Our ongoing digital revolution is transforming the way we live and work and disrupting entire sectors of our society. Every business is impacted, regardless of size, by changing ecosystems, new competitors, and heightened customer expectations. Businesses and governments can take advantage of digital transformation to improve customer experience and loyalty, boost revenues, reduce costs, and manage risks―in other words, to achieve real outcomes.

One of my favorite stories of digital transformation is Netflix. It started as a logistics company that mailed movie DVDs to your home. Then it pivoted to streaming video over the Internet, which became hugely popular. Now, the company is building services on top of that digital platform, enabling customers to binge-watch Netflix original shows like “House of Cards” and “Narcos.” Netflix has gone through a continuous digital transformation to enhance its customer experience and achieve great business outcomes.

Digital transformation services

IT services, of course, are at the center of these digital transformations. Cutting-edge consumption-based models that offer flexibility and an Intelligent Edge that spawns innovation is helping deliver new customer journeys and new ways of experiencing the world. The way to think about it is that the customer experience is the IT experience. Whether it’s a product like Dropbox cloud storage, a brand like craft e-retailer Etsy, or a relationship like low-income entrepreneur financing via global platforms like Kiva, these are experiences enabled through IT. Everything is being transformed by IT, and the change is constant.

The best IT consumption models today deliver flexibility and optimal business outcomes. Some of our customers, for example, tell us that they don’t know if they have the right capacity to handle the mountains of data being produced. Our research shows that 50 percent of enterprises have experienced downtime because of poor capacity planning. Sometimes data is growing so fast that a business is not able to manage it in the right way. Sometimes companies have all this expensive equipment and they are underutilizing it. We can help you manage your IT capacity so you can achieve the outcomes you need when you need them.

One of the benefits of public cloud is that you don’t have to worry about the infrastructure, and most enterprises today use the public cloud because of the clear benefits it offers in supporting innovation, with developer-friendly tools and flexible economics. But with these benefits come trade-offs in security, control, and costs as production scales. 

What if you could have the best of both worlds? By identifying your right mix of hybrid cloud, moving the workloads that make sense to public cloud, and making the rest of your IT cloud-like, you can retain control, security, and governance over your data while ensuring IT is an accelerator for your business in the digital age―not the brake.

Ultimately, flexible consumption will bring greater benefits than just speed and cost savings. It can help your operations move from being reactive to proactive and ultimately predictive. For example, a shipment of crucial parts could show up at your door when you didn’t even know there was a potential problem. The beauty of this is that the more we can add artificial intelligence to data analytics and operational support, the more your infrastructure can take care of itself and the more time gets freed up for line managers to work on innovation.

At the same time, we’re witnessing innovation driven from the edge. Thanks to exponential growth in sensors, smartphones, and other devices, we can all now communicate and analyze information gathered from work spaces, consumers, and even natural phenomena such as the weather. The edge encompasses computing, storage, and connectivity that can be trusted and secure, and that enables businesses to harvest data for insights and actions near the source of that data, whether it’s by the objects themselves or in nearby servers.

By harnessing insights from data created at the edge, we can fundamentally change the way our world works, for the better.  Take agriculture, for example. In 1930, one farmer fed 10 people. Today, one farmer feeds 155 people, and in 2050, one farmer will need to feed 250 people. HPE helped Land O’Lakes build an IoT data platform to enable its farmers, retailers, and third-party providers more quickly and accurately store, share, and analyze crop data. By leveraging these technologies, Land O’Lakes farmers are producing 650 percent more corn today on 13 percent fewer acres than they were 50 years ago. From buried IoT sensors that can accurately predict future yields to smart dashboards that integrate crop and field data from thousands of acres, the farms of the future will need to be even more connected, productive, and sustainable. The world’s population is depending on it.

The new technological world I’ve described here is within our reach. The articles that follow describe real-world examples of how flexible consumption models, hybrid IT, Intelligent Edge, and security infrastructure work in the real world. As the science fiction writer William Gibson put it, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” I believe that this future is in reach for all companies no matter what size or industry. It’s simply a matter of embracing the technology in ways that are smart, economical, customer-focused, and result in desired business outcomes. Now let’s begin.