Martec’s law states, “Technology changes exponentially; organizations change logarithmically.”

Translation? Technology will accelerate faster than companies can adapt to increasing data growth and adopt new business models.

In 2019, trends are emerging across industries for business models such as fully managed services. The drivers and challenges for platform modernization include:

1. Explosive data growth from multiple touchpoints

Companies are inundated with wave upon wave of data about customers from different sources, without knowing how to effectively use it to drive revenue growth or deliver a superior customer experience.

The explosive growth of customer data comes from multiple channels such as:

searches from mobile devices (projected to increase 67 percent year over year)

social media content

·e-commerce growth

This means companies must address the challenges of data sprawl and servicing customers through various touchpoints, including data governance strategies with retaining and disposing of data to help reduce the storage costs of managing data from multiple channels.

2. New customer insights

Companies have started to use the cloud and the notion of big data to collect all kinds of information about suppliers, customer and products. Data is everywhere.

For companies to be differentiated in the market, this means turning the data into a company asset. It will require driving analytics across the enterprise to drive new customer insights.

3. New business models

The initial forays for most enterprises into the cloud were focused on the easy things. Moving basic applications such as email and customer relationships management tools (CRMs) to the cloud helped them avoid the purchase of new hardware by renting cloud infrastructure or storage. Building new applications on the cloud sped innovation.

Even now, the majority of mission-critical workloads and sensitive data are run on business systems on-premises. These workloads mean companies will need to reevaluate their governance and platform models or risk being hindered by regulatory requirements and performance challenges.

The trends across industries now involve using the cloud to migrate and innovate applications and require a solution that enables continuous delivery of new features and can guarantee a high level of service quality and resiliency. Companies are looking to run applications on an increasing mix of clouds and vendor platforms. Other drivers include being faced with global and regional data regulations such as GDPR and compliance requirements.

Fully managed services

Deploying the capability to build new apps in the cloud and adopt SaaS models can help drive new capabilities in your business and result in a faster time to value for internal- and external-facing applications. Fully managed services is a business model that offers multiple benefits including:

Subscription pricing that includes hardware, software and provisioning within days rather than the months it takes for on-premises solutions

Increased flexibility using cloud-based tools to augment SaaS and other cloud solutions

Quick implementation of development and testing environments

Faster time-to-value through experimentation and innovation

Master Data Management on Cloud managed

IBM Master Data Management on Cloud is a fully managed solution by which IBM provisions, maintains and manages your master data infrastructure for single or multiple domains such as clients, products, suppliers and more while updating security and privacy controls.

Shift your focus from IT administrative tasks and maintenance to driving greater value for your core business. With critical resources freed up, organizations can spend more resources on how to deliver a more personalized experience to customers and ultimately transform their businesses.