MuleSoft lays out digital transformation challenges

86% of IT decision makers in the retail sector fear their firm’s revenues will take a hit in the next year if they fail to complete their digital transformation initiatives. That’s according to research carried out by Vanson Bourne on behalf of MuleSoft and involving 104 IT decision makers.

This highlights a gap between what the business expects and what IT can deliver – with two-thirds of retailers admitting they weren’t able to deliver all projects asked of them over the last year. 91%, meanwhile, agreed that integration challenges hinder digital transformation. This is further underlined by the finding that retailers are spending 23% of their budgets on integration.

82% say that point-to-point integration has created some of the biggest headaches their organisation has ever seen. Furthermore, 79% believe that point-to-point integration must die if their organisation is to reduce costs, deliver on business needs faster, remain competitive and extract more value from data. 97% claimed that their application development process isn’t efficient enough. This is being exacerbated by the finding that retailers only make 35% of their internal IT assets available for developers to re-use. Furthermore, 82% say they do not always re-use software assets when developing new products and services.

“When it comes to digital transformation, it is no longer a case of ‘if’ but ‘when’ for organisations. However, there is growing impatience at a business level to make the goals of digital transformation a reality right now, as those that fall behind will start to lose revenue and market share fast,” says Ross Mason, Founder and VP of Product Strategy, MuleSoft. “Today, CIOs and IT decision makers are under a huge amount of pressure to meet business expectations, but it’s clear that they are struggling to keep up. Integration challenges are creating an IT delivery gap, and organisations can no longer afford to let it drain time, resources and budget.”