Businesses are at a pivotal moment in time. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that global GDP shrank by 4.4% in 2020, and contraction in the most advanced economies is estimated to be 5.8%. Today, however, vaccine availability and distribution brings us the brightest glimmer of hope yet that slowing the devastation of the virus may be a reality. More effectively addressing the health crisis also means economic recovery is becoming a stronger possibility – if businesses can lean into change and embrace new ways of working.

To enable this recovery, organisations across every industry are accelerating their shift to digital solutions. Turning to cloud technology promises to solve their most challenging problems and enable opportunities amidst changing customer demands and regulatory frameworks. In fact, McKinsey estimates the pandemic has fueled a three- to four-year acceleration of companies adopting digital technologies to support their customer and supply chain interactions. The most innovative companies need to rethink how employees collaborate and how they can digitise customer experiences.

Here are three key ways in which companies can use technology to their advantage and fuel their own recovery.

Businesses need to lower their costs and replatform for the future
Macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties create unknowns for every business. As a result, CEOs and CFOs are naturally seeking to optimise areas of their organisations.

Buying, maintaining and upgrading the technology infrastructure needed to run a business is not only difficult, but increasingly it is prohibitively expensive. Fixed IT systems require users to accurately predict their future needs, which now seem out-of-touch with our ever-changing business landscape. By contrast, a cloud server ensures that you only invest in the right amount, enabling users to flexibly adjust their consumption to meet fluctuating demands. This allows businesses to reinvest the remaining capital in creating customer experiences that will drive value creation. Gartner estimates that infrastructure-as-a-service is expected to grow 27.6% in 2021, precisely because of these cost savings and operational efficiencies – two of the greatest benefits of moving to the cloud.

Additionally, companies are realising the potential of a multicloud strategy. This set-up allows businesses to achieve an open, secure and agile infrastructure that can run in any environment, on any cloud. To grow and innovate within a company may mean moving entire on-premise IT infrastructure to the cloud, to transform digital operations.

Every business needs a digital front door
The remote nature of our lives—which is a permanent shift—is compelling businesses to use data and analytics to understand their customers better, overall enriching the customer experience.

Lockdowns have accelerated customer preferences for digital alternatives. Face-to-face customer service – a physical front door- is no longer enough to sustain a growing business. Today, customers also demand a ‘digital entrance’, and it’s transcending virtually every industry. In retail, companies are using AI and machine learning to deliver a better, more accurate online experience. Healthcare providers need secure, scalable platforms that support digital patient visits known as telemedicine.

Digital front doors are also changing the way governments work, like leveraging the cloud to distribute unemployment insurance online. With digitisation comes the opportunity for businesses to use data and analytics to make smarter decisions and get closer to their customers by creating more useful and productive experiences. By investing in innovative digital front doors now, companies will remain agile throughout the pandemic, whilst pivoting with changing customer expectations. Companies should celebrate the ease of digital experiences, which are personalisable and in no way mean a sacrifice on quality.

Companies need to embrace new ways of working
The future of work—and, for that matter, the definition of “workplace” itself—has transformed. While the pandemic as we know it will one day subside, our new way of working is here to stay, and it’s heightened the need to rethink how people get things done. We see the need for a new hybrid work environment, where companies and employees can use a digital workspace that allows them to collaborate on a flexible, cloud-native platform to generate new ideas and connect with each other. A successful transition into this new era of work is contingent on how successfully companies keep their people engaged, productive, and connected while reevaluating existing communication and collaboration tools.

No one can predict what the coming years will bring, but companies can control how they respond to uncertainty by investing in agile infrastructure that keeps people and connection at the heart of their operations. At this inflection point in the story of work, the ways in which each company responds to the challenges and opportunities it brings will define their relevance in the future. Those who lean into change, no matter how uncomfortable, and embrace the opportunity to fundamentally transform, will be stronger than before.

In a bid to ramp up its cloud portfolio in China, Microsoft is planning to open a new Azure region in the country through its local operating partner, 21Vianet.

The move comes amid growing demand for cloud services in China.

This expansion is expected to effectively double the capacity of Microsoft’s intelligent cloud portfolio in China in the coming years, which includes Azure, Microsoft Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform operated by 21Vianet, Microsoft said in a blog post on Friday.

