BENGALURU, India :  Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, together with HFS Research unveiled a market study titled, ‘Nowhere to Hide: Embracing the Most Seismic Technological and Business Change in our Lifetime.’ Focusing on how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted businesses across industries, this joint study by Infosys and HFS Research revealed that numerous organizations have accelerated the adoption of automation, digital business models, and the hyper-scale cloud to respond to customer needs quickly and competitively. The report also brought to fore a shift in corporate mindset to advocate change and digitize businesses.

The world changed overnight as COVID-19 created a state of upheaval and economic uncertainty, deeming the real-time prediction of complex risk scenarios as critical. The HFS Research spotlights the emergence of dynamic digital organizations energized by technology that has opened avenues for rapid progression and business growth. The report further highlights that more than digitizing processes, digital transformation is about business leaders reshaping existing business models and exploring new ways of uniting people, data, and processes to create value for their customers. The Infosys-HFS Research additionally emphasizes the strategies implemented by successful companies in various industries (G2K) to survive and thrive in the post-pandemic economy.

For the study, HFS Research, in partnership with Infosys, surveyed 400 Global 2000 executives to understand how businesses can survive and thrive in the economy riddled with the pandemic. It offers perspectives to develop an outlook for IT and business services in the current geopolitical environment.

Key findings:

• Bigger impact: Almost 70 percent of respondents believe that COVID-19 will have a bigger impact than the 2008 downturn with budgets, supply chains, employee availability, and customer intimacy being impacted the most.
• Businesses that will thrive: The public sector, banking, insurance, healthcare, life sciences, and the high-tech industry respondents are relatively confident as they see emerging opportunities for making appropriate investments amid the crisis.
• Protecting the business: At least 65 percent of respondents are insulating their business from volatility by building diverse customer pools and investing in an agile business model.
• Digitize and Adapt: Over 60 percent of enterprises plan to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives and over 70 percent plan to change their product and service portfolio to drive greater customer value.
• Critical IT investments to compete: Investing in creating a virtual, secure, and cloud-enabled IT environment that enables remote working at scale (virtualization, collaboration, security). Investments in the cloud, cybersecurity, and modernizing core IT apps and infrastructure are at the top of the priority heap.
• Increased IT spending: Enterprises expect to increase their spending the most on business and digital consulting, followed by IT infrastructure services (including cloud). They expect the demand for IT and business process services to pick up to serve the dual purpose of driving digital while saving cash.
• Unleash your people to thrive. Nearly 90 percent of organizations realize they need to reposition to unleash people in the new reality. Post-COVID, working arrangements will change dramatically. Only 37 percent prefer a return to an office-based environment. The work culture will evolve from siloed working to interdisciplinary collaboration.

Pravin Rao, Chief Operating Officer at Infosys said, “Post-COVID, we have witnessed accelerated scaling of digital across most enterprises. The strategic investment in cloud, cybersecurity, and modernization is not only helping businesses sharpen their focus on end-to-end customer journeys but also enabling them to do a lot more with much higher agility. With so much at stake to drive customer centricity and productivity, investment in employees and ensuring their well-being is of paramount importance. In a distributed work environment such as today, employees are an important centerpiece within the companies’ strategy framework and therefore, it is imperative for organizations to see how the hybrid work model can be made more effective, productive, resilient, and secure.”

“A new dawn will emerge as the fog clears. We must embrace this brave new business world where a perfect alignment of business outcomes and their enabling technologies demand all our focus and creativity. We are living through the emergence of dynamic digital organizations where people are energized by technology, where they plug into business experiences that are progressing rapidly to places where the possibilities are limitless, where the future is unravelling before our eyes.  What we have experienced – inside of a single year – is the coming together of people to confront their fear of change to face the reality that their organization will sink without it,” said Phil Fersht, CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research.