As the digital revolution gains momentum, we’ve seen that businesses worldwide are intensifying their efforts to deliver intelligent and seamless digital experiences by leveraging data-driven automation. I have seen how the gradual pace of digital transformation over the past decade has now given way to a comprehensive, large-scale digital reinvention.

Consequently, a new approach to IT becomes inevitable—one that enables organizations to prioritize business outcomes while accelerating the impact of new technologies. However, most struggle to harness the rapidly evolving “digital technology flywheel,” where data fuels digital businesses, hybrid cloud enables data democratization, artificial intelligence (AI) unlocks innovation, and XaaS drives outcomes.

The four core imperatives for a future-ready business

IBM is assisting clients in making informed architectural decisions to future-ready their businesses, allowing for the creation of sustained value in the long run—where possibilities can be limitless. These architectural decisions are grounded in four core imperatives:

• Create freely by simplifying hybrid cloud landscapes, giving clients the strategic freedom to distribute, run and connect workloads and IT where they are needed.

• Create quickly by delivering “fit-for-purpose” IT solutions on-demand, composed from the services of their choice and consuming only what is needed, when its needed.

• Create securely by prioritizing data fluidity across digital-value chains, enabling clients to access and integrate with built-in security and compliance controls.

• Create intelligently by architecting AI for scale, helping clients to train and run compute-intensive AI designed for greater performance, agility and sustainability.

Progressing with these imperatives necessitates a fresh approach to digital transformation, freeing businesses to focus on outcomes by transcending the constraints of current data, cloud and IT infrastructures. By designing a digital services platform, clients can help simplify value creation, leveraging a flexible as-a-service experience that allows easy configuration and deployment of “fit-for-purpose” solutions tailored to specific workload requirements. When architected appropriately, this approach can empower organizations with strategic freedom in determining the placement of data, workloads and the technologies they work with, fostering innovation on their own terms while maintaining control over risk and cost.

A roadmap for your business

When we work with clients, they are already on this transformative journey, albeit at different stages of maturity. For example, our client Ecogas successfully deployed SAP HANA 2.0 in a hybrid environment based on IBM Power10 servers, extending high-quality digital services to over one million people.

We hope that clients will also move their business systems to IBM Power Virtual Server and use IBM Power Enterprise Pools 2.0 to dynamically and cost-effectively flex its on-premises compute resources to accommodate peaks in business volumes.

I also encourage you to explore this IBM-sponsored Moor Insights research paper that provides a roadmap into the future.