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Three in four CFOs and CIOs fear business will lag if they’re not clued up on cloud

Picture credit: Doug88888/Flickr

Research published today by Canopy and Vanson Bourne shows that three quarters of chief financial officers think their organisations are not ready for digital business transformation, with a similar number worried they’ll become uncompetitive by the end of 2015.

This translates as CFOs missing out, on average, €67m of revenue last year due to not having the right cloud solutions in place, according to the research, of 950 CIOs, CFOs and business decision makers in mid-market and enterprise firms in Europe.

Here’s what else the survey found:

  • Two in five (41%) of respondents admitted frustration with onboarding customers due to the poor responsiveness of IT tools
  • Improving customer service (67%) is most important to fast-track digital transformation, ahead of improving mobility (45%) and using digital channels for selling (42%)
  • Two thirds (64%) admitted that a lack of cloud investment was “holding back vital digital projects”

The future should be rosy for financial execs, according to the research. CFOs estimated that if enhanced cloud capabilities were in place in their company, double digit growth could be achieved in 2015 – a €123m revenue boost on average. The vast majority (90%) of respondents said they needed to embrace cloud based applications and infrastructure to deliver digital transformation.

“One of the keys to unlocking digital transformation is cloud computing,” said Jacques Pommeraud, Canopy CEO, in a statement. “From the work we’re doing with clients, we’re seeing that it has the power to create revenue by making the customer journey effortless across any device, enables faster customer sign-ups so they’ll spend sooner and support real-time analytics to make more accurate targeting decisions.

“The most innovative clients use the power of cloud and large scale analytics to generate new sources of revenue, for example in manufacturing for the area of preventative maintenance,” he added.

These results are particularly interesting, given Salesforce announced Wave, its new analytics cloud, at Dreamforce earlier this week. Meanwhile, research from the NCC Group found that three quarters (72%) of CIOs at financial services firms feared the cloud because of data concerns.

You can read more on the Canopy results here.