According to the white paper, China Cloud Industry Development1, the cloud market in China is expected to reach 300 billion yuan (approximately $46 billion) in 2023.

In response to the pandemic, 63 per cent of organisations in China are leveraging cloud-related innovations to accelerate digitisation in their products, payments, e-commerce, automation, and more.

“This unveils a big opportunity. Microsoft Cloud operated by 21Vianet was the first international public cloud compliantly launched in China through a local operating partner,” Alain Crozier, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft Greater China Region (GCR), said in a statement.

“The upcoming region will reinforce the capabilities to help further nurture local talents, stimulate local innovation, grow local technology ecosystems, and empower businesses in a wide range of industries to achieve more,” Crozier said.

Microsoft has been collaborating with 21Vianet to run its cloud services in China since 2014 as foreign cloud service providers are prohibited from owning and operating their own datacentres in the country.

In accordance with Chinese regulatory requirements, Azure regions operated by 21Vianet in China are physically separated instances from Microsoft’s global cloud but are built on the same cloud technical base as its global peers.

The consistent architecture across China and global markets makes it easy for multinational companies to transplant their IT systems and business applications to China or vice versa.

“Announced in 2012, and officially launched in March 2014 with two initial regions, Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet was the first international public cloud service to become generally available in the China market,” Omar Khan, General Manager, Microsoft Azure, wrote in the blog post.

“Following Azure, Microsoft Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform operated by 21Vianet successively launched in China in 2014, 2019, and 2020.”

Barely 12 months after launching an initiative to preserve open source software for future generations, GitHub is now sharing these collections with major libraries around the world.

The GitHub Archive Program include the GitHub Arctic Code Vault, which stores 186 reels of piqlFilm and 21 terabytes of repository data, deem under the frozen Arctic ground.

Now, GitHub is donating a collection of 17,000 ‘greatest hits’ repositories in England, Egypt, California, and in GitHub headquarters.

The repositories will be stored at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in England, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (AKA the Library of Alexandria) in Egypt, Stanford Libraries in California, and GitHub’s San Francisco HQ.

GitHub says that the Bodleian Library is one of Europe’s oldest libraries. Librarian Richard Ovenden says preservation of knowledge is of enormous importance to libraries and society.

“In this digital age, we must constantly seek new ways of preserving critical information, such as code. Librarians and archivists, the custodians of the past, are also the advance-guards of the future. Our community has developed open approaches to software development, data practices, and scholarly communication for years, consequently, it feels like the Bodleian Libraries is a perfect partner with GitHub and the other partner libraries around the world to ensure the preservation of open source software.”

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is located in Africa, and is a partner participating in the Internet Archive. Library director Mostafa El Feki says the library is committed to preserving heritage.

“The Bibliotheca Alexandrina developed several initiatives including web archiving, book digitization, and 3D artifact digitisation. Therefore, we are delighted to work with GitHub to preserve yet another highly valuable form of human heritage: the open-source software that powers much of the technologies, on which our society today depends.”

Stanford Libraries at Stanford University, California, is the third recipient. It is known for its work in digital archiving and research.

Stanford Libraries vice provost and university librarian Michael Keller says the the announcement is a creative way to conserve history, innovation and code.

“We are pleased to be a partner on the GitHub Archive Program, the reliance on multiple providers of the same service corresponds to our LOCKSS program, driven by the principle that Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe.”

But how do you present open-source archives in aesthetically-pleasing way? GitHub wanted to make the archive ‘beautiful’, so it created a design that blended an homage to the spirit of open source software and history.

Swiss health and InsurTech firm dacadoo, which provides digital health engagement and health risk quantification systems to insurers, has coined the term “integrated insurance operators” to describe insurers that will truly grow and define the next 10-20 years in the industry.

Such insurers offer a fully integrated digital ecosystem, including a tangible health and wellbeing proposition, to elevate the customer experience and engage their members through mobile-first digital health engagement platforms.

“They will drive the disruption from within,” said Mr Peter Ohnemus, president & CEO of dacadoo.

He said that few insurers are operating based on today’s consumer behaviour, and they do not reflect the expectations of the mobile-first, digital and dynamic generation.

