Canada needs to get on the digital wave or get left behind: Cisco rep

TORONTO — Most Canadian businesses are not prepared for the next wave of digital innovation and there needs to be a collaborative effort to help them adapt, a Cisco Systems Inc. representative told a conference on Thursday. Rick Huijbregts, Cisco’s vice-president of transformation and innovation, held a session on Canadian innovation on the second and final day of the Connected Plus conference in Toronto. He said more needs to be done to help businesses adapt to new technologies that will inevitably disrupt how they do business. “As this is happening around us, we — big companies, small companies, startups, governments, the whole ecosystem — need to collaborate and work together to take advantage of what’s happening here or we will be left behind,” Huijbregts said in his keynote to a crowd of technologists, engineers, policy-makers and academics. The conference played host to more than 750 Internet of Things (IoT) professionals and to companies including Rogers Communications Inc., BCE Inc., Telus Corp., Microsoft Corp., Cogeco Inc., General Electric Co. and Ericsson AB. It covered topics including connected condos, home automation, smart cities, the connected consumer and industrial IoT. “We need to help them imagine what the future will look like and help them build infrastructure and strategies and technologies and foundational capabilities on top of which they can transform their businesses,” he added. But Huijbregts said most of Canada is not ready for the digital shift and cited the onset of technological disrupters, including mixed, virtual and augmented reality, commercial use of drones, 3D printing and the use of robots. He noted statistics from market intelligence company International Data Corp. (IDC) found that while 97 per cent of business executives believe they need a digital strategy, only 17 per cent actually have one. “That’s a massive gap, still…” he said. “Everything I’ve spoken about is coming fast and furious and will impact their business.” “We have a lot of work in front of us.” Huijbregts said a study by Cisco and the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland found that over the next 10 years Canada could generate almost $1 trillion in revenue through savings and investments — $795 billion from the private sector and $158 billion from the public sector — on digital initiatives. According to a Cisco report, which maps digital value in the private sector between 2015 and 2024, Cisco and IMD launched a joint five-year initiative called the Global Centre for Digital Business Transformation (DBT Center) “to help organizations map out their digital strategies.” What they found was that the time to digital disruption “for most industries is a mere three years.” The report said technology-driven developments that are contributing to this “digital disruption” include the expansion of the wearables market, the increasing number of cars connected to the Internet worldwide, and the growth in both the global mobile health and sensor market and adoption of connected technologies in the home. Huijbregts added that Canada is dropping when it comes to its innovation ranking compared to other Organization for Co-operation and Economic Development (OECD) countries and that if it doesn’t find new ways of doing things, it will slip further behind. “The only way to get this is if we think about digital infrastructure as the foundation, and then think about IoT, video, mobility and all of those technologies that are coming our way to create these new experiences … and help those 83 per cent of Canadian businesses that have no plan and no vision on how digital will impact their businesses to take advantage of what we have in front of us.” — With reporting by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Canada needs to get on the digital wave or get left behind: Cisco rep

News | October 14, 2016

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Canada needs to get on the digital wave or get left behind: Cisco rep

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