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1 Out of 3 Companies Underprepared for Digital Transformation

Daniel Mayo

One third (33 percent) of enterprises globally are underprepared for “digital transformation” – the process of replacing legacy networks and dedicated service platforms with a coherent digital environment that is flexible, cost-effective, and capable of delivering changes rapidly and dynamically – according to Ovum's ICT Enterprise Insights report for 2017.

The research also revealed that while 60 percent believe their organization’s process of digital transformation is “well advanced” or “in progress,” only 7 percent believe it to be complete.

Respondents from the financial services sector demonstrated the most confidence in enabling digital transformation, with 60 percent of enterprise IT decision makers in this industry believing the process to be “well advanced” or “in progress.” Of these organizations, retail banks claim to be the most advanced (45 percent), followed by payments, insurance and financial markets (40 percent). By contrast, respondents from the retail sector considered their industry the least prepared for digital transformation. In the public sector, 38 percent of respondents thought their sector was experiencing some or significant disruption to services from digital technologies, only 29 percent thought their own organization was affected.

The uneven maturity of digital transformation by industry and country has created a complex landscape for sales teams to navigate, but our data plays a significant role in quantifying for our customers their target markets’ investment appetite and timescales. This enables them to quickly and confidently make decisions about where to focus their go-to-market and product investments.

In addition to this, the study indicated that while IT spend is growing globally, the top 3 regions where spend is increasing most rapidly are South Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America, with North America, Western Europe and Australia showing the slowest increase in spend.

The new study closely examined the process of digital transformation currently taking place within enterprises today, and found many are struggling with omnichannel customer/citizen engagement, predominantly focused on online/mobile channels to date. 30 percent of enterprises are only at the early or not-started stages, while 25 percent of enterprises claim to be at least well advanced in this area.

Ovum’s ICT Enterprise Insights report provides insight for Ovum clients to help determine which industry in each market region is best prepared for digital transformation, how enterprises in their target vertical markets are prioritizing their IT and communication investment, and how much IT budgets are expected to increase or decrease for their target customers in 2017.

Methodology: Ovum’s ICT Enterprise Insights 2017 is based on the world’s largest annual IT decision-maker survey, covering 7,000+ enterprises across 62 countries, 80 technologies and 15 industries.

Daniel Mayo is Director of IT, Data & Tools at Ovum.

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1 Out of 3 Companies Underprepared for Digital Transformation

Daniel Mayo

One third (33 percent) of enterprises globally are underprepared for “digital transformation” – the process of replacing legacy networks and dedicated service platforms with a coherent digital environment that is flexible, cost-effective, and capable of delivering changes rapidly and dynamically – according to Ovum's ICT Enterprise Insights report for 2017.

The research also revealed that while 60 percent believe their organization’s process of digital transformation is “well advanced” or “in progress,” only 7 percent believe it to be complete.

Respondents from the financial services sector demonstrated the most confidence in enabling digital transformation, with 60 percent of enterprise IT decision makers in this industry believing the process to be “well advanced” or “in progress.” Of these organizations, retail banks claim to be the most advanced (45 percent), followed by payments, insurance and financial markets (40 percent). By contrast, respondents from the retail sector considered their industry the least prepared for digital transformation. In the public sector, 38 percent of respondents thought their sector was experiencing some or significant disruption to services from digital technologies, only 29 percent thought their own organization was affected.

The uneven maturity of digital transformation by industry and country has created a complex landscape for sales teams to navigate, but our data plays a significant role in quantifying for our customers their target markets’ investment appetite and timescales. This enables them to quickly and confidently make decisions about where to focus their go-to-market and product investments.

In addition to this, the study indicated that while IT spend is growing globally, the top 3 regions where spend is increasing most rapidly are South Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America, with North America, Western Europe and Australia showing the slowest increase in spend.

The new study closely examined the process of digital transformation currently taking place within enterprises today, and found many are struggling with omnichannel customer/citizen engagement, predominantly focused on online/mobile channels to date. 30 percent of enterprises are only at the early or not-started stages, while 25 percent of enterprises claim to be at least well advanced in this area.

Ovum’s ICT Enterprise Insights report provides insight for Ovum clients to help determine which industry in each market region is best prepared for digital transformation, how enterprises in their target vertical markets are prioritizing their IT and communication investment, and how much IT budgets are expected to increase or decrease for their target customers in 2017.

Methodology: Ovum’s ICT Enterprise Insights 2017 is based on the world’s largest annual IT decision-maker survey, covering 7,000+ enterprises across 62 countries, 80 technologies and 15 industries.

Daniel Mayo is Director of IT, Data & Tools at Ovum.

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The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...