A recently released report from GSMA Intelligence showed, among other insights, that enterprises are focusing more on improving cybersecurity and boosting their revenue, as opposed to cutting their costs.
GSMA, who hosted a webinar delving into these insights and at which IoT Insider was present, took some time to translate the findings into actionable takeaways for the benefit of both enterprises and suppliers.
Industry verticals have different priorities
Pablo Iacopino, Director of Ecosystem Research took attendees through the findings of the survey, ‘The rise of digital industries: navigating enterprise needs, investments and supplier decisions’. It was conducted in the summer of 2024 and involved 4,200 enterprises across 21 countries and 10 vertical industries.
One takeaway became immediately clear – the objectives of industries, the technologies they embrace, their perceived benefits and priorities in their digital transformation journey, all depend on the industry vertical.
“This is very important because if you are a supplier of digital transformation technologies, you may want to tailor your B2B messaging, your B2B strategy to the specific objectives of your target vertical sectors,” Iacopino explained.
For example, the most important digital transformation objective for healthcare is to meet compliance or regulatory requirements; for financial or automotive services, this is an increase of revenues.
Consequently, GSMA Intelligence drew on data provided by the survey to calculate the ranking of verticals based on their digital transformation objectives, their use of today’s technologies and future spend on digital transformation.
“The ranking shows that the financial services and media and entertainment are leading the way in terms of digital transformation,” noted Iacopino, “[the] public sector and agriculture are at the bottom based on our ranking.”
Technologies enterprises are deploying
The kinds of technologies enterprises in each surveyed industry vertical currently uses was just as important to understand from the perspective of a technology supplier who wants to market their solutions and services sufficiently.
Findings showed cybersecurity and the Cloud are the most commonly adopted technologies for enabling enterprises’ digital transformation, but that this did depend on the vertical. Additionally, questions posed by GSMA Intelligence to enterprises sought to establish priority sectors for each technology as well as current use, to indicate what technologies sectors might invest in, in the future.
“Suppliers of Cloud and cybersecurity solutions should look to scale with manufacturing, utilities and transportation sectors as a priority,” shared Christina Patsioura, Lead Analyst, IoT & Enterprise. “On the other hand, automotive is likely to be a prime customer of AI and IoT technologies more than others.”
The challenges behind deploying technologies, Patsioura said, were found to be largely the same, regardless of the technology: the cost of implementation, security vulnerabilities, integration with existing systems and lack of internal expertise. The top challenges were understood to be the cost of implementation and complexity of integration.
“What does that mean for suppliers? It means they should ensure their offerings cover the key concerns and barriers their potential customers see,” she said. “It also tells us what attributes those suppliers should stress in order to stand out in the market.
“For example, in the case of IoT, it seems a good portion of enterprise buyers see the technology as lacking mature solutions. A supplier of IoT needs to explain why their offerings are mature enough.”
Recognise the differences
A quick demonstration of a dashboard GSMA Intelligence had put together with the express purpose of making it easy for enterprises and suppliers to navigate their insights showed that the priorities were also dependent on where the enterprises were based in the world. In the US market, for example, the top objective was to increase revenues; in Germany this was strengthening the competitive position.
“The goal here is trying to help understand the market, the opportunities and how to support those opportunities,” Peter Jarich, Head of GSMA Intelligence, summed up aptly. “Every vertical is different, we can’t look at every single vertical being the same and maybe that’s part of the industry’s problem.
“We talk about B2B opportunities like it is one, big, monolithic opportunity, but we need to recognise that every vertical is different and every country is different.”
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