Waldemar Adams, SAP Senior Vice President of Analytics -Middle East and Africa

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JOHANNESBURG , LOCAL businesses must keep up with change or else they are doomed to fail.

This is the warning of an expert amid the unprecedented ever-quickening cycle of change.

“Change today is faster, more erratic, more elemental than ever before. A collision of technological, competitive and cultural pressures is forming a vortex of what we have begun to call the information age,” Waldemar Adams, SAP Senior Vice President of Analytics: Middle East and Africa.

SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software.

Adams reiterates a business that does not keep up with change is doomed to fail.

“Most healthy companies die because they resist change,” he says.

Adams raises the examples of some Fortune 500s once giants of their markets – BlackBerry, Nokia and Blockbuster Video.

“They were super successful, the world leaders. They had their business model and they relied on it. It was all they knew and they were good at it. So why give it up?”

“But the change wasn’t a surprise out of the blue. Another customer moved to a smartphone or used streaming instead of renting. And another one. Change was there, they just chose to ignore it.”

The organisations that are adapting faster to this digital transformation are more successful, says Adams.

“They have more revenue,” says Adams.

Digitally transformed companies on average only increased revenue by 9 percent, but simultaneously boosted profitability 25 percent.

“That is quite a big,” says Adams.

– Guardian