Just 31% of companies are responding proactively to the digital transformation.” At the most recent session of Desayunos ESADE Alumni in Madrid, Santiago Solanas, Vice President of Cisco for Southern Europe (Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Israel, Malta, Portugal and Spain), observed that most companies are not addressing the challenge of the digital revolution with an adequate strategy. “In fact,” he noted, “41% of companies see this situation as a threat rather than an opportunity.”

The necessary change “should not be implemented all at once,” argued Mr. Solanas. “Companies that choose their position on the basis of value creation work on the basis of specific projects that then become a part of a coordinated strategic plan.”

Mr. Solanas invited companies to assimilate the digital transformation in three major areas: “Creating new customer experiences, transforming business processes and driving innovation.” He added: “If we address these areas through our strategy, we can increase economic value for the company and the consumer, allowing us to participate in many very different platforms.” He insisted, however, that “the digital transformation cannot be not carried out all at once; you have to know which sections to work on first and when to develop them.” He then elaborated: “To give you an example, in the retail sector there is currently more than $500 billion at stake, and only 26% of companies will be able to get a piece of it by working, specifically, on their business model, the customer experience and innovation.”

Digital vortex and security

“The future has arrived very quickly and it is overwhelming,” Mr. Solanas observed. “Facebook now knows us better than our own partners do, and self-driving cars are generating between 20 and 30 gigabytes of information every hour.” He added: “Two years from now, half of all Internet searches will be done by voice. In the United States, the figure is already 30%. By 2020, there will be 50 billion connected devices worldwide.” We are living, he said, in a “digital vortex” where, as different industries “get closer to the centre of the vortex, the rate of transformation begins to accelerate and elements start colliding with one another more frequently, generating greater chaos”.

Given the volume of information generated by the digital revolution and the vulnerability that it brings with it, Mr. Solanas acknowledged that “you can’t be 100% secure, but you can be sufficiently well protected to detect threats and eliminate them before they pose a serious danger”. “On average, it takes a hundred days to detect an intrusion, although that time can be reduced to 3.5 hours, like at Cisco, if you have a latest-generation network,” Mr. Solanas commented, before reiterating his satisfaction at the fact that none of his clients were affected by the recent WannaCry virus: “It entered, we detected it and we were able to clean things up before it was activated.”

Mr. Solanas was joined by Pedro Navarro, Vice-Chair of the ESADE Foundation Board of Trustees, at this most recent session of Desayunos ESADE Alumni.