Now that we have settled into the new year, enterprise cloud solution providers are looking to expand their focus to business buyers, not just IT/development teams.

As Gartner notes in its Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023 presentation, given by Gartner analysts at its 2022 IT Symposia globally, “senior IT and business leaders need to prepare to optimise, scale, or pioneer.

• To optimise resilience, operations or trust;
• To scale your vertical solutions, product delivery, or… everywhere;
• To pioneer customer engagement, accelerated responses or opportunity.”

There is also a growing need for combinations of technologies to address disruptions in any given industry or market.

With these market dynamics as the backdrop, here are four technology trends to watch:

1. The composable reality

For the last few years, many of the top market research and analyst firms have talked about the need and recommendation for purchasing best-of-breed applications and “composing” them together in a harmonious way, known as the “composable ERP.”

This challenges the notion of a monolithic ERP system itself as the centre of gravity for an organisation. However, what hasn’t yet been formally addressed is the means by which to accomplish this composition. While many pure-play vendors in the market have their specific versions of iPaaS (infrastructure platform-as-a-service), no-code development frameworks, machine learning platforms, and more, no one has fully expanded their portfolio to cover the complete breadth for an end-to-end innovation use case. This is where GSIs (global system integrators) have traditionally played a large role, but the demand from buyers will likely be that this is an easier and faster process to procure, personalise, and deploy. Many larger software companies have procured more capabilities, but the vast majority are not natively integrated yet with their existing cloud services. This will be the year to make that a reality through a true digital transformation platform that becomes the standard glue for any given organisation.

2. Mainstream hyperautomation

With the continuous pressure on cost efficiency and market influence, there is a conflicting need for new business models & differentiation while also being cost conscious. Organisations need to prove ROI faster while also focusing on the areas of their business where the largest cost and risk occurs. More often than not, this tends to centre around operations and people.

What the industry should expect is that simply automating one given task is not enough. That may simply begin the journey. Instead, this will be a journey of continuous improvement even if a sense of automation exists. Can this be faster, more accurate, more proactive, more intelligent? Can this continue to automate across disparate systems? Can this reach into my legacy on-premise systems and knowledge? This will become the expectation that IT teams request, as they are pressured by the business.

3. Enterprise simulations

Similar to the hyperautomation trend, businesses will want to explore if new paths can help them receive inventory faster, sell more product, reduce waste, move into new markets, or even assess how they can react to new market situations. Performing large-scale simulations like this can certainly be done in test environments, but that comes with an excessively large overhead of data migrations or refreshes, process refinements, and eventual porting of changes to production. My expectation is that business users will want access to simulations in the context of their daily work. For instance, if a procurement specialist is working on an order and thinks this might be her opportunity to work with a new vendor of choice, then perhaps technology will enable her to simulate that decision based on the mass data profiles and machine learning & optimisation models running in the background. If the user likes the result, then they can gain more confidence in the path and ultimately make better decisions that affect the overall business significantly. It should no longer be the bottleneck for changing a business process for better decision-making.

4. Enterprises becoming creative agencies

As an aggregator of the previous trends, the overarching movement is that, as the workforce evolves and the business becomes increasingly more pressured for ROI-based innovation, the C-suite will want technology solutions that empower their workers to be creative in safe yet measured ways. They will want to exploit the creativity of every member of every department without having to procure a myriad of tools and put stress on IT to provide project spaces. Instead, this should be ingrained into the enterprise software experience to encourage such behaviour. Employees will be better able to manage supply chains, resolve issues and escalations, optimise planning and inventory, and more. Companies will look for a trusted partner in an enterprise software vendor to empower and embrace the fact that lack of standardisation in innovation can actually make you differentiated in your market.