Giorgio Heiman is vice president of Orange Business Services Africa. The France-based global company has invested in the African Coast to Europe cable, which connects 20 African countries to Europe, improving connectivity between local and global networks. Orange Business Services has a presence in 17 African countries.

This is part of a press release written by Heiman that ran in ITWebAfrica.

One of the biggest contributors to business disruption is the advent of intermediation, or the sharing economy, as it is also known. The level of interconnectedness enabled by current technology allows people to share resources with others when they are not using them.

A prime example of how the sharing economy develops through opportunities brought by digital transformation is the success of the recent rental property start-up, Airbnb, a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodation around the world online or from a mobile phone direct with the property owner.

The company was founded in 2008, and by the beginning of 2015 it claimed to represent more than 17 percent of the hotel room supply in New York and more than 10 percent in London. Amazing when you consider they own no stock or inventory, but have managed to become an exchange platform through digital technology that has allowed disruption and challenge to the long-established hotel industry.

This is also true of Uber, which is now disrupting the traditional taxi industry business model. We have even invented a new word, “Uberisation” to describe the situation where an existing traditional business model that has been around for a century is being fundamentally challenged in a very short time frame.

Machine to Machine and the Internet of Things are key drivers in the new digital landscape. The distribution of connected objects, the supply of services that add value to those objects, particularly in the health and wellbeing field or in the connected home field, and the management of data related to connected objects through an open intermediation platform are game-changers.

Digital transformation brings new and exciting opportunities for business, but the business must act fast, and be flexible and agile enough to grasp the opportunities.

Read more at ITWebAfrica.