Welcome to the KuppingerCole Analyst Chat. I'm your host. My name is Matthias Reinwarth, I'm Lead Advisor and Senior Analyst with KuppingerCole Analysts. My guest today for the second episode of a series of episodes around the EIC keynote that Martin Kuppinger held at 2022 in Berlin. My guest of course is today again Martin Kuppinger, Principle Analyst and one of the founders of KuppingerCole Analysts. Hi Martin, good to see you.
Hi Matthias, pleasure to talk to you again.
Great to have you and we are following up on an earlier episode that we did around the topic of change, changes in different aspects of the real world and the business world and the digitalization as we see it as of now and how that can be used as on the one hand opportunities and transformed into opportunities and how to deal with the challenges that are there and that cannot be just removed by ignoring them, how to deal with them properly. And that leads us to the topic for today. That means that business, how we are doing it, and especially IT as we will be doing it in the future will be different in many aspects. It will be changing. So there will be what you call a paradigm change and future IT will look very much differently. What will future IT look like? What are the characteristics that you are thinking of that you mentioned during the keynote at EIC?
Yeah. I listed ten characteristics back then. And so at the end all this is, I would dare to say, more evolutionary. So at the end it will disrupt many of the things or the ways we did things in the past. But on the other hand, it is not that these things just appear and they are there and change everything. So it's a journey and if I take the first one, decentralized. So decentralized technologies such as blockchain, such as distributed ledgers, they are here for quite a while. They are still in their evolution. They're finding their place. They probably have moved from from hype through a phase of dissolution towards a perspective where we think about what is the real benefit of using that and there are quite a number of these technologies. So, the ten ones I listed were decentralized, augmented, dynamic, distributed, hyperconnected, secure, agile, collaborative, composable and smart.
Right, I think we've talked about this aspect of composable already a bit when we were talking before the EIC. But I think this "composable" is a more or less new term. That is something that has been just recently coined to describe a certain aspect. And it goes back to this service aspect. This combining existing building blocks into a redesigned Lego like business model. Does that describe it properly?
I think the composable part comes from on one hand, enterprises need to be more become more agile, more flexible in what they do. And so enterprises are changing. They are doing things themselves, they are working with different partners. So the entire supply chain is becoming more, the entire value chain is becoming more flexible and will be composed differently over time. And this change must be reflected at all levels, in the light of business applications, but also the underlying IT. And there are, I would dare to say, to two major technology levels which support this. The one is really orchestration at a business level. So how do we orchestrate that process? And then there's the technical API level aspect where it's about modern architectures like microservices based architectures which expose APIs which can be connected. And the point behind that is that I think the thinking must be, the future IT must be more flexible in the way we can construct things. We can bring together things, we can combine different types of solutions like SaaS services, but also integrate legacy IT into something which still works seamlessly together along that business process, along the supplier value chain.
Right. Understood. And you've mentioned also augmented and that perfectly fits into that aspect as well. Just recently I've been talking to my wife about traveling 30 years ago. We flew to Malta and we wanted to travel there and each map that we bought was different. So there was really no authoritative source for just traveling. Today, we just use a smartphone, we use a maps app and we can travel and we can even predict how long it will take from getting to A to B, and we will get to B. So this has completely changed. So this augmentation of travel has already arrived in our daily life. How will augmentation also affect IT in the future? Will it be more automation will it be more what we called RPA? So how does augmentation come into play?
So I think we see a lot of augmentation already. And when we talk about what frequently is then positioned as AI / ML, so artificial intelligence and machine learning and sometimes not even is formally seen AI or ML, but it's augmenting it's augmenting users in doing things better. When you go to identity, we have augmentation around managing role models or recertification, complex tasks that people struggle with and technology can augment. And I sometimes feel that that we could call AI better or spell it better as augmenting intelligence instead of artificial intelligence. Because this would way better describe what is really delivered here. And I think we see this in many areas and so my expectation for the future of RPA, for robotic process automation is not that we say, OK here's a human and doing his or her job and here's the robot doing that job. But where the RPA seamlessly integrates into the tasks and supports where it's needed as AI and other elements, too. Ao a way more seamless integration. And this augmented IT, we see it already in manufacturing in several areas where the glasses help workers to do their job properly. And we will see definitely more of that where technology really augments humans but in a seamless manner. Not in a, like most of the RPA approaches, in a replacement manner.
