Interview
The Future of Work: Enterprise 4.0
- Enterprise 4.0 is characterized as an emerging era beginning now, where legacy phone systems migrate to unified communications as a service, while collaboration and video trends become the norm.
- Distributed workforces will drive the "sweet spot" for software, making project management applications increasingly important and raising the percentage of IT spending dedicated to software.
- Public cloud adoption is expected to gain even more significance for business continuity with growth curves inflecting higher, while desktop as a service and real-time application monitoring will see much higher penetration.
- Established technologies from the previous 20-year cycle remain vital, with inflection rates accelerating due to the pandemic, alongside a focus on continuous analytics, robotic process automation, IoT, and extended reality.
- New defining technologies for Enterprise 4.0 are projected to emerge over the next 10 to 20 years, with security maintaining its status as a strategic spending priority throughout the cycle.
- Large companies possessing capital will likely increase focus on mergers and acquisitions if not well-positioned, while public companies are expected to become bigger defining players in the market.
- Private sector participants in these technology areas will attract venture capital investment over the next five to 10 years as the VC community races to fund the next generation of future leaders.
- Successful enterprises are expected to be those that endure and become multi-generational, with the debate between "sweet versus best of breed" solutions becoming a persistent industry dynamic.