We are in a perfect Digital Storm

What is Digital Transformation (Dx): Digital transformation is the profound transformation of business and organizational activities, processes, competencies and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities of a mix of digital technologies and their accelerating impact across society in a strategic and prioritized way, with present and future shifts in mind.

Digital transformation is about implementing new employee roles, software, hardware, as-a-Service options (including cloud computing), automation, and agile processes in a combination that dramatically changes your business operating model.

What is innovation: Innovation is about using or creating something disruptive – a product, service, or process that shifts your overall paradigm. Remember that innovation is not always the technology being used or created. It is what results from that technology and how you solve your pre-existing problems in newly reimagined ways that benefit your organization.

Six spokes of Digital Transformation, (with Dx being the hub) are:

• Cloud computing/Cyber security/authentication
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML)/Deep learning (DL)/Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR)
• Business Intelligence (BI)/Big data
• Blockchain
• 5G
• IoT

With the global pandemic of COVID-19, starting earlier this year, there has been an acceleration of Digital Transformation, with significant need for increase in Remote learning, increased connectivity and speed, cybersecurity, remote ordering and efficient supply chain. While there has been a major employment loss in Airlines, travel, hotel, resorts, restaurant, fast food industry, casinos and entertainment; the picture is quite opposite/bright in many other industries. This paradigm shift has thrust us into Industry 4.0 and accelerated the pace of Dx. Most of the leading companies including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google have crossed a Trillion-dollar market cap. The growth of companies like nVidia (an enabler of AI) has significantly increased. Technology is “a killer and an opportunity.” When we look on the recent surge in tech companies’ value.

There has been a major transformation into Platform companies. So far Apple has been the only true platform company in the world.

What is a platform: A platform company is a completely HW and SW compatible and scalable all the way to cloud? Microsoft, nVidia and Salesforce.com are all trying to be a platform company. There hasn’t been a company like Apple in the history of the world. Charles Munger (Berkshire Hathaway) compared Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL) to John D Rockefeller’s empire. “It’s been the most dramatic thing that’s almost ever happened in the entire world history of finance.” Apple is the most advanced company in Chip design, SW, HW, security and cloud.

In September 2020, this year a San Mateo, California company, called SnowFlake Cloud Platform company went public, after 8years, since its start. It has a market cap of over $40B, and the 5 founders became billionaires on the first day of IPO. So, what is a single Cloud Platform? You can eliminate data silos and run your workloads from a single platform, such as Data Engineering, Data Lake, Data Warehouse, Data Science, Data Applications and Data Sharing. You can appreciate the power of a Platform. That is the future.