Right. And you've mentioned that already, and I think that is another aspect that I want to highlight. It's really getting away from siloed solutions also in enterprise I.T getting to a more connected to more smart interoperability. You called it hyper connected and collaborative. But this is really... the other term that you mentioned is a smart, I think breaking up silos and getting to new results by combining existing systems to a greater good that is something that we also should look at. So breaking up the silos and really connecting existing solutions for a better approach.
Yeah. [...] clearly will do this connectivity in a way that works properly. So avoiding that we distribute it by just duplicating, it will be distributed by being able to consume in real time in a still reliable manner, which is the other side. So the more elements you have, the more things can break, the more sources, the more connections you have for your data to more break points you have. So we need to figure out this properly, but when we look at some of the decentralized solutions, then they have this distributed but still highly available in their very nature like a blockchain. So there are approaches that definitely help in doing this. And I think we will see, and it has already started, take all these discussions about smart cities smart energy and so on. We see already a lot of areas where technology really integrates with everything we do. And when you have a relatively new modern vehicle, you always have this augmenting connected, in the end rather smart elements in this vehicle that support you as a driver, not only in autonomous driving, but ahead of autonomous driving.
Right, your keynote as you've designed it was was a call to action for leaders and decision makers to have a look at what is going on in the real world, change, the opportunities that arise from that, but also how to revisit business models and how the way of working together in general by using technologies that are already there and that are currently on the rise. What would be as a quick summary, this call to action, what would you say to decision makers, to leaders as a takeaway from this episode, where to start, what to look at, where to create the benefit?
I think the point is that there's a lot of technology innovation there, and I would say my most important takeaway would be to understand this not as a disruption, not as a challenge, but an opportunity. But also not to follow blindly every hype, but to really look at changes from a perspective of, OK, what does this mean? Can this have an impact? How can I utilize this for my business, for my organization, to get better, for delivering better goods, physical or digital goods to my customers and my consumers, the citizens. Tracking this innovation and following it and also testing it, thinking about it, so encouraging your team to look at it, but also to say, OK, maybe it's not yet there. Maybe it is relevant for something different. And we saw it initially. So also allowing for failure and stepping back instead of then trying to make something a success where you at some point learned, OK if this was too early, maybe. And I think this is very important for leadership. Helping, so fostering innovation but also allowing for failure because innovation means some of these things will never come. Some of the things will look very different when they come, some of these things will come faster, some of these will come slower than expected. And this is, I think, the leadership task here.
Right. So to sum it up, and we've talked a lot about the EIC keynote, and I finally want to mention that it's, of course, still available on our website. So those who have been at EIC can rewatch it and digest the insights that you've provided there, those who have not been at EIC, they can go to kuppingercole.com and click the link to the EIC recordings that are available there as well. That can be rewatched there as a whole. So all five streams are available, for all four days. So there is lots of material not to read but to watch with all the slides attached as well. I would highly recommend that. I'm still doing that, I'm still watching tracks and sessions that I just could not attend because you can do only one at a time. I really highly recommend that. And you did quite some great workshops and speeches there as well, so I really recommend the audience to go to kuppingercole.com and rewatch that episode. The insight that you've given here for how to foster innovation is really one of these starting points. Anything else that you would like to recommend when rewatching EIC before we close down?
I think as you said, you can't attend every session. I think there were some, as usual, some really, really great keynotes. Looking at keynotes always is a good thing. I would recommend for people who are more in technology side to look at my talk about defining KRIs and KPIs for identity management, more a tech thing, but a very important one. And this may sound boring, but worth to look at.
Thanks. And I think that's really correct because KPIs, KRIs can really help you in just doing things better and more efficient, more effectively. Thank you very much, Martin, for being my guest today for sharing some insight about your EIC keynote and how you look at these changing landscapes that we are acting in and looking forward to having you soon in another episode of this podcast.
Thank you, Martin.
Thank you.
Bye bye.
