Become the disruptor of your industry's status quo, or face the consequences. To succeed, CEOs need to know the answer to a key question in 2018 and beyond. Does our CIO and/or CTO have what it takes to contribute to a meaningful and substantive digital transformation agenda?

As digitally-fuelled disruptors reshape industries, the clear mandate for every enterprise is to re-imagine itself to compete in the increasingly digital economy that's platform-powered and ecosystem-enabled.

To help CIOs and CTOs through this period of multiplied innovation, International Data Corporation (IDC) published its Worldwide CIO Agenda 2018 Predictions.

Top 10 strategic IT planning changes

They outline IDC's vision for the ten most important shifts that will happen in IT organizations over the next 36 months, and will guide IT executives in the formation of their three-year strategic IT plan.

According to the IDC assessment, lines are being drawn that separate industry laggards from "digital-native enterprises" that can harness the power of technology to accelerate their business development.

In the context of continuous emergence, IDC asserts today's business technology environments must adapt at an accelerated pace to the scale, scope, and speed of progressive digital transformation.

"For CIOs and senior IT executives, the challenge is to think and operate like a digital-native enterprise in the face of the emergence of platforms, innovation accelerators, machine learning, augmented skills, micro-personalization, new partnerships, and new relationships," said Serge Findling, vice president at IDC.

The IDC predictions for the Worldwide CIO Agenda are:

• By 2018, 75 percent of CIOs will put experiential engagement, data monetisation, or digital business at scale at the top of their agenda.
• Through 2019, dragged down by conflicting digital transformation imperatives, ineffective technology innovation, cloud infrastructure transition, and underfunded end of life core systems, 75% of CIOs and their enterprises will fail to meet all of their digital objectives.
• By 2020, 60% of the CIOs who have crossed the digital divide will prevail in C-suite turmoil and competition to become digital business leaders for their enterprises.
• By 2019, 60% of CIOs will complete infrastructure and application replatforming using cloud, mobile, and DevOps, clearing the deck for accelerated enterprise digital transformation.
• By 2019, 60% of IT organisations will deploy DX platforms supporting new customer- and ecosystem-facing business models.
• By 2019, 75% of CIOs will refocus cybersecurity around authentication and trust to manage business risks, initiating the retirement of systems that cannot ensure data protection.
• By 2020, 40% of CIOs will leverage vision- and mission-driven leadership to inspire and empower their organisations to create digital transformation capabilities.
• Recognising the failure of existing IT governance and the need for a shared digital transformation vision; by 2020, 40% of CIOs will adopt new digital governance models to accelerate innovation and speed.
• By 2018, 70% of CIOs will take agility to the next level, gearing up to a product model using design thinking and DevOps.
• By 2020, 60% of CIOs will implement an IT business model and culture that shifts focus from IT projects to digitally-oriented products.

"As the new digital economy emerges from disruption, CIOs are seeing their last opportunity to cross the digital divide and earn their right to play in the next phase," concluded Findling.

Meet the cloud’s newest strategic partners: Salesforce and Google. The two companies announced a deal at Dreamforce late yesterday, with Google Cloud becoming Salesforce’s preferred public cloud provider alongside new product integrations.

There were four primary integrations announced. Salesforce Lightning for Gmail enables users to surface Salesforce CRM data in Gmail, as well as customer interactions from Gmail directly within Salesforce. Lightning for Sheets allows the Google spreadsheet tool to be embedded anywhere in Salesforce, while Quip – the word processing and productivity app bought by Salesforce last year – will be able to integrated with Google Drive and Calendar. Salesforce will also integrate with Hangouts.

“Our partnership with Google represents the best of both worlds for our customers,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a statement, “There has never been an easier way for companies to run their entire business in the cloud – from productivity apps, email and analytics, to sales, service and marketing apps, this partnership will help make our customers smarter and more productive.”

“Our teams are working very closely to develop new integrations that will connect Salesforce CRM with G Suite to offer the only cloud-native collaboration platform of its kind,” wrote Nan Boden, Google Cloud head of global technology partners in a blog post.

“We hope this partnership enables more companies to take advantage of the cloud and that the combined solutions will provide an unmatched experience for customers,” added Boden.  

