VMware: next 2,000 days critical for CIOs in Asia in transforming enterprises

VMware, an enterprise software provider, says that the role of chief information officers (CIOs) in Asia Pacific (APAC) and Japan will take a strategic turn by 2025, as they become directly responsible for business outcomes. Organisations will turn to their CIOs to power business expansion.

Surveying 200 CIOs in the APAC and Japan region, The Asia-Pacific CIO In 2025: Driving Fundamental Enterprise Change study* discovered that 64% of CIOs believe they will become key decision makers for corporate strategy with nearly 60% of CIOs in the region expecting to head a profit centre by 2025 and 56% expecting to become CEOs by 2025.

Looking ahead to 2025, CIOs will see a strategic pivot in their roles. They are not only technology implementers but also architects of new business models, overseeing how organisations build, run, manage, connect and protect workloads in response to the rapidly-developing app economy. Cybersecurity continues to be a key priority, with 84% of CIOs suggesting a significant Internet overhaul to control cyber risks.

“Technology has been an enabler of business, but today, it has also become a key disrupter of business models. This trend will become even more prevalent as the digital economy develops and matures. CIOs will need to play the role of a business disrupter in order to influence and achieve a better business outcome for their organisation. We need to adapt to change quickly, upskill ourselves and our workforce in order to deliver products and services that will help our customers get the most out of life,” said Jimmy Ng, CIO, DBS Bank.

APAC CIOs are expected to embrace cutting-edge, data-driven technologies to stay competitive and unlock new growth opportunities for their businesses. The top five future technologies that APAC CIOs in the study are betting on are machine learning (63%), the Internet of Things (IoT, 61%), artificial intelligence (AI, 60%), edge computing (57%) and Blockchain (51%). Forward-thinking CIOs understand that to harness the full potential of these future technologies, they will need to invest in building a robust framework that allows them to build, run and manage modern workloads.

“We are at a critical juncture where cloud, apps, networking, mobility and security intersect. This presents an unprecedented opportunity for CIOs to step up and steer organizations through rapid cycles of innovation to guarantee impactful business outcomes,” said Sanjay K. Deshmukh, VP and MD, Southeast Asia and Korea, VMware.

“VMware Tanzu and Project Pacific, supported by the full breadth and depth of our portfolio makes VMware uniquely positioned to help CIOs build, run, manage, connect and protect their business.”

VMware’s new Tanzu portfolio and Project Pacific will empower CIOs to make the right business bets, harnessing the full potential of Kubernetes to transform the way their organisations build, run and manage cutting-edge technologies.

APAC CIOs are driving new ways of doing business, with more than 60% of them embarking on revenue-generating initiatives. By 2020, that figure is projected to grow to 85% - more than eight in 10 APAC CIOs will be responsible for their organisations’ top-line growth and the alignment between technology and business strategies will be key to their success.

The top three revenue initiatives APAC CIOs will implement include packaging and selling data to a third party (22%), directly managing customer data (21%) and providing IT services to third parties (20%). To help achieve this, enhancements made to VMware’s hybrid cloud portfolio in August 2019 can help CIOs establish a strong digital foundation.

Source: VMware. APAC CIO roles are changing.

As APAC CIOs harness technology to accelerate enterprise transformation, cyberthreats stand in the way of their business success. Reflecting this concern, more than 80% of APAC CIOs support the need for the Internet to be overhauled to combat the increasing sophistication of cybercriminals with 36% of them believing that cybercrime will likely or very likely lead to a shutdown of the Internet.

Designed specifically to address cyberthreats for the modern distributed enterprise, VMware’s new zero-trust architecture vision makes security intrinsic, automated, proactive and pervasive, redefining how businesses can protect themselves. This vision is also supported by VMware’s enhanced partnership with Dell to make VMware Carbon Black Cloud a preferred endpoint/workload security solution for Dell customers**.

CIOs in the APAC region can lead their companies toward fundamentally new ways of doing business in response to the region’s growing app-driven digital economy. In this new paradigm, enterprises are increasingly adopting Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure to continuously deliver custom software on a more secure, reliable platform, and to transform how their enterprises do business,” said Lionel Lim, VP and MD, Asia Pacific and Japan, Pivotal.

“By providing organisations with a developer-ready infrastructure that allows them to harness the full potential of Kubernetes to build, run and manage modern applications, VMware is well placed to help APAC CIOs deliver innovations that help drive successful business outcomes.”

*Forbes Insights and VMware surveyed 652 CIOs across the globe about the future of their role in April 2019. Some 31% of respondents were from North America, 39% from Europe and 30% from the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan. These CIOs represented a wide range of industries, including financial services, government, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and telecommunications. All CIOs were from organisations with annual revenue of US$1 billion or more, with 16% from firms with US$10 billion or more in revenue.

** VMware acquired Carbon Black in October 2019. Carbon Black now forms the nucleus of VMware’s security offering, providing advanced cybersecurity protection and in-depth behavioural insights to help stop sophisticated cyberattacks and accelerate responses. The enhanced partnership with Dell Technologies that will make Carbon Black Cloud, along with Dell Trusted Devices and Secureworks, the preferred endpoint security solution for Dell commercial customers.

Dell customers now have the option to factory install VMware Carbon Black’s Next-Generation Antivirus and Endpoint Detection and Response solutions on their computers, enabling them with capabilities to prevent cyberattacks with artificial intelligence and machine learning technology; detect cyberthreats with enhanced insights and analytics; and respond to cyber incidents with complete management and assistance to help quickly contain and eliminate the cyberthreat.