What enterprise IT leaders should do to thrive amidst Digital Disruption?

With the age of digitization upon us, every organization has to become more agile and innovate. Otherwise, someone else will come out of now where and take a lead. What sort of disruption is happening, which are some of the leading disruptors, how can IT leadership of an organization help take the lead, and what are some of the solutions that can help?

CIOL spoke to Karen Holland, VP Enterprise Group – Asia Pacific & Japan, Hewlett Packard Enterprise to understand.

Here’s the excerpt and the video clip of the interview:

What are some of the changes you're seeing in the business in India as well as in Asia today?

There’s absolutely never been a better time to be in IT, Why? Because the rapid pace of digitization is changing the ways organizations operate.

So, digitization is disrupting new markets, and existing markets, and it’s also enabling existing companies and established companies to innovate and to provide new services and new products to their customers.

Now, digital disruption and new organizations aren’t just springing up in Silicon Valley, but they’re springing up here in Asia and especially here in India.

What I’m seeing is a lot of origination and a lot of innovative companies being born in India, and with really the type of services that I’m not seeing anywhere else in Asia.

How can organizations unleash their digital potential?

All these organizations have devices that can now be connected to the Internet. Imagine all the data and intelligence we can get from those devices and then incorporate them into new processes and into the development of new and better services for consumers.

Digital is all about customer experience, new services, new revenue streams, for which to happen, you need fantastic operational background, because in the digital business, a bad online experience, is a bad business experience, so it has to be smooth.

Underpinning all of this transformation is actually the transformation of IT, which is what’s powering the new digital economy. It’s what’s powering and enabling customers to make the changes that they need to make. So IT has now moved most definitely from the back room to the board room. It’s the IT leaders of today that are going to be creating this new value for organizations.

These new revenue streams that are going to be taking companies to new heights and levels, but underneath that, they need that solid ID background, which is where companies like HPE can really partner with businesses to take them on to that next level of their digital journey.

How can HPE help enterprise IT become a business value creator?

Where do you see India on the digital disruption curve?

I see new types of businesses that are springing up from all the innovation and creativity in the Indian market.

Let me give you three examples of that. First, look at the transportation industry. We’re familiar with Uber and Ola. What these organizations have done is that they have completely disrupted the taxi service. The way they can link up riders with drivers, like never before. If you look at it, companies like Uber and Ola have only been around for just a few years, and their growth is tremendous already.

Healthcare is another industry that’s been disrupted. There’s a great company called Portea, which is very innovative, and has linked healthcare professionals with individuals to provide services in the convenience of their own homes. It’s a highly innovative and highly disruptive organization.

Another industry that’s being disrupted is the payments industry, and a great example is another India example. A company that has originated here and originated new concepts--Paytm. The company is taking advantage of the highest mobile phone penetration in the world, where credit card penetration is pretty low. Paytm is offering a service where users can pay all their utility and other bills online through app. You might say that online banks can do that, but Paytm is also offering Amazon like experience. They can use Paytm as a digital wallet and take it not only online, but also offline space, allowing customers to walk into stores and use Paytm to pay for services. It’s hugely innovative, and hugely disruptive!

Besides these, there are also industries like manufacturing that are still to be disrupted in that scale.

How does HPE plan to cater to the needs of the businesses in this digital age?

If you look at it, computing hasn’t fundamentally changed in 60 years, and with the amount of data that’s going to be produced, our current systems will just not be able to cope up.

At HPE, we’re taking an industry lead to create a new, transformational compute architecture for the new generation for what’s required in the future. We’re working with HPE labs, which is dedicated to providing a lot cool stuff especially for the digital enterprise and digital economy.

We’re calling this the machine, which is pushing the boundaries of physics behind IT. So we’re going to be using electrons for computing, photons for communication, and Ions for storage. So fundamentally, we’re creating a brand new, fundamental architecture, which will allow us to make that quantum leap, which we need to make to provide the type of efficiency and performance required for the digital world, and the digital economy.