VAI Customers Weigh in on VAI Software, Cloud, and Business Outlook

We’re back from Disney, where we held this year’s VAI Customer Conference, Prevail 2023. With so much excitement and momentum going into the planning of the conference, expectations were high, and attendees were not disappointed. It’s been several years since the last in-person gathering, and we’ve found that our customers embraced face-to-face interaction, with many of them claiming that an in-person meeting is far more productive than a virtual one and that it feels nice to be free of the distractions of daily office life. 

Prevail 2023 offered our clients and visitors the ability to enhance their S2K ERP software skills, experience practical laboratories, interact with VAI specialists, network with industry peers, hear from speakers, and have fun at EPCOT. They also offered some insight into the future of business and IT.

We found that cloud adoption still dominates the landscape. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 75% of organizations will adopt a digital transformation model predicated on the cloud as the fundamental underlying platform. In our Prevail 2023 customer survey, over 54% of respondents are currently running their enterprise software in the cloud, with another 8% considering it this year. Approximately 28% of respondents are considering moving their operations to the cloud within a few years. Just under 8% are not considering moving their enterprise software to the cloud.

Moving to the cloud has many advantages, including greater analytics, cost savings, the elimination of physical infrastructure, faster scalability, and increased security. Because on-premise licensing may no longer be required, cloud databases can dramatically lower the running costs of in-office databases and actual on-premise servers. Another advantage of the cloud is scalability, which may be configured to operate automatically. Data can be safely kept in the cloud with disaster recovery capabilities, and with increased analytics, businesses may incorporate AI services to provide more in-depth analysis of their data.

Customers have shared that running their ERP in VAI Cloud gives them peace of mind with having the infrastructure and equipment already in place, along with High Availability and Disaster Recovery that guarantees them 100% uptime. The outsourcing of business infrastructure frees up resources, allowing for more efficient employee time management.  

Business and IT spend outlook over the next 12 months. An article in The Economic Times by DD Mishra, Sr Director Analyst, Gartner, suggests that while 2023 may be a year of caution and some of the budgets may have been paused, the next year onwards, we will see a return to growth while IT services spending for the next two-three years is going to be in the double-digits.

36% of our clients have had very high business aspirations for the future year. In contrast, 54% are cautiously optimistic and 10% are neutrally hopeful. Nobody had a pessimistic viewpoint. Businesses may and should use the lessons they've gained during difficult times to plan and get ready for what might occur tomorrow, despite cyberattacks, economic downturns, climatic disasters, armed conflict, pandemics, and industry problems. This fosters resilience and the capacity to anticipate outcomes and, in certain cases, employ technology to do so, paving the path for enterprises to flourish in a variety of settings and circumstances.

How Does ERP Help the Workday? We asked our attendees an open-ended question about how VAI helped them to organize their workday. We categorized those responses and learned that about 40% love the data management and analysis tools we offer. Nearly 30% said that our tools help them with customer service – from ordering to retail’ and 25% highlighted something to do with our accounting functions as helpful. Other responses focused on security, production, inventory management, and workflow.

At Prevail 2023, we learned many things, but the chief among them is that cloud computing is still exploding in popularity, while IT services investment is expected to increase by double digits over the next two to three years. Most businesses are hopeful for the future, and people value the friendliness and unity that come from face-to-face communication.

That will be something we keep in mind as we move ahead and begin to consider our next event.

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