Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly
At Data Summit Connect 2020 Bruno Kurtic, founding VP, strategy and solutions, Sumo Logic, explained how digital transformation and the drive to differentiate has made every company a software business.
Full videos of Data Summit Connect 2020 presentations are available at www.dbta.com/DBTA-Downloads/WhitePapers.
Digital transformation has been a business imperative for the last decade but the trend of transforming traditional business models into digital business models has been going on for about 25 years, or since the advent of the world wide web, Kurtic observed.
As companies transform into digital businesses, they are having to change their processes, technologies, and tools, acquire new skills, and more.
"Really what digital transformation is—and it's sometimes called the analytics information age, or analytics economy—is the fourth stage of the industrial revolution," Kurtic said. "If you think back, it's sort of the steam engine and the automated production line, and then the introduction of the computing power to manufacturing and supply chain process processes. We are now transforming our businesses, transforming the industry into essentially a digital experience industry. So this has been going on for 25 years and it's probably going to be going on for another couple of decades as we go through the stage."
When companies go through digital transformation, a few fundamental things happen. However, the biggest fundamental change that companies go through is that they become software companies, he explained.
"Long gone are the days when buying off-the-shelf software ERP systems or supply chain systems or CRM systems from vendors is sufficient to differentiate your business," Kurtic said. "When you go to digital, you're fundamentally transforming how you do business, which means that in order to transform yourself into doing business better than your competitors, you must innovate differently."
Companies must write their own software that is finely tuned and adapted to their own business model in order to differentiate.