Consumers’ shifting demands are now combining with digital innovation to transform analogue business models, with record funding being allocated towards InsurTech developments, even against a backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Many insurers have failed to fully grasp the magnitude of the changes that are happening,” said Mr Ohnemus.

“For the insurers, building and leading integrated health and wellbeing digital ecosystems means they will have a unique understanding of a consumer’s life, while the consumer gains relevant health advice and personalised lifestyle navigations,” said Mr Ohnemus. “Such micro-services and lifestyle-based insurance products will become extremely popular, as long as customer privacy and trust are retained and a good mobile experience is delivered.”

dacadoo has conducted an insurance industry research project, the Global Integrated Insurance Operator Survey, which ran throughout October 2020 and collected responses from over 300 Life & Health insurance executives globally.

One of the main objectives behind this research initiative was to discover how insurance executives see their organisations changing within the near future and whether digitisation and customer-centricity have become an important part of that transformation.

The survey report, titled “Global Market Report on the Integrated Insurance Operator—Becoming a digital leader within the life and health insurance industry in the new normal”, shows that:

60% of insurers either already have a digital health engagement platform or are planning and/or implementing it 86% believe that implementing an integrated insurance operation sits either high or middle in their rank of strategic initiatives

68% agree that their digital transformation has become a business survival imperative

69% reveal that they are implementing new products and services as part of an integrated insurance operation, whereas 17% say that they will consider implementing new products and services in the next three years or more.

In 2013, the Italian electronics manufacturer launched a smart telemetric system for local and remote cryogenic tanks monitoring.

MiniCRIOTEL communicates by a 4G modem on GPRS cellular network and sends data to the server on AMBRA Sistemi’s web application CrioSystemSupervisor.

“The GPRS technology reduces costs significantly for data transfer allowing a high frequency of data communication,” Massimiliano Sabbatini, Business Development Manager at AMBRA Sistemi, explained to gasworld.

“A continuous monitoring system helps gas suppliers to eliminate product shortage and/or extra deliveries and ensure sufficient level for each customer.”

Level and pressure monitoring are available on two displays on the unit front panel and measurements are performed by AMBRA Sistemi’s DRT sensor, which is a combined strength-gauge transducer integrated into the unit and patented by the company.

“This sensor, specifically developed for cryogenic tanks under pressure, provides high performances regarding accuracy, endurance to mechanical bursts, reliability, compatibility, small size and low cost compared with whichever different solution available in the market,” Sabbatini continued.

“The same unit can be applied to tanks from 500 litres up to 100,000 litres for oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, argon and nitrous oxide gases.”

“The power supply of MiniCRIOTEL can be provided by solar cells, external 24 Vdc or long life battery pack; the aluminium housing is with protection proof IP65 and a neodymium magnetic kit allows to install the unit onboard of the cryogenic tanks quickly and in an easy way.”

“In order to minimise the energy consumption required for operations with solar cells, the device remains in sleep-mode and switches on the GPRS modem at regular frequency.”

“However, level and pressure local measurements are updated every 15 seconds for real time local monitoring thanks to the extra low power consumption of our DRT sensor.”

Sabbatini said there is a big interest from all gas suppliers to cover all their cryogenic tanks with telemetry systems.

“In many cases there are applied integrated system based on general purpose solutions which requires to involve technicians with high skill and high cost for complex installation. These limits slow down this process of telemetry diffusion,” Sabbatini highlighted.

IoT

As the world of gases increasingly looks at digitisation, optimisation and lower environmental impact, AMBRA Sistemi’s technology has been making a valuable contribution in this area for many years.

“There are still wide margins for development that will offer interesting opportunities in the short future to all companies that will have the ability to understand its potential and adapt quickly to this change,” Sabbatini told gasworld.

“With the help of the industrial 4.0 revolution it is sure that the gases industry can become cleaner, greener and smarter.”

“Cryogenic tanks, transportable pressurised vessels, gas cylinder bundles and single cylinders are destined to become increasingly complex and smart products. It is AMBRA Sistemi’s task and interest to contribute to this ongoing evolution.”

“To achieve this goal, we regularly invest in the design and development of new solutions, with an ever wider range of solutions, in the belief that this is the best way to the success.”

