Gartner estimates that worldwide IT spending will be nearly $4.5 trillion in 2023. Despite high inflationary pressure and threats of a looming recession hovering over major economies, the outlook for enterprise IT spending is still positive and expected to exceed levels seen in 2022.

To be honest, it isn’t a surprise to see so much money being poured into the digital landscape by businesses of all sizes.

Over the past decade, and especially in the pandemic years, consumers have increasingly shifted their interests to digital channels for nearly everything. From entertainment to education, finance, healthcare, and retail, there is a heightened demand from consumers to have their engagement with businesses in these segments handled through self-service digital channels.

What Does This Mean for the Enterprise Application Landscape?

With consumers expressing an accelerated digital aspiration for all their needs, businesses would have to naturally invest in sprucing up their tech landscape to fulfill these aspirations and expectations. The question of whether digital is important or not is now out of the way. The focus of enterprise leaders will be on what digital transformation initiatives they must invest in and implement at the earliest. Knowing what to do to make enterprise applications resilient and future-proof will be one of the key metrics of success for modern-day businesses.

On this note, here are my top 3 predictions for the world of enterprise applications in 2023 and beyond:

1. Legacy Application Modernization

The market for application modernization is expected to be worth over $32.8 billion globally by 2027. Legacy applications are one of the biggest hindrances to a seamless digital experience for customers. As competition heats up, enterprises must be in a position to offer digital services that are easy to scale, easy to integrate with a partner or 3rd party systems, open to flexible and fast feature roll-out initiatives, and above all, support dynamic performance requirements of customers.

Legacy applications, however, do not support this philosophy and can be a big hurdle in the organization’s digital ambitions. Hence, I fully expect that leaders will give full power to CIOs and CTOs to run application modernization initiatives across the operational and customer engagement landscape at will.

These initiatives may either require customizing or upgrading existing applications to suit newer digital trends or moving the business functionality from an existing legacy application to a completely new platform or product. These new platforms or products could be either engineered from scratch or leveraged as a SaaS offering from popular vendors.

2. Autonomous Operations

In the past decade, enterprise applications were primarily designed to help businesses automate critical functions or operations. With digital services taking center stage in almost every business aspect, it is now important for enterprises to move to the next chapter of automation with their applications. Thus, my next prediction for enterprise applications will be autonomous operations.

In simple terms, autonomous operations focus on enabling business systems to learn from operational insights and make decisions autonomously. One of the best ways to understand this trend is to explore the rise of AI services in the mainstream.

From customer service chatbots to generative AI systems that can handle entire marketing campaigns autonomously, the next couple of years will be the era of AI. Generative AI alone is expected to be worth over $126.5 billion by 2031, according to studies. The growth of AI is also the biggest asset that enterprises can leverage to meet the digital aspirations of consumers at scale.

3. Cybersecurity

My final prediction for the world of enterprise applications in 2023 and beyond would be a dramatic increase in the investment that businesses worldwide would make in the field of cybersecurity. It is an inevitable consequence of the expanding digital landscape where consumers continue to transact daily with businesses of all sizes.

As more sensitive data and insights are exchanged over enterprise digital networks, security becomes the most critical element that decision-makers must prioritize for their growth. Increasing regulatory pressure from regulations like GDPR, the rise of new-age cyber threats, and the transition of corporate job roles into fully remote work modes are all key in making cybersecurity investments a top priority.

Just because I named these 3 trends, it doesn’t mean that these are the only ones that businesses must prioritize in the coming years. These 3 areas represent a very broad spectrum of accelerated digital transformation initiatives that enterprises must carefully execute in their business models.

So, How to Proceed?

Treading uncharted territories in the digital space can be a big challenge if businesses have limited exposure to best practices, the sustainable architecture of applications, and expertise in emerging technologies. This is why having a knowledgeable technology partner like i-Source to guide your business by preparing the most optimal digital roadmap for success is essential.

Get in touch with i-Source Infosystems to learn more about how your business can transition into a digital-first enterprise faster while balancing risks and costs to uncover maximum ROI. I’m sure my team can help you as they have many others.

Mohan Tilak
Chief of Operations, Application Maintenance & Support