes, governance and security remain a priority; so our platform has it built right in.”
Marshall, Fisher and Albert will be among the experts addressing a webinar hosted by iOCO and IBM, in collaboration with ITWeb, on 'AI Powered Analytics for Digital Acceleration'. This event, on 27 October, will reveal findings of the IBM IBV’s new digital acceleration study, the factors that accelerate business, why data and analytics efforts can fail, and how IBM is enabling business transformation through its AI-powered analytics innovations. For more information and to register for this event, click here.