AMBRA Sistemi has already developed IoT solutions for monitoring compressed gas cylinder bundles with NB-IoT and Sigfox technologies.

“We have already carried out test on field with these devices for over 12 months, with positive results and interesting market expectations,” Sabbatini said.

“This project has enormous potentiality given the number of compressed gas cylinder bundles on the gases market.”

“Moreover, AMBRA Sistemi has developed a solution for monitoring individual compressed gas cylinders with NB-IoT and Sigfox technologies.”

“This project is relatively new, but the results are encouraging and the solution is of great interest for the gas market.”

London, 20 October 2020 – Atos has been awarded a leading role on a new cloud computing initiative to help deliver operational efficiencies and enhance customer service for Northumbrian Water, one of the UK’s leading utility providers.

With its Microsoft Azure expertise, Atos is working alongside Northumbrian Water to migrate the first wave of three data processing and storage applications (out of circa 35 applications in the framework) to the cloud over a three-year span.

This is the first of several frameworks to be awarded under an extensive digital transformation initiative that stretches across Northumbrian Water’s operations.

Northumbrian Water will benefit from improved agility, flexibility and control and, as a result of the programme, will be able to deliver enhanced customer experience. The project will therefore increase the reliability of delivering sustainable clean water to over 4.5 million households across the whole of their company supply area which comprises the Northumbrian, Essex and Suffolk regions of England. It will also help Northumbrian Water drive down operating costs and improve overall efficiency by deploying cloud services across the organisation.

Martin Jackson, Head of Strategy and Product Management at Northumbrian Water, said: “Atos demonstrated that it both shares our values and had the ability to provide a compelling solution, combining a strong UK team on the ground with the experience of delivering similar successful projects. We are looking forward to working closely with Atos team over the term of the contract.”

Andy Corkhill, Vice President Energy & Utilities, Atos UK & Ireland, said: “As the new preferred partner of Northumbrian Water for the first wave of applications on the Cloud Migration Framework, this project will be the anchor in the first stages of delivering successful digital transformation, both through the framework and first wave of applications. An agile and efficient utilities sector is vital to the UK, and embracing digitisation is pivotal in providing a sustainable, focused service for our customers in a digital society.”

Steve George, Client Partner, Energy and Utilities at Atos, said: “Migrating data processing and storage to the cloud will help Northumbrian Water enhance security and ensure future scalability, whilst also becoming more operationally efficient. This project, and the wider digital transformation of utilities, will ultimately enable consumers to benefit from more efficient suppliers, improved resilience and customer service.”

Having been selected as the preferred partner for the first wave on the Cloud Migration Framework, Atos has worked closely with the IS team at Northumbrian Water on the migration process of the intial 3 applications.

The Migros community has chosen to partner with Microsoft on its „Journey to the Cloud“. In addition to Microsoft 365, the Swiss retail company will use Azure Services from the Microsoft Cloud in Switzerland in the future, thus accelerating the already advanced digitisation of the entire group of companies.

Patrick Mosberger, Head of IT Infrastructure at Migros-Genossenschafts-Bund, is pleased about the future cooperation: „With our Cloud first strategy, we are taking Migros into a new infrastructure era. The efficient and scalable cloud technology enables us, together with our cooperatives and subsidiaries, to test innovative e-commerce concepts and new business models and to react flexibly to the demands of our customers“.

The Swiss data centers play a central role for Patrick Mosberger: „Security and data protection are core values for Migros. It is important for us to have control and full transparency at all times. The possibility of local data storage in the data centers of Microsoft Switzerland was therefore, in addition to the technological criteria, a very decisive reason for this strategic platform decision and for the partnership with Microsoft.“

Various companies in the Migros community have been using services from Microsoft’s Azure Cloud for a long time, such as the most successful Swiss online retailer Digitec Galaxus AG and the Migros Klubschule.

The future happens all the time. Technology is fuelling a fourth industrial revolution that is exponentially increasing the rate of change and threatening the relevance of all businesses, regardless of size and complexity. This is placing digital transformation — a term that is often misused — on the strategic agenda of every business.

Digital transformation helps CEOs diversify revenue streams, sustain profitability and increase agility. It is a crucial requirement for companies wishing to remain competitive amid accelerating change and disruption.

