Looking into what’s on the horizon in 2025, we invited our CEO, John Cotterell, to share his views on the rapidly evolving market and how Endava is best placed to support businesses most impacted by the new digital shift. While the pace of change is disruptive and unparalleled, we anticipate exciting opportunities ahead.
John, as we set the theme for this conversation, what key trends or shifts do you see defining today’s market?
The one key takeaway from today’s market is that AI is reshaping everything, bringing both disruption and opportunity. We’re seeing this firsthand as the market evolves, with new opportunities emerging at every turn. This shift is driving a new era with the potential for the most significant advancements since the advent of the internet, revolutionising how businesses harness technology.
However, a recent joint report with IDC reveals a gap in generative AI adoption: while 70% of businesses see it as a potential disruptor, only 38% are actively pursuing it, highlighting a hesitancy to invest in AI initiatives despite its expected impact. As of now, we are increasingly seeing high impact use cases and we believe that as businesses overcome the obstacles this will drive a new wave of digital – a digital shift if you like.
With AI now reshaping both the business and technology landscape, what are the biggest obstacles businesses face and what do they need to overcome?
With innovation increasingly tied to architecture, we’re seeing a greater demand for data in the cloud to fuel AI and other advanced capabilities. To succeed in this era, firms need to radically accelerate the understanding of their core data assets, move towards composable architectures and gain a deeper understanding of their workflows and business logic. They must dive deeper into their core systems and shift toward a digital core. This is a huge ask, and a real step change from the digital wave so far.
But with AI comes its challenges. Ongoing issues such as hallucinations, high processing costs, security and expanding its use beyond chat-based applications – must be addressed before it can be fully integrated into production systems.
With that, uncertainty is a common thread businesses are facing. The macro-environment we operate in is characterised by the covid wave of investment, the raising of interest rates and geopolitical uncertainty. Within that, CFOs have since raised the bar on business cases, where the new technology –with all the uncertainty that comes with it – has hit an environment where corporates are seeking greater certainty and higher returns.
You’ve called out a significant move to core modernisation. How has this changed the way we can support our customers?
The increasing convergence between core and digital applications is enabling us to support our customers in new ways: we’re not only helping them in creating innovative tech solutions but also helping them look into their core systems and innovate from the ground up. Supporting their transformation as one sole, reliable and experienced partner is a truly rewarding experience for us.
Furthermore, with core modernisation becoming more essential for companies who are cognisant of refining their competitive edge, we’re now covering a much bigger market. This shift means our customers are engaging us in larger projects that go beyond simply digital customer-facing solutions and into more transformative core modernisation.
As a result, we’re expanding our delivery scope and investing in automation, enhancing our value to clients and broadening the range of opportunities we can address. This is not only reshaping the way we collaborate but is also helping us to foster deeper, more strategic partnerships with our most valued customers, unlocking new opportunities and driving meaningful business outcomes together.
You mentioned the digital shift has presented both market changes and emerging opportunities. What makes Endava a good partner for its clients?
Our differentiation today lies in our decades of experience helping our customers in their digital transformation journeys and leveraging our unique core modernisation accelerators.
This approach is strengthened by our deep industry expertise, built through decades of close collaboration with our customers, which in turn helps us to deliver market leading results for them. We bring a unique blend of business insight and technical skill that allows us to tackle complex challenges effectively, helping our customers to reach success more smoothly.
Last year we launched Dava.X. What role does it play in all of this?
As technology evolves, so do our solutions to help our customers. That’s why we created Dava.X. We use our Dava.X expert areas to enhance our offering across each stage of our customer’s digital journey, empowering them to confidently navigate the digital shift and gain a competitive edge.
These hyper-focused specialist areas represent emerging and established technologies – and the strong capabilities our customers have access to when working with Endava. This is something we have always done, but the fast-evolving digital shift has made it essential that we capture our best technology and innovation and accelerate it across Endava and into the market. Dava.X enables us to do this more effectively.
Moving forward, how do Endava's accelerators create a competitive edge in the market and address client hesitation?
Our accelerators offer a distinct approach to modernisation and innovation that stands out in the market. We’ve invested significantly in our proprietary solutions focused on core modernisation, allowing us to leverage AI to supercharge the existing capabilities in our solutions portfolio.
Our accelerators apply within domains; providing reuse on common application components; to the application of AI; to core modernisation; to cloud enabling us to understand existing environments faster and more comprehensively. They also enable us to plan change more effectively and execute far more productively.
These accelerators have been years in the making, in some cases over ten. They incorporate years of experience working with clients, including investment in technology and capability to enable truly world-class solutions, much of which we have patented or have patents pending. We believe this, combined with our expertise and collaborative approach places us at the helm of delivering core modernisation success for our customers.
In summary, our commitment to core modernisation is redefining the way we deliver value to our customers. As we close off, we leave with the thought that the world is changing at an unprecedented pace, with AI driving a stronger focus on core innovation – our key strength. This shift is expanding our addressable market, as clients seek larger, more strategic engagements to remain adaptable in a landscape that is constantly in flux.
Wondering how core modernisation is unlocking new opportunities with AI for industries worldwide? Join our leadership team as they discuss how we're shaping the future with intelligence.