It’s clear that digital transformation and the adoption of digital technology continue to dominate information and communications technology. It is truly the key to all kinds of innovation and will be particularly important as organizations continue to become more distributed.

As IT becomes more specialized, it’s becoming harder to find enough people to manage complex digital transformations. Organizations are turning to managed services to coordinate and address all of these IT needs — in particular cloud, connectivity, and security. Often, businesses don’t have enough staff, or the right staff, to handle the day-to-day management of services and still facilitate innovation. Assessing internal IT and infrastructure needs and finding the right managed solutions and services to help with digital transformation will be critical in the coming years.

When the industry began building and adopting “the cloud,” we should have collectively placed more focus on enterprise-grade features that deliver network flexibility. One size does not fit all. Companies need to be able to adapt their networking and infrastructure as their needs shift. Connecting and migrating workloads to the cloud should not have to be a complex undertaking.

Fortunately, we are now able to develop SD-WAN and multi-cloud solutions to connect a customer’s resources to the cloud. From a security standpoint, we can layer comprehensive security solutions over this new multi-cloud ecosystem and provide visibility and management across our customers’ IT environments. We started 11:11 Systems to bring cloud, connectivity, and security together to ensure customer apps and data are always running, accessible, and protected by providing fully integrated, fully automated services, activities, and data powered on a single platform.

Innovation is the true difference between success and failure, whether it takes the form of a technological breakthrough or a strategic initiative that challenges the way we look at the world. Innovation is an endlessly empowering attitude that sets people and companies apart.

To foster innovation, an organization has to be willing and ready to invest: to face its own gaps and weaknesses, to be open to being uncomfortable and challenged, and to take uncharted paths to rethink how all businesses, all technologies, and all people work together.

PTC’s value to me, to 11:11 Systems, or anyone in the ICT industry are three-pronged:

1. The Annual Conference provides a global platform to kick off the year with a clear understanding of how all players are planning their go-to-market strategies;
2. An incredible networking opportunity to meet important contributors within our industry;
3. A community that makes a difference and gives back through education, information, and projects.

It will be one of the best investments your organization will make. Stay connected and discover, rethink, and learn as ICT evolves.

If you find yourself imagining a global community connected beyond the perceived barriers of demographic, socioeconomic, and physical borders, then ICT is not just a good fit for you—it needs you. It is a field that is open to big thinkers, innovators, and visionaries.