Some 75% of global businesses are expected to be fully digital or preparing to become digital businesses by 2020, said a Cisco executive on Wednesday.

David Meads, vice president for Cisco Africa was speaking at the Cisco One Africa Partner Summit 2015 in Limpopo, South Africa where he noted that businesses need to adopt and embrace digitisation.

In terms of Meads' definition digitisation is forming new connections and connecting the unconnected via the internet, which demands high-speed, high-quality and affordable broadband, both wired and wireless.

During his presentation Meads stated that broadband and information and communications technology can help accelerate governments and industry agendas to go digital.

He further noted that it is not only international businesses that have shown interest in digital business transformation, rather that some African companies have also shown interest.

Meads has noticed a clear theme for digitisation running through many conversations among Africa's businesses and governments.

"This was a global statistic... I think we can have an interesting discussion whether in Africa that could be more or less because arguably there is a great deal of potential for an upside across many African countries if they do digitise, whether it is the small-medium business or in the public sector," he told ITWeb Africa.

He explained that industries like the financial services sector and natural resources and mining companies have shown particular interest in going digital. These sectors are looking at how they can bring IT into the operational space.

Equity Bank example

Meads made an example of how East African banking group Equity Bank's chief executive officer; James Mwangi has said they want to "fully digitise their business in three years".

Equity Bank has been driving its transformation by moving from not only being a provider of financial services in Kenya, but also entering the mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) space.

Earlier this month an Equity Bank official told ITWeb Africa that their ultra-thin SIM technology was 'on the horizon'.

Equity, which won an MVNO licence last year, partnered with Taiwanese headquartered Taisys to launch thin-SIMs for one year in Kenya.

The bank plans to roll-out the thin SIM technology slated to rival to Kenya's leading mobile operator, Safaricom's M-Pesa mobile money service.

Despite the global shift towards digitisation by businesses, as well as the potential of digitisation, which is now slowly being realised by some African businesses - Gartner predictions reveal that only 30% of these businesses will be successful.

Wendy Mars, Cisco's vice president for enterprise business group in EMEAR, noted that factors such as talent and technical expertise would determine success of digitisation.

"The number one reason companies fail in their digital transformation efforts is they fail to re-imagine their business from top to bottom before they begin," she stated.

Meads noted that when it comes to digitisation a business has one of two choices: do nothing and go out of business or try to reinvent the business, look for new revenue streams or try to disrupt and maybe move into other markets.

"We're pretty sure in our opinion that if you don't do anything the future does not look bright," he concluded.