Just like past years, Gartner blew us away with its annual conference and IT Expo, the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, FL. At MicroFocus, we are always excited to participate and learn ways in which we can better serve our customers. This year’s focus was “Lead 360. Drive Digital to the Core”. A topic that is at the heart of what we do. Here are four highlights from the event:
1: The Digital Movement
Digital is a buzzword in the IT world today, and a hot topic for companies looking to gain an edge over their competition. Explained simply, the digital movement is when “Enterprises seek a digital edge, transform processes, business models, and the customer experience by exploiting the pervasive digital connections between systems, people, places, and things.” Gartner brought this movement to life in the Symposium, and we were impressed to see the innovation that is happening in the IT world. As Michael Brown said at the conference, “We need to continue to push the boundaries of IT to leverage all that digitalization has to offer,” and CIO said “Software will become ‘smarter,’and is at the heart of the digital revolution.”
So what is the difference between Digital strategy and IT strategy? Harvard Business Review explains: “…most IT strategies treat technology in isolation. Think about it — your company may be working on a cloud strategy, social strategy, or mobile strategy. But today’s hottest customer-facing solutions rely on pervasive digital connections in which the individual technologies (cloud, near field communications, mobile, big data, etc.) merge to deliver an experience that looks and feels an awful lot like our natural behavior.” Digitization is about getting everything you can out of all of your technology working together.
2: A Shift in Mentality
With this digital movement, companies should adopt a “detect and respond” approach. It’s about moving from “Distrust until you have a reason to trust” to “Trust until you have a reason to distrust.” The digital movement is here to stay, and software is what is leading the movement. It’s all about letting these programs run to their full potential, rather than limiting them. When implementing new software we take risks. These are risks that innovative companies take and, in the end, will help them to succeed. Being static is not an option here. Successful companies will manage this risk and make smart, informed decisions, investing in and putting their trust into the best software the industry has to offer. A Gartner infographic shows interesting trends in leading companies, pertaining to trusting in digitization:
- 79% of top performers create and participate in digital ecosystems, while only 24% of trailing performers create and participate
- 78% of top performers engage with startups, while 45% of trailing performers ignore startups
- 68% of top performers adopt a bimodal IT strategy, while 17% don’t
- 85% of top performers focus on digital business and 77% also focus on innovation vs. day-to-day IT services
3: 27,445 Exabytes of data!
This is the massive amount of data that is predicted to be on the internet by 2020, as explained by Peter Sondergaard:
(can we insert a tweet? If so, insert https://twitter.com/Gartner_inc/status/795550523978117120 here. If not, create hyperlink above)
When we hear this, we instantly think about the management of that data. Our first thoughts are “Where will it be stored?” and “What can be done with all that information to improve business?” As communication technology grows it will create data that will be increasingly difficult (and important) to manage. This is where Archiving 2.0 steps in. In case you didn’t see our video on the bus ride into the event, here it is:
Archiving 2.0 is the future of archiving. We see Retain becoming much more than an archive where data is secured in case of litigation or E-discovery. We see it becoming a source of information that will be referred to daily in order to make informed and strategic business decisions. The growth of the Internet will be accompanied by the growth of Archiving 2.0.
4: The tech community
One highlight was simply being able to participate in the event and community. The tech community is full of excitement, and we love being able to collaborate and learn with its brightest minds, pushing performance and innovation to new levels. One of the ideas that we brought to the conference was “Supercharge Office 365.” This closely follows the theme of the conference. A huge part of digital strategy is to combine technologies, leveraging them all in order to improve operations and processes. Retain, combined with Office 365, creates that digital edge. Office 365 is a great email platform, but has minimal archiving capabilities. Retain fills in by archiving all 365 email, and integrating social media archiving as well as mobile archiving – all in one secure, unified archive. This archive then becomes an asset for any company as a source of information and insurance against litigation.
We also sponsored the meal hall, because who doesn’t love food??
