A recent survey indicates that organizations fall roughly equally into three groups when it comes to digital transformation:

• An aspirational category (31%) of organizations that want to take advantage of more DX opportunities but need to pay more attention to the basic plumbing—including adding networking capabilities and investing in networking technologies to include software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WANs).
• Those that have not committed to transformation (33%). They are limited in their network access capabilities and WAN technologies, which, in turn, is limiting their ability to take advantage of cloud services.
• Opportunistic enterprises (33%) that are fully committed to digital transformation and have made the necessary investments in networking technologies to get there.

Another 2% are considered disrupters that are working to meet the business goals facilitated by DX to drive networking strategy and are moving to SD-WAN to capture the benefits of cloud services.

Surprisingly, perhaps, considering IT’s bad rap for past technology leaps—remember the early pains of ERP?—83% of transformation projects are meeting or exceeding schedules and most of those are within or under budget.

That’s not to say there’s hardly any discomfort. IT skills are seen as a top-three impediment to transformation by 75% of the respondents. “In some organizations, they may not have touched some of these legacy networking boxes for 15 years,” says Jody Hagemann, director, Product Management and Strategy, with Comcast Business. “Many are still coming to grips with what software-defined technology does and what the service provider handles, versus what the organization itself manages. It’s a new engagement model, so many are turning to managed services to help with the transition.”

Almost two-thirds of the survey respondents view managed services as a key priority in their digital transformation strategies.