How do you see data-driven transformation reshaping enterprise IT infrastructure and application integration in the next three to five years?
Grant Caley: Historically, IT was built around applications, such as large databases, records or collaborative tools like Microsoft Office. Today, organisations need to have instant, continuous access to raw and refined data, which is managed, curated and scalable.
Every piece of data can now hold value for an enterprise, but the challenge here is that data must be managed intelligently if it is to provide meaningful and valuable outcomes for a business. Foundational IT infrastructure therefore need to be able to manage, secure and make data available so organisations can then get the most out of their applications, automation solutions or AI tools.
We’ re now in a data-first world of business, and those that don’ t approach this correctly may miss out in the next three to five years.
Ann Maya: Legacy infrastructure simply can’ t keep up with the demands of data-driven transformation accelerated by AI needs. Organisations are responding by moving increasing volumes of their workloads to the cloud to get the speed, elasticity and processing power that they need.
Data infrastructures are also going through a big upheaval. The need to connect, cleanse and deliver data in a more dynamic way means traditional integration processes are no longer viable. In a world increasingly powered by AI, there is no tolerance for manual data handoffs‘ first ingest, then clean your data, then move it for analysis’, with lead and lag times. Insights need to be on tap, feeding everything from analytics dashboards to AI models without interruption.
Data transformation will need to embrace more automation so that it hums. Transformation in the next five years will be defined by how effectively enterprises turn their raw data into live, trustworthy insights that can be streamed directly from the cloud at the fast pace decision-makers demand.
Centralised, AI-driven, Integration Platform as a Service( iPaaS) solutions are the only way to automate data pipelines and surface holistic views of business data in real time, while also giving organisations a way to easily build and adapt to changing process needs.
164 December 2025