Faced with an evolving macro-economic and competitive landscape, Linda Yao, Chief Operating Officer and Head of Strategy, Lenovo Solutions & Services Group, predicts that businesses will be focused on deriving more value from their IT spending in a couple of ways. 

“The first is they will demand more flexibility in their operations, in terms of having their investments scale with the value they return,” she says. “They will want more predictability in their cash flows, whether that means using technology to stabilise revenue growth or to achieve expense savings, or implementing that technology in a way that allows for predictable cash flow payments.

“Businesses will also be focused on ensuring IT deployment directly supports or drives business outcomes. We will see more customers adopt IT based on business outcomes that they want to achieve whether it’s top line, bottom line, or to hit specific customer experience, sustainability, throughput, customer acquisition, type of metrics. More businesses will tie their technology adoption to these metrics rather than deploy and maintain technology in a vacuum.

“As a result, IT spending on legacy infrastructure will shift to spending on next generation technology and grow rapidly in the next five to 10 years as customers modernise or revamp their IT stack end to end. This includes moving from legacy IT systems to hybrid cloud, adopting more virtualised and interconnected IT environments and eschewing traditional software licences for highly personalised tech on demand.”