After a slow start in South Africa, cloud adoption is picking up fast, following global trends in which spend on cloud services is rapidly doubling and even tripling.<\/p>\n
According to IDC, spend on public cloud services will grow from around $70 billion in 2015 to over $141 billion in 2019, with Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service growth outpacing Software as a Service growth.<\/p>\n
IDC predicts cloud IT infrastructure spending will pass the $53 billion mark by 2019, accounting for 46 percent of total expenditures on enterprise IT infrastructure.<\/p>\n
While this growth is impressive, it shouldn\u2019t be surprising.<\/p>\n
Moving to the cloud dramatically simplifies infrastructure, removes impediments to change, improves security, and allows for the collection of massive amounts of data for analysis.<\/p>\n
Most importantly, however, it facilitates experimentation, rapid change, and easier adoption of new technologies.<\/p>\n
So, while the cloud offers inherent benefits, it\u2019s also just the first step on the road to the new order of business.<\/p>\n
This is the point where the real business revolution begins.<\/p>\n
Beyond the cloud, businesses must meet customer demand for multimodel engagement, where they can use multiple channels of communication within a single interaction seamlessly.<\/p>\n
An example is escalating from a Web chat to a video session with co-browsing.<\/p>\n
Increasingly, customer engagement and collaboration technologies will merge. The above example illustrates this capability.<\/p>\n
Another is the ability of agents, along with business users, to be members of subject-specific chat rooms.<\/p>\n
Being able to quickly tap into a resource such as this would enable agents to far more effectively address customer issues in real-time.<\/p>\n
Virtual reality is another area that\u2019s transforming business.<\/p>\n
Imagine agents and customers walking together through virtual worlds to exchange information, demonstrate complex concepts, or showcase goods and services.<\/p>\n
As part of a multimodal interaction, the customer experience becomes deeply personalized and effortless.<\/p>\n
We are already moving beyond data analytics to artificial intelligence (AI).<\/p>\n
AI automatically and proactively identifies problems and recognizes trends so supervisors don\u2019t have to search through enormous data sets.<\/p>\n
This knowledge will drive disruptive change in products, services and customer engagement.<\/p>\n
The cloud presents a wealth of as-yet untapped opportunities to completely disrupt business and society at large.<\/p>\n
The question now isn\u2019t whether or not to embrace change.<\/p>\n
For businesses that want to succeed, the only question left is how fast can you do it?<\/p>\n