After a very long 2020 I believe that the enterprise IT market has gotten used to our changed world and we should see a return to previous levels of growth in 2021.
By Peter Mülders, Synthesis customer success manager
Cloud infrastructure and SaaS tools are going to be big. We’ve all seen how quickly Microsoft 365 took off last year, offering businesses the chance to connect staff without needing to procure and deploy a single server.
Remote work is obviously here to stay after businesses took a leap of faith and found success. I believe we’ll see hybrid working environments become popular with some staff in the office and some working from home offices. This does mean that there will be a heavy focus on security at the perimeter (firewalls, VPNs, etc) and inside the business to catch up.
There is a global movement to zero trust that’s best described by Google in their BeyondCorp concept – where every part of your digital landscape is treated as if it’s on the Internet. You can no longer rely on an attacker never getting into your network as your only defence, so a lot of enterprise systems and their interconnections will need to be re-evaluated and modernised.
With 2020 having been such an online year for consumers, we’ll see a lot of big businesses trying to achieve better and faster personalisation for their clients. This means we’ll see them exploring lots of new technologies in the space of data streaming architectures to assist in realtime computing (Kafka is the leader in this space), and there will be lots of interest in AI and machine learning (ML) work to try to understand customer behaviour and preferences. These are two niche industries right now, but they are definitely emerging as some of the strongest solutions to the problems. But beware the salesman that just wants to throw AI and ML at everything, these are just a set of tools in an experienced problem solver’s toolbox so they are not ready for solving all your problems.
Salesforce (CRM and its myriad of related tools) is going to see a lot of growth in South Africa this year as businesses try to gain a better understanding of their clients and work towards the elusive “360 view of client”.
Contactless payment systems are growing rapidly (including a Synthesis product, Halo Dot, that allows your phone to operate as a merchant POS device) and e-commerce platforms have matured to the point where even a mom-and-pop shop can open an online store.