Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2023: The Year Enterprises Embrace Digital Transformation
By Ken Barth, CEO of Catalogic Software
Digital transformation has been a
buzzword for several years. And its meaning has been up for interpretation, as
each digital transformation initiative will be a different experience for every
company. But most can agree that digital transformation is the adoption of
technology that ultimately results in a change in how a business
operates.
Organizations that have or are
about to place emphasis on their digital transformations will do so to speed up
processes. With significant portions of the workforce located at remote
locations for at least part of the week, digital transformation will better
enable them to complete tasks and assignments on time.
We anticipate digital
transformation initiatives will be prioritized by organizations in 2023. The promise
of the refinement in quality of services, faster time to market, increased
ability to scale and lower costs are all important drivers for adoption.
It's important to point out that
the start to 2023 will be difficult with a looming recession that could create
job loss. Other factors for a sluggish start to the new year include ongoing
high energy prices, and continuing supply chain disruptions.
With these economic elements in
play, it is likely that the tech sector will tone back its investment
perspective. Instead of spending cash to grow business unprofitably, it's
likely that businesses will be more introspective and slow their growth to
preserve cash and take a wait and see approach to see how the year goes. It's
not a reduction in business, but instead, maintaining the status quo until we
know what's in store for 2023.
In this environment, digital
transformations will begin to take root in organizations previously too busy
and spread too thin to fully embark on the effort. While businesses will take
overall measures to preserve cash, the planned spend will go toward technology
acquisition in 2023. The investments are going to go there. Businesses are
and will continue to look for ways to optimize processes and even replace the
people they've lost to the Great Resignation.
After living and working through
the economic downturns of 2000, 2008, and now 2022, we can see that we are much
more digitized, even in our everyday lives, than we were 14 years ago. In
2008, if a business needed to research the value of a particular technology,
the CIO was at the heart of the conversation. Today, we're all technology
practitioners and see the value of how tech drives revenue and increases
profit. Digital transformation initiatives have many supporters within
organizations that can see the value and will support the process.
As an
IT vendor, Catalogic sells through channel partners, and we are focused on
ensuring our customers are always able to shield and recover their data. In a
world of evolving malware and cyberattacks and security breaches spurring
supply chain disruptions, our latest ransomware shielding capabilities provide
a sense of confidence to our enterprise data protection customers, helping keep
them on track for their digital transformations.
While our customers' transform and
enhance their digital services and operational costs, Catalogic provides free
cyber resilience and data protection services for their developers at the
outset of an agreement. These new applications are typically running in
containers in Kubernetes environments in public clouds vs. in on-premises
servers and storage. The channel businesses that can offer assistance to their
customers and help them to transition their applications to new environments
will thrive as the recession eases.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ken Barth is Catalogic’s Chief Executive Officer. Ken has over 20 years of management leadership experience in the technology industry. The Founder of TekTools, Inc, he served as the Chief Executive Officer and President of the Company from November 1997 until January 2010. During his tenure, the company developed and brought to market the KAWA and Profiler products. KAWA, a Java Integrated Development Environment, garnered more than 50,000 users worldwide before the product and the development team was acquired by the Allaire Corp. (NASDAQ: ALLR) in November of 2000. Profiler, an IT Infrastructure Monitoring and Reporting suite, grew to well over 1,000 customers prior to its acquisition by Solarwinds in January 2010. Prior to that, from 1993 to 1997 he was a founding shareholder and helped to build Micromuse, Inc from a U.S. startup to a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: MUSE).
Ken is a graduate from the University of North Texas and actively supports a number of education focused organizations in the not for profit community.