Over the past year, there has been an acceleration in digital transformation for IBM’s clients all over the world.

Customers have used technology tools to allow teams to connect and operate remotely, which has also provided them the opportunity to leverage automation, artificial intelligence and the cloud. So what’s next for the future of digital transformation?

Mark Foster (pictured), senior vice president of IBM Services and Global Business Services at IBM, says that virtual enterprise and collaborative ecosystems are going to be even more important moving forward.

“A virtual enterprise for us is an extension of the thought process we’ve had before around how technology is transforming the way all businesses operate,” Foster said. “If you do apply … the power of technology to build new business platforms, to think about new ways of applying technology to transform your business processes, you think about the way that all of us are reinventing the relationship between people and technology in our organizations — the virtual enterprise just takes that to the next level.”

Foster spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during IBM Think. They discussed the concept of a virtual enterprise, collaborative ecosystems and what it will take to succeed. (* Disclosure below.)

Using virtual enterprise to create new ecosystems and markets

So what will it take to become a virtual enterprise? A virtual enterprise recognizes that if a company is able to take location out of the equation, then they are able to leverage ecosystems more completely through connecting through networks of organizations, according to Foster.

“We create this even more connected, even more expansive vision of business, which is … able to leverage technology within its own four walls. It’s able to leverage it powerfully with its business partners,” Foster described.

For this to work, an intelligent workflow that creates an ecosystem of collaboration and mutual benefit must run through an enterprise and its many partners, according to Foster. The power of such a collaborative ecosystem is brought to life by mutually leveraging technology through partnerships and the creation of platforms for new ecosystems and markets.

“The ecosystem and its success becomes the strategy … of the participants as opposed to being something that they happened to be going along with. So it becomes the strategy of the organization,” Foster stated. “And when you can connect the dots and you can expand your market footprint by combining with other key players at scale and also create a way that smaller organizations can come and sit upon the platforms that you create and leverage those capabilities, then the opportunity to actually use that to really expand your horizons of where your business can go are very real.”

While ecosystems are crucial for virtual enterprises, there’s also the opportunity to think about the use of data as a stronger source of innovation across an ecosystem, according to Foster. This, in turn, will help businesses to think about how products and services could be modernized to succeed in such a data-driven world.

“You’re really thinking about how to reinvent the way work gets done — apply automation, apply AI, apply blockchain, apply IoT to transform those workflows is a massive, massive opportunity,” Foster concluded. “By the power of that, you’re able to have significantly more impact than before.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Think. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE