Tech trends redefining Asian business

• Jan 28, 2019

As consumer expectations and the business environment evolve at an even faster rate, clear market winners and losers will begin to emerge. 
Businesses seeking to navigate the complex web of digital transformation, disruption and evolution need to be aware of three key trends that will affect Asian enterprises in 2019. Understanding and exploiting them will be essential to establishing a platform for lasting business success. 
Digitisation and disruption revisited: Much has been written about digitisation and disruption — but it has focused primarily on the technology and the enterprise. This narrow focus will likely change in 2019. 
Technological innovation is not a trend, it’s a constant — and has been so for centuries. What is changing now is the scale, speed, breadth and depth of the impact of digital transformation and disruption. 
In 2019, the enterprise technology dam will burst. Businesses are now more aware than ever that their technology infrastructure — the platform that their entire business, business model and future survival is based on — is no longer suitable and cannot simply be “patched” or tinkered with. 
The traditional infrastructure is hardware-based, slow, inflexible, siloed, costly — in cash, space, energy and staff resources. In short — outdated and offering only limited value. 
To survive, businesses must integrate and utilise the latest tech and innovation across the entire enterprise in real time: changing resources, focus, verticals, or even industry at a moment’s notice to stay up with, and ahead of competitors and the market. 
Technology is no longer just about the business — it is about the wider environment: customer behaviour, market changes, economic direction, as well as tech innovation. Having the next-generation building blocks (hybrid infrastructure) in place and available to navigate this new paradigm will be critical. 
In fact, recent research by Nutanix has already indicated a boom in next-generation infrastructure adoption as Asian enterprises ramp up their ability to better compete intra-regionally and internationally — ushering in a new type of enterprise. 
The smart, flexible digital enterprise: Smart business is not new. Enterprises have been harnessing big data and new technologies to improve efficiency and reduce cost for some time. However, many of these initiatives have simply been project-based — not enterprise wide. That will all change. 
Until recently, trying to get clear visibility from every aspect of the business has proved elusive. The increased adoption of hybrid cloud and enterprise cloud operating systems is removing this last silo of organisational dysfunction and paving the way for real-time, comprehensive and actionable intelligence. 
The digital enterprise will truly arrive this year, responding to the increased sophistication and changing preferences of customers and the need to ensure the company can survive and thrive in a constantly changing world. 
These smarter, flexible businesses will adopt next-generation infrastructure to help realign their operations, personnel, business and even business models. They’ll begin to see, analyse and utilise all of their data, wherever it sits or whatever it runs on. Interoperability and visibility will become standard across the entire enterprise. 
The empowered workforce: Just as enterprises and their markets transform, so too will the workforce and workplace. Employment, economic and social trends are creating new ways of working as digitisation drives workplace transformation. 
For enterprises, employees are now also customers, keen to pick and choose where, when and how they operate. Employees are also no longer “fixed” to traditional working styles or practices. They expect to embrace the tools, technology, style and location of how they work and function. 
Accommodating this provides the business with much more productive, efficient and focused employees — at the cost of traditional “control”. Employees, meanwhile, are now more empowered to operate at optimum efficiency. The cloud is enabling humans and devices to merge, communicating intelligently in real time. 
Once again, enterprise infrastructure must be flexible in respect of the tools, tech and software it can accommodate, and the relevant security, integration, policies and access it can provide. 
However, this flexibility also has consequences for staff. What is really changing for them is the speed and scale of their working environment. Employees will become as flexible as the enterprise, not assigned to one department, function, location, or even team. 
Employees in 2019 will be more generalist than specialist, working across multiple teams, functions and even businesses. They will be mobile — using the “personal” toolkit provided by the digital enterprise to maintain contact, alignment, productivity and effectiveness. 
Like the enterprise, they too will be self-learning, as the pace of innovation and transformation accelerates. Ultimately, how enterprises harness these changes will be critical for improving employee satisfaction, productivity and growth. 
In closing: Any technology that can join the dots and integrate the region’s vastly divergent technology, underlying infrastructure and market size, scope and sophistication is set to redefine the region’s enterprises. 
As the centre of the global economy turns towards Asia, we are in an unrivalled position to benefit — and by creating the building blocks for Asia’s digital future we are helping to redefine the region for even greater success. 
Thawipong Anotaisinthawee is country manager of Nutanix Thailand, a US-based cloud computing software company. 

Source: https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/news/1619006/tech-trends-redefining-asian-business