Locked in a foot race with rivals to lure new customers, companies are increasingly launching digital initiatives to expand or build digital capabilities aimed at making the business more efficient or improving top-line revenue growth.

The trend toward digitization is only gaining steam. CIOs currently devote 18 percent of their budgets in support of digital transformation, a figure expected to increase to 28 percent by 2018, Gartner analyst Andy Rowsell-Jones told CIO.com in October after surveying 2,600 CIOs worldwide. Going digital often means significant challenges and consequences, says Rowsell-Jones, adding that companies are overhauling their business models and allocating more of their IT budgets to catch digital disruptors.

But the march toward a digital future is slow going. Data collected from the 2017 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey published in May suggests companies’ digital efforts are progressing more like the tortoise than the hare, as only 18 percent consider their digital strategies “very effective.”

CIO.com checked in on 10 digital transformations underway at some of the world’s leading brands. Following are snapshots of their digital initiatives in progress, overviewing their strategies and implementations and the challenges they’ve met along the way.

StubHub

When CIO Marty Boos joined StubHub five-plus years ago the ticket retailer’s infrastructure was struggling to handle the sheer volume of a business that processes thousands of ticket transactions daily for concerts and sporting events. Leveraging Linux servers and technology from VMware, Akamai and Oracle, Boos built a private cloud that scales elastically. To better support global transactions in the wake of StubHub’s purchase of Ticketbis, Boos is close to picking a public cloud vendor to process payments locally in 44 countries worldwide. “We’re going to use that to get the transaction closer to the consumer,” Boos says.

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