With a new year at the horizon, it is the time to take an informed take on the tech themes that are going to emerge in 2023. The Best of Tech 2023 research presents 11 key business and tech trends. These were unveiled during the Best of Tech 2023 event presented by ETEK International Corporation and organized by Coeus Age.
The event witnessed a complete narrative on resilience and sustainability, across levels – environment, business, and self.
1. Domestic IT Spend to Cross INR 3,00,000 Crores Mark
The total IT spend in the domestic market shall cross INR 3,00,000 Crore mark in 2023 with a growth of 7.8% over 2022.
The domestic IT spend growth hit the nadir in 2020 at -1.8%, but it has bounced back since then. The enterprise segment IT growth shall be a tad higher at 9%.
2. Exploration for the Next Growth & Innovation Platform shall Continue
Enterprises across sectors will further build new growth and innovation platforms through 2023 to assure future performance. It is like investing in a future growth portfolio, where some options may succeed, and some other may not. These include options such as new online marketplaces, ‘build your product’ platforms, new services (like auction, subscription) platforms, industry ecosystem innovations, community engaging platforms (e.g. for the farmers) etc.
3. Sustainability across the Value Chain shall Gain Ground
Businesses have realized that resilience and sustainability cannot be built in isolation, an ecosystem level play is the need of the hour. So, while sectors like BFSI and auto are building a cohesive ecosystem strategy, others like hospitals, pharma, media, and logistics and supply chain are building critical linkages with external parties, which may evolve further.
4. CRM to Evolve as the Core of Growth & Innovation
CRM is becoming the center of a holistic Customer Experience (CX) drive in sectors such as BFSI, Auto, CPG, and Retail. CX is an evolving continuum with convenience at the lower end of the spectrum, while addressing deep psychological needs in a hyper personalized mode comes at the higher end.
Along with other tech areas like Customer 360, AI/ ML, end to end omni channel service platforms, continuous feedback and sentiments analysis etc., CRM is evolving into a bigger and relevant CX drive. What was ERP in the past, the center of organizational business system, CRM is fast moving into the center of business innovation and growth.
5. HRMS to Lay the Foundation for Building Change Capacity
Like CRM, enterprise HR management system (HRMS) has the potential to transform into a holistic change capacity initiative. A sea change has happened in the ways in which HR is management and employees are engaged, learning content is curated and employees consume them in a self-paced, anytime, and anywhere mode.
Attracting new age skills and also building them among the existing employees is becoming critical for the DX success. The enterprises have started on it and will be busy putting essential elements in place through 2023 before a holistic change capacity gets built.
6. Digital Industries of the Future shall Evolve Organically
Refineries, Utilities, Mines, and Factories of the Future will evolve albeit in an organic manner through 2023.
These will be built upon the principles of operational optimization, data driven processes, energy efficiency, water conservation, connected equipments, predictive maintenance, SHE, unified dashboards. These will be intrinsically linked to integrated production planning to align with the market behavior.
7. Omni Channel to go Stronger
Omni Channel will further strengthen in 2023 in sectors like BFSI, Auto, CPG and Retail. As enterprises move from single (to few) to multiple channels, they shall finally evolve into Omni Channel sales, delivery and services.
Omni Channel is characterized by the unification of the channel specific applications for a consistent and seamless continuity across channels. This needs to be complemented with automated demand management, demand sensing, auto inventory replenishment, and hyper local capabilities.
8. Supply Chain Dots to Connect Organically
Supply chain resilience and sustainability will transform rapidly in 2023. As enterprises move beyond EDI and invest in areas like procure to pay, vendor discovery and development, price discovery, extensive use of IoT and sensors, automated warehouses, track and trace, visibility of inventory across the value chain, logistics integration, third party services or data integration in the cloud, sustainability guidelines and compliance, and control towers or central command centers for supply chain visibility, their supply chains will further evolve into being resilient and sustainable.
9. Data Capability to Grow Stronger
Data capability defined as the ability to capture, clean, collate, store, govern and supply data for meaningful analytics, AI, ML use cases will gain ground across many sectors in 2023.
Leading ones are BFSI, auto, CPG, retail, pharma, and logistics and supply chain. 360 data from operational, customer, financial, social, and third-party systems will be ingested over time for a holistic data analytics and data driven autonomy.
10. Cyber Security 3.0 to Shape up
Cyber Security 3.0 shall gain strong ground in 2023, in sectors that deal with critical information infrastructure or customer data, like oil and gas, BFSI, retail, pharma, and hospitals. Cyber Security 3.0 paradigm is built upon a 360-degrees integrated security layer with analytics/ AI/ ML capabilities, next gen SOCs and NOCs to detect and respond to threats in almost real time, a single glass pane for complete visibility, and a risk assessment and quantification framework for aligning investments.
11. Cloud to go Broad-based
Cloud is gaining traction, though at different pace in different sectors. While BFSI is leading the pack with building cloud native architecture that helps them drive ecosystem level competitive capabilities and support new growth platforms, other sectors like manufacturing, metals and mining, infrastructure and construction are still adopting cloud on a piecemeal basis. Cloud adoption is ramping up across all three tech layers i.e., infrastructure, applications and data, and development.
