Rethink Connectivity and Unlock Opportunity
It's an exciting time for marketers as digital disruption creates new opportunities. Connectivity is no longer about joining A to B, but about creating a powerful enabler to drive change.
The digital revolution is unfolding fast, focusing attention on the availability of 5G and Wi-Fi to consumers, and the plug-and-play nature of businesses online. Now, many are realising that connectivity is more than just a link online: it’s a powerful enabler that allows your business and your marketing to adapt to digital disruption.
Disruptors and Shakers
The sheer availability and accessibility of digital tools, applications, and platforms has given rise to a surge of disruptors. Traditional business models and marketing strategies are being upended across the board, as competitors spot ways to digitise, automate, and scale business processes.
Each of these disruptors looked at the existing way of doing things, saw how digital technologies and services could improve them, and ended up revolutionising entire sectors that had operated in much the same way for decades, if not centuries. Another common thread is the speed at which these disruptors come to market and refine their way of doing things to be even more effective.
None of this would have been possible without strong connectivity to the right places, managed intelligently and widely automated.
Making Change Possible
One thing the pandemic taught us in marketing is that even large enterprises can pivot quickly when the need arises. Many businesses are now seeing that things they might have first thought were too hard or too expensive are now possible and practical, when approached the right way, with the right support, and the right partner.
Around the world, businesses began to see where they could move services and capabilities online, to make them accessible to customers during times of restriction.
The possibilities might seem endless—but only on the basis of high quality, reliable, and intelligently managed connectivity.
I’m not just talking about a fibre connection to your local internet point of presence. To accelerate your business, you need secure, reliable connectivity that intelligently scales with demand, into key platforms, resources and marketplaces around the world.
The Power of Flexibility
So how has connectivity evolved? A recent cloud research report found that there isn’t a single IT innovation that doesn’t depend one way or another on the right kind of connectivity. These days, connectivity isn’t judged simply on raw performance, but the ease with which you can provision it, and flex it up and down according to your needs.
It’s almost impossible to accurately predict what your bandwidth needs will be over a period of years, while many enterprises might not even know what they require next week.
When flexible connectivity is an absolute necessity for the business of the future, you need to be able to help yourself—with tools, like a simple portal to the network, that allow you to make changes without having to negotiate new contracts or make inconvenient commitments.
Partnering for Success
However, as businesses transform through the power of connectivity, they can’t do it alone. Recent research found that nearly half (49%) of businesses chose to work with a partner because of their technical knowledge, with almost the same number (48%) citing experience.
That’s why I like to act as a navigator, giving access to digital superhighways, making sense of the myriad possibilities, and determining the best routes.
I’ve always encouraged my teams to broaden their experience. The people I mentor often work across multiple disciplines in their careers, and it makes them better able to understand customers and what they are trying to achieve.
When we connect a customer to the digital world, we work hard to understand not just their current needs but their ambitions for tomorrow. The right connectivity gives them an edge today, and also builds a platform for them to continue their development with the best technical resources at their disposal.
The research shows that businesses understand the possibilities. In the next five to 10 years, nearly half (46%) intend to move their high performance computing (HPC) workloads to the cloud, with Big Data analytics and AI just behind at 44% and 43% respectively.
And businesses want this done in an automated way. The same proportion (43%) are planning to migrate systems for improving collaboration and productivity. For marketers, cloud facilitates faster, secure data management and data-driven decision-making; enhanced automation; improved collaboration and cost control.
Connecting the Right Things to the Right Places
This all shows that secure, scalable, predictable connectivity to the right places enables marketing teams to implement their transformation ambitions, adapting to disruption and accessing the right resources.
To help organisations see the digital light, marketers must lead with outcomes, not speeds and feeds. I’ve seen this approach work when we’ve helped organisations transform by connecting to the digital world, achieving the necessary steps on their transformation journeys. These businesses have become more agile, more responsive, and better able to access the talent that will further speed up their momentum.
If connectivity is the high-speed motorway that allows organisations to send their traffic up and down to enable a better experience, I’m excited to show the businesses that are still in the car park how to get going, and where it can take them.