LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS SHANGHAI 2015: Vodafone’s Global Enterprise unit claims a rise in “connected infrastructure” over the next year will see new competitors and disruptors emerge across global industries at a faster rate than ever before.

Peter Bocquet (pictured), head of Unified Communications and Collaboration, Asia and Africa, predicts a number of global enterprises will have to deal with new competitors in the next 12 months, driven by major changes in everyday processes – “including those that aren’t traditional hotbeds of innovation”.

Speaking to Mobile World Live ahead of his presentation on ‘Supporting the Connected Enterprise’ at Mobile World Congress Shanghai this week, Bocquet predicted disruptors similar to AirBNB and Uber “will soon exist in every industry, as they take advantage of seamless connectivity to talent, infrastructure, and markets to be more efficient and effective than traditional enterprise models.”

Bocquet warned that the “biggest threat to today’s market leaders may in fact be hyper nimble competitors, who they don’t even know exist yet”.

For existing players to survive, Bocquet urged today’s enterprises to “embrace this level of connectivity and move fast enough to compete and thrive”.

Vodafone, which founded its Global Enterprise unit in 2007, expressed its own goal to become a “Total Communications” provider, but Bocquet confessed that “there’s still some way to go” before it is able to meet the ever broadening range of customer needs.

“We provide fixed, mobile, M2M, IoT, and all other sorts of connectivity services – but these need to be integrated with other technologies and non-technological business functions in order to truly reach that Total Communications vision. So we’re on the path towards covering the total mobile enterprise,” he said.

Vodafone Global Enterprise today plays a major role in providing platforms for enterprises to seamlessly connect across the globe and Bocquet said the company has noted a shift in how enterprises now tend to think about their operations, with less of a focus on efficiency.

The unit is tasked with providing adaptable connectivity platforms to support “a growing number of major enterprises that are outsourcing creativity and innovation to specialist individuals and small groups”.

According to Bocquet, this trend has major implications for operators.

“You need to provide connectivity solutions which are not only flexible enough to facilitate these sorts of new contingent working practises, but also secure and resilient enough for enterprises to maintain their competitive edge.”