The pace and degree of digital transformation have accelerated in the past year as businesses were forced to devise newer strategies to ensure business continuity while minimizing the negative impact of the pandemic. Enterprises that had made significant investments in digital technologies were better poised to face the unexpected and rapid changes in business scenarios, whereas those with low digital maturity had to spend a significant part of the early days of the pandemic in transforming their operations to suit the new normal.
External factors such as customer needs and requirements, quality, reduction of production and control costs, environmental impact of products, etc., are pushing enterprises to re-evaluate their business strategies. They are continuously striving to find the right balance between increasing the margins of legacy products and generating revenue growth through investments made toward digital innovation, new products, and services. The compelling sense of urgency to solve integration challenges and overcome other shortcomings related to poor visibility into data flows, low data security, overall latency, etc., is pushing enterprises to re-evaluate their legacy systems. While some enterprises prefer to gradually replace legacy systems, others are carefully assessing risks and identifying ways to modernize legacy systems and tools to improve overall performance. To optimize and derive the maximum value of legacy systems, enterprises are rebuilding legacy elements into the cloud-native environment, rearchitecting or re-platforming legacy applications. Looking at the impact on industries in the past year, healthcare, telecom, software, and internet have stayed resilient, with increasing investments made towards digital infrastructure and solutions to reimagine nearly every facet of their operations. In contrast, the pandemic has had a pronounced impact on industries such as aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, travel, and hospitality, as demand for services took a nosedive. Across industries, digital technologies have been a moat for survival for businesses, having enabled various use cases. This has led to a steep rise in global Digital Engineering (DE) spending, which reached USD 545Bn1. in 2020, despite the overall economic downturn.
