The future is now! Virtualization – exploring a new world

'The future is now! Virtualization - exploring a new world' analyses the challenges, which organizations are facing today, and highlights the importance of resilience as well as new impulses and strategic approaches for companies.

The white paper highlights the opportunity for organizations to successfully master various challenges of the increasingly complex market through virtuality and to strengthen their own resilience. It shows recommended actions for companies in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous market environment.

It also highlights the potential of virtuality in the telecommunications industry, which could play a significant role in the design and implementation of virtualization.

Virtualization as a new challenge

The constant dynamics of the market challenge companies to continuously adapt to the environment in order to remain competitive and strengthen their own position. In addition to the previous influencing factors such as digitalization and digital transformation, new challenges are arising with the increasing relevance of virtualization. The Corona pandemic also highlighted the growing importance of flexibility and resilience for companies. These were suddenly forced to question existing processes and examine which activities can be carried out digitally and virtually. The focus changed from efficiency to resilience as a new priority for companies.

Recently, the Corona crisis has shown companies how important it is to build resilience within their own organizations. Even before Corona, organizations found themselves in a highly complex environment due to the ongoing digital transformation. Virtualization is disruptive - boundaries between what exists physically and what exists virtually are increasingly disappearing. Companies that want to remain competitive and master the path to becoming more resilient organizations cannot afford to sleep through the rise of virtualization and must embrace transformation now.

Marcel Tietjen, BearingPoint Partner

Virtualization and its different forms

BearingPoint sees virtuality as an important component for everyday life as well as for companies. Two relevant forms of virtualization are defined. The so-called 'global first' and the 'remote first' companies are already fully virtualized from the beginning. In contrast, there are the traditional companies with few points of contact with virtualization, which promote virtualization by transforming their own processes and thus improve their resilience.

BackCasting as a method for long-term target definition in a volatile environment

Companies can use 'BackCasting' as a strategic response to market developments and competitive pressure. BackCasting takes a future goal as a starting point and, based on this, derives possible solutions and measures for successfully achieving the goal.

Opportunities for telecommunications companies

For the telecommunications industry, virtualization offers significant opportunities to develop new business models, withstand pressures in the industry and create new revenue streams. This is also evident with regard to the healthcare sector. The feasibility of virtualization means, for example, that patients and doctors can discuss diagnosis and treatment in a virtual room.