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2022 Digital Transformation Predictions

As part of 2022 APM Predictions list, APMdigest asked industry experts to predict how Digital Transformation will evolve and impact business in 2022.

Digital Transformation Projects Accelerate

According to IDC, by 2022, 70% of all organizations will have accelerated use of digital technologies, transforming existing business processes to drive customer engagement, employee productivity, and business resiliency. As we saw the pandemic accelerate remote working, there is not much sign of things returning to normal any time soon. In 2022, we will see an increase in digital transformation projects that provide better collaboration across multi-functional teams, requiring stricter data governance and tighter security, while providing cost and performance-optimized hybrid data infrastructures.
Venkat Rajaji
VP Product Management, Quest Software

As 2022 approaches, the pace of digital transformation in enterprises will accelerate. With more applications moving to containers and Kubernetes, legacy storage data management platforms built to support monoliths won't be able to provide the scalability and granularity to successfully manage data for larger distributed microservices based applications. In addition, the need for agility and speed in building and deploying applications will become more significant, which is where containers will be the best options for optimal scalability and adaptability for rapid data delivery.
Kirby Wadsworth
CMO, ionir

Next-Gen of Digital Transformation is Digital Automation

In 2022, we'll see industries incorporate automation into their digital transformation strategies. Digital transformation has been a mainstay in the marketplace for a while now, and the progress and escalation due to the pandemic and our remote world have many marketplaces providing automation for the digitalization of automation. In the wake of successful digital transformation, we'll see automation begin to touch all facets of businesses for automation in fulfillment, accounting, advertising and marketing. This concept will percolate for the SMB with customer relationship automation, which I anticipate where we'll see the most growth in the next decade.
Borya Shakhnovich
CEO, airSlate

HYPERAUTOMATION REPLACES AUTOMATION

Hyperautomation will replace automation as the next business imperative for organizations undergoing digital transformation. Advances in automation have created operational efficiencies, but these automations are typically static. If processes, workflows, apps or data change, developers must update their automations — essentially turning an automated process intto a manual one. Hyperautomation, on the other hand, uses AI/ML to identify patterns to create smarter automations that can evolve and adapt to change at the speed and scale businesses need now.
Ed Macosky
SVP and Head of Product, Boomi

CEO becomes more technical

Digital business has been our reality for several years now, but the pandemic completely cemented that reality for businesses. While it used to be that CFOs and the finance organization influenced core business strategy, now it's the software side that dictates strategy. For example, if the C-level executives don't understand software development, then M&A opportunities will suffer and silos will pop up throughout a business — burdening the entire organization and limiting customer success. Moving forward, we'll see CEOs grow their technical acumen and install digital board members with non-traditional software backgrounds to succeed in the digital world.
Derek Holt
GM of Agile and DevOps, Digital.ai

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE HINDERS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Organizational change and resistance of IT organizations/staff to adopt new models (e.g. project-to-product thinking) will continue to be the #1 impediment for companies attempting to achieve their digital transformation goals.
Julian Dunn
Director of Product Marketing, PagerDuty

Recovery From Failed and Flawed Transformations

The pandemic made digital transformation a business mandate for every type of organization, everywhere, all at the same time. From SMBs to huge enterprises, everyone raced to adopt new digital tools to support new ways of working and of reaching customers. In the rush, many of these transformations failed, or were implemented without reaching their full impact. Organizations who underwent digital transformation in 2020 and 2021 will look back in 2022 to measure their success — and, given that pre-pandemic upwards of 80% of digital transformations may have failed — they will likely discover significant room for improvement. As a result, in 2022 we will see the c-suite questioning IT on the value of tech investments and tech teams, and in turn, optimizing and implementing more new approaches and platforms throughout their stacks.
Tej Redkar
Chief Product Officer, LogicMonitor

The Latest

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...

2022 Digital Transformation Predictions

As part of 2022 APM Predictions list, APMdigest asked industry experts to predict how Digital Transformation will evolve and impact business in 2022.

Digital Transformation Projects Accelerate

According to IDC, by 2022, 70% of all organizations will have accelerated use of digital technologies, transforming existing business processes to drive customer engagement, employee productivity, and business resiliency. As we saw the pandemic accelerate remote working, there is not much sign of things returning to normal any time soon. In 2022, we will see an increase in digital transformation projects that provide better collaboration across multi-functional teams, requiring stricter data governance and tighter security, while providing cost and performance-optimized hybrid data infrastructures.
Venkat Rajaji
VP Product Management, Quest Software

As 2022 approaches, the pace of digital transformation in enterprises will accelerate. With more applications moving to containers and Kubernetes, legacy storage data management platforms built to support monoliths won't be able to provide the scalability and granularity to successfully manage data for larger distributed microservices based applications. In addition, the need for agility and speed in building and deploying applications will become more significant, which is where containers will be the best options for optimal scalability and adaptability for rapid data delivery.
Kirby Wadsworth
CMO, ionir

Next-Gen of Digital Transformation is Digital Automation

In 2022, we'll see industries incorporate automation into their digital transformation strategies. Digital transformation has been a mainstay in the marketplace for a while now, and the progress and escalation due to the pandemic and our remote world have many marketplaces providing automation for the digitalization of automation. In the wake of successful digital transformation, we'll see automation begin to touch all facets of businesses for automation in fulfillment, accounting, advertising and marketing. This concept will percolate for the SMB with customer relationship automation, which I anticipate where we'll see the most growth in the next decade.
Borya Shakhnovich
CEO, airSlate

HYPERAUTOMATION REPLACES AUTOMATION

Hyperautomation will replace automation as the next business imperative for organizations undergoing digital transformation. Advances in automation have created operational efficiencies, but these automations are typically static. If processes, workflows, apps or data change, developers must update their automations — essentially turning an automated process intto a manual one. Hyperautomation, on the other hand, uses AI/ML to identify patterns to create smarter automations that can evolve and adapt to change at the speed and scale businesses need now.
Ed Macosky
SVP and Head of Product, Boomi

CEO becomes more technical

Digital business has been our reality for several years now, but the pandemic completely cemented that reality for businesses. While it used to be that CFOs and the finance organization influenced core business strategy, now it's the software side that dictates strategy. For example, if the C-level executives don't understand software development, then M&A opportunities will suffer and silos will pop up throughout a business — burdening the entire organization and limiting customer success. Moving forward, we'll see CEOs grow their technical acumen and install digital board members with non-traditional software backgrounds to succeed in the digital world.
Derek Holt
GM of Agile and DevOps, Digital.ai

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE HINDERS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Organizational change and resistance of IT organizations/staff to adopt new models (e.g. project-to-product thinking) will continue to be the #1 impediment for companies attempting to achieve their digital transformation goals.
Julian Dunn
Director of Product Marketing, PagerDuty

Recovery From Failed and Flawed Transformations

The pandemic made digital transformation a business mandate for every type of organization, everywhere, all at the same time. From SMBs to huge enterprises, everyone raced to adopt new digital tools to support new ways of working and of reaching customers. In the rush, many of these transformations failed, or were implemented without reaching their full impact. Organizations who underwent digital transformation in 2020 and 2021 will look back in 2022 to measure their success — and, given that pre-pandemic upwards of 80% of digital transformations may have failed — they will likely discover significant room for improvement. As a result, in 2022 we will see the c-suite questioning IT on the value of tech investments and tech teams, and in turn, optimizing and implementing more new approaches and platforms throughout their stacks.
Tej Redkar
Chief Product Officer, LogicMonitor

The Latest

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...