There is no doubt that these last few years have been difficult for businesses, with many still feeling the after-effects of the pandemic. Not only that but the Ukraine/Russian war has caused further challenges across the globe, including higher energy costs for many. Despite all of this, there are still plenty of businesses which are growing. Intelligent CXO spoke to three businesspeople about the year ahead and how businesses will be able to grow.
Aaron White, Vice President and General Manager, Nutanix APJ;
Having survived the disruption of the past two years, growth is top of the agenda for enterprises across Australia in 2023.
With digital now the default mode of operation, the driving forces for growth will be the ability to rapidly analyse data, launch new products and run IT more efficiently.
Unfortunately, the events of the past two years have left organisations with a major hurdle to overcome before they can pursue their growth plans. Necessity dictated that during periods of lockdown, investments in remote work and collaboration technologies were prioritised. However, this came at the expense of neglecting investments in the assets running the business’ core infrastructure.
As a result, Australian enterprises have been sweating their core infrastructure assets for years – and there’s not much sweat left in them.
With growth the primary aim for next year and beyond, the core IT infrastructure that’s now ‘end of service life’ will need to be modernised.
This will be a crucial step in any growth strategy as assets that have been sweating for years will become unreliable and cost far too much to maintain, while their lack of flexibility will be a serious handbrake on any growth ambitions.
Meeting the next set of business requirements will require organisations to transform their infrastructure.
Other organisations who modernised their IT before the pandemic, largely pursued ‘cloud-first’ strategies that saw them overcommit to shifting everything to public cloud.
On the other hand, those organisations who have been sweating their assets are starting with a blank canvas. As our understanding of cloud has matured, so too have best-practice strategies.
Today, ‘cloud-first’ has been superseded with ‘hybrid multi-cloud’ strategies. Rather than attempt to shift all an enterprise’s applications, data and workloads to a single public cloud provider, this modern cloud strategy understands that every workload has specific needs.
As such, multiple different clouds are woven together with the performance, security and cost needs of each workload dictating where it operates. Business critical applications might run on a private cloud, customer facing and collaboration applications on a public cloud, while edge clouds serve the needs of remote offices and worksites.
Today, hybrid multi-cloud management platforms allow all these different pieces of infrastructure to run as a cohesive whole. Critically, they also allow applications to seamlessly shift between the various clouds without expensive refactoring every time business needs change.
In other words, the best growth strategy for 2023 is ‘don’t sweat it’ anymore.
Rajesh Ganesan, President, ManageEngine
Managing who you don’t see: Leaders are almost three years into managing dispersed workforces, and a return to pre-pandemic environments is looking unlikely. A recent study found two-thirds of Asia-Pacific employees who can work remotely prefer the hybrid model. Leaders need to move past hastily assembled remote work environments and ensure the best outcomes in the new environment. For instance, employees are often onboarded without the opportunity to meet their colleagues and employers face-to-face, which can lead to feelings of disconnectedness. A steady flow of check-ins – even if it’s automated – can go a long way towards creating a nurturing work environment.
Creating talent from within the organisation: It’s no secret that skills shortages are continuing to besiege organisations, both large and small, across industries. In our experience with customers, it’s the number one challenge impacting the IT industry. Rather than waiting for a silver bullet to penetrate the skills gap, leaders should focus on sourcing and building talent from the ground up. Zoho Corp, parent company of ManageEngine, often scouts talent at an early stage – in schools and colleges – and it’s allowed us to develop a well-resourced internal cybersecurity team.
Security and privacy as basic principles and business enablers: Mitigating cyberthreats is, debatably, the top issue on leaders’ minds heading into 2023. There’s no singular solution. Instead, there are cornerstone strategies set by the Australian Cybersecurity Centre (ACSC) in its Essential Eight Maturity Model. This respected resource provides a great baseline for leaders looking to strengthen protections, starting with keeping their systems regularly patched. Beyond this, leaders should infuse cyber principles into every team in their organisation. We need to let go of the idea that the perfect cybersecurity professional will walk into our offices and fix all our problems. Cybersecurity is an all-hands-on-deck endeavour, and we should make sure all employees are equipped with knowledge about security best practices.
Think and build for the long term: The organisations that fared best during the pandemic are those that made the right technology allocations and policy decisions ahead of time. While it’s tempting to
focus on immediate outcomes, we should instead plant and nourish seeds that will grow meaningful fruit in the future. This could involve giving inexperienced candidates a chance to build and grow their skills or allocating a budget towards lesser-explored technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to ease workloads for staff and plug resource gaps.
Andrea Rubei, CEO, MyMeta
Reflecting on the past year first, it has been the validation of our service among a number of key high profile enterprise clients and system integrators that set 2022 apart for myMeta. 2022 was also about investing heavily in engineering and in innovative technologies, and that is a strategy we will take into 2023.
As we look ahead to the possibility of economic uncertainty in 2023, companies should consider this time to invest wisely in their business and look ahead to growth. Companies that do so will be in the best position to capitalise on market conditions during a recovery or upswing. Investing in quality people and in tools that increase engagement and productivity will help to grow companies not just for today but also for the mid- to long-term. Creating better experiences for your customers is perhaps the best way to ensure growth for the future and offering increased value is another way to grow.
And while it may seem counterintuitive for companies to spend more money in a tough economic climate, we are finding that the more resilient and forward-thinking companies we work with are finding ways to increase productivity and engagement to get more from their current technology and people.
As a result, a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) like myMeta is a very economical solution that offers a clear ROI and helps companies to do more without having to make significant infrastructure changes or large investments in staffing.
After all, moving to the cloud brings many advantages in terms of flexibility, scalability and economies of scale. However, it does come with some limitations in terms of being able to adapt the solutions. With myMeta, though, our customers can finally get a 100% tailored cloud solution. They choose their preferred solution, and we tailor it for them to their exact specifications. It’s like buying a tailormade suit from their favourite brand!
Now, we’re taking things to the next stage and working to allow our partners to build these tailormade solutions for all of the most-known cloud applications out there, as well as for specific verticals and being able to sell them to all their customers.
The result? myMeta offers companies the ability to improve both their internal employee experience and engagement, as well as their external customer’s experience and engagement. The benefit is twofold, with improved productivity internally and increased customer business externally. And what could be a better growth strategy than that?