Convergence and co-creation trends will give birth to open ecosystems

Avatar for Terry TrainaBy Terry Traina|Dec 7, 2021|7:30 am CST

Looking into the future, Masergy recognizes distinct trends that will continue to foster innovation, putting digital transformation on the fast track in 2022. This series of articles outlines the four key predictions we think will happen next.

Don’t miss our other predictions:

  1. AIOps goes mainstream, empowering hyper automation and accelerated innovation
  2. 2022 will be the year to modernize IT or die

Here is our third prediction…

Convergence and co-creation trends will give birth to open-innovation ecosystems

Just as the global pandemic accelerated digital transformation trends, consolidating years of work into a matter of months, so too will the notion of tech convergence and open innovation. Leveraging the momentum of today’s digital-first world, solution providers and the IT industry at large will continue to drive wider technology convergence and consolidation. That trend will give birth to interconnected IT ecosystems fostering shared development and the co-creation of new services and experiences. We will see not just clusters of converged technologies but hyper-converged systems, platform-as-a-service solutions, and broad communications hubs addressing the widest enterprise needs.

This trend is observable today in converged IT solutions — technology chains uniting network and security capabilities together with artificial intelligence — which will unlock the bigger vision of open-innovation ecosystems with shared enterprise IT platforms. Here, manufacturers, service providers, technology alliances, companies as well as their multi-generational employees, customers, and partners will all be given equal power in co-creating, co-innovating, and co-orchestrating enterprise infrastructure, workflows, services, and experiences.

We also see evidence in today’s initiatives such as the Open Grid, which will turn the Internet inside-out, by bringing more supercomputing power to the edge of every network and bringing new, more immersive experiences to fruition.

Open-innovation ecosystems will be defined by:

  • Intermingling environments where interconnections are pervasive and intersections (as well as interdependencies) are blurred or even erased
  • Re-architected IT infrastructures and connectivity services that lay the foundation for the digitally powered future: cloud and software-defined agility, wireless xG speed and affordability, AI intelligence, hyper-automation with real-time abilities to predict, prescribe, and act
  • Innate security with ubiquitous Zero Trust security architectures
  • Synergies where the aggregated benefit of linked technologies build upon one another to deliver breakthroughs in innovation
  • Neutral marketplaces, open standards, IT democratization, IT consumerization, and consumption models
  • Extensive collaboration, cooperatives, and tech alliance organizations working together, including co-creation and equal opportunities with more bottom-up analysis and ground-truth discovery

Silos can be the death of digital transformation, and open-innovation ecosystems will quicken our pace in making IT evolutions that reach further than the cloud and go beyond XG and the edge. Fostering these globally shared platforms with real-world use cases, enterprises of the future will be empowered to make larger, faster strides in their digital transformation journeys.

Related resources and recommended reading

Don’t miss our other predictions

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