Comprehensive digital transformation can be complicated. Complex legacy systems with a myriad components make system-wide transformation extremely challenging. And getting it wrong can be consequential. The International Data Corporation estimates that spending on digital transformation technology will have increased to $2-trillion in 2020. And for every $1bn invested in new technology, according to a 2018 study by the Project Management Institute, $112m is lost to projects that fail. By 2020, companies across the globe had thus wasted a collective $224bn on failed technology transformations.

As globalisation takes hold and digitisation of industries and e-commerce expands, the world’s biggest software developers — such as Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon — have had an effect on the business models of companies of all scales globally. We need to be able to interact with them, leverage their capabilities, and compete with them. Every company thus needs to become a software company. For us to compete globally in a digital era, we should be able to build software as well as they do, while ensuring that ethical design and development considerations are top of mind.

All competitive modern organisations need to place far more strategic emphasis on software development, which is at the heart of digital transformation and competitive advantage. There is very little in the modern world that can’t be automated or enabled with software. We speak of “DevAnything”, because anything is possible with modern technology, software, data, analytics and integration. Software is no longer about a business requirement spec that is handed to an IT team. It has become an integrated, continuous process that enables business to develop creative and innovative solutions.

So what does it take to build a world-class posture on software to support digital transformation in your business? Forward-thinking CEOs need assurance that their organisation is able to deliver on the following crucial components:

Design. Software used to be built around how a company could best deliver products and processes. Consumers in the digital age have become far more demanding in pursuit of the frictionless experiences and instant gratification digital can offer. Technology offers a huge opportunity to differentiate customer experiences, but the stakes are much higher given the pace at which the world is moving. Design of the experiences powered by software has become the essential ingredient of differentiation and competitiveness.

Companies should place customers at the epicentre, gaining insight into their needs and problems and deploying human-centred problem-solving and design techniques to solve their biggest business opportunities and challenges. This “design thinking” approach redefines how we build products and customer experiences. Software designed to solve real problems, and for the customer, is a critical success factor.

Agility. Technology has exponentially accelerated the pace at which business is required to change, and this is happening faster than we can realistically anticipate: we will not know what is coming until it is upon us. The only strategic response for modern business is to build radical agility into software development processes. Agility is increasingly the only meaningful currency when building resilient, antifragile organisations that can adapt to change. To compete in a digital age, all companies should be able to develop with the speed and agility of the best in the world.
Organisations should thus move on from old “waterfall” IT approaches, implement agile enablement methodologies, and put tooling in place that ensures the continuous delivery of quality software. CEOs should have the assurance that they are developing software in ways that will allow their business to deliver products, features and processes, from design through to development and testing, at a predictable cost and at the scale and pace expected in the digital era.

Forming strategic partnerships with software development companies that can understand and translate end-user requirements, and that can scale up or down in response to immediate needs while delivering exceptional software, allows companies to quickly pivot and respond to strategic digital opportunities.

Interconnection. We live in a modern world of networked economies in which trading and making connections, which previously required years of manual negotiation and integration, can now happen in the blink of an eye. The new world of business is fuelled by the ability to rapidly connect internally, with partners, and with other third-party networks to offer new products, services and business processes. New products are unlocked through digital connections with third parties, and new customer experiences are delivered and enhanced by accessing specific data and services (location-based services and operations, for example) available from third parties.
At the heart of modern connectivity is the application programming interface (API), a protocol that allows secure and seamless connection to services provided internally to organisations and through third parties. To truly lead in a digital age, the chief information officer should be creating an API-first organisation that builds software based on its ability to connect. Adopting an API-first philosophy, and having the platforms to facilitate smooth exchange of APIs with other businesses, can revolutionise the quality of products and innovation, and rapidly accelerate time to market.

Digital transformation has become an existential concern for businesses nowadays, and has earned its place on the board agenda. A big part of a digital advantage starts with software. CEOs need to know they have a range of critical capabilities in place to ensure they are able to develop world-class experiences for their customers, and automation and enablement for their businesses that will allow them to remain relevant and competitive. Strategic focus on design, agility and interconnection will ensure they are building platform businesses fit to compete in a modern digital world.