1. “Mobile fueled advertising, video, PoS, cars”– Generating valuable data, enabling opportunities for monetization.
With a smart phone in nearly
everyone’s pocket, the next innovation phase in mobile will gather pace.
Wearables connect to them, Point-of-Sale (PoS) is transforming payments around
them, cars are safer because of them and advertising is funding them. A new
frontier in personal, contextual, real-time information is rapidly opening new
opportunities for business and new opportunities for SPs to monetize their
mobile services.
Cloud spending will surge 25% but more importantly, cloud will
transform and disrupt everything from the mall to the corner store (will
“Amazoned” become a verb?). Government agencies consider ‘cloud first’
policies. Business leaders seek IT from the most convenient supply source.
Consumer experiences (gaming, video) increasingly