Salesforce naturally has plenty of other strategic partners in place. In March, the company signed up with IBM in what was described as a ‘landmark global strategic partnership’ focusing around artificial intelligence (AI), an area which Benioff is certainly tuned into. At IBM’s InterConnect event in Las Vegas that month, Benioff joined IBM CEO Ginni Rometty on stage to discuss their shared initiatives.

The company signed a deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) last year stating the Seattle giant as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. According to Business Insider, Salesforce will still work with AWS in some capacity but Google has ‘taken some of its territory.’

For Google’s part, this represents another win in a year laden with them. According to financial results back in July, the company tripled the number of its big cloud deals – ranked as $0.5 million or above – year over year. Among its more recent customers, as announced at Google’s Next conference in San Francisco in March, include Verizon, Colgate-Palmolive, and eBay – three companies listed in the most recent Fortune 500.

OpenStack revenue will break the $6 billion barrier by 2021, with major advances in China and Asia Pacific being a contributory factor, according to the latest note from 451 Research.

Predictions concerning the overall market size have dipped slightly from the research firm’s previous analysis this time last year – the forecast for 2020 is now at $5.63bn, down from $5.75bn – yet 451 argues growth will remain strong (below) with a CAGR of 30% and an overall size of $6.73bn by 2021.

Service providers with OpenStack private cloud revenue will exceed revenue from those with OpenStack-based public cloud implementations as soon as 2018, according to the research. Deployments in China and Asia Pacific are now growing faster than in the rest of the world, with the research firm adding that part of this increase is down to the Chinese government’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology advocating for OpenStack.

The research also assesses the growing prominence of containers and microservices technologies. According to Al Sadowski, 451 research vice president, OpenStack is no longer the ‘shiny new toy’ in the industry. Yet the most innovative and progressive OpenStack deployments feature the use of Docker and Kubernetes.

“While there is no clear answer yet about OpenStack coexistence with containers, it is worth noting that containers and container management are nascent markets in terms of production use cases,” added Sadowski.

The proclamation has been made to coincide with the latest OpenStack Summit, to be held in Sydney over the coming days. Before the festivities, the OpenStack Foundation announced it will use the event to help address how open source technologies can be integrated to solve real-world problems. This will be done in four parts; documenting cross-project use cases, collaborating across communities, fostering new projects at the OpenStack Foundation, and coordinating end to end testing across projects.

Of particular note is the recently announced Public Cloud Passport program. A global gaggle of public cloud providers, including OVH, Telefonica and UKCloud, are offering trials for users to ‘experience the freedom, performance and interoperability of open source infrastructure’, as OpenStack puts it.

• Worldwide public cloud services market revenue is projected to grow 18.5% in 2017 reaching $260.2B, up from $219.6B in 2016.
• 2016 worldwide SaaS revenue exceeded Gartner’s previous forecast by $48.2B.
• SaaS revenue is expected to grow 21% in 2017 reaching $58.6B by the end of this year.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is projected to grow 36.6% in 2017 alone, reaching $34.7B this year making this area the fastest growing of all cloud services today.

Gartner’s latest worldwide public cloud services revenue forecast published earlier this month predicts Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), currently growing at a 23.31% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), will outpace the overall market growth of 13.38% through 2020. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) revenue is predicted to grow from $58.6B in 2017 to $99.7B in 2020. Taking into account the entire forecast period of 2016 – 2020, SaaS is on pace to attain 15.65% compound annual growth throughout the forecast period, also outpacing the total cloud market. The following graphic compares revenue growth by cloud services category for the years 2016 through 2020. Please click on the graphic to expand it for easier reading.

Catalysts driving greater adoption and correspondingly higher CAGRs include a shift Gartner sees in infrastructure, middleware, application and business process services spending. In 2016, Gartner estimates approximately 17% of the total market revenue for these areas had shifted to the cloud. Gartner predicts by 2021, 28% of all IT spending will be for cloud-based infrastructure, middleware, application and business process services.

Another factor is the adoption of platform as a service (PaaS). Gartner notes that enterprises are confident that PaaS can be a secure, scalable application development platform in the future.  The following graphic compares the compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) of each cloud service area including the total market. Please click on the graphic to expand it for easier reading.

Source: Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud Services Revenue to Reach $260 Billion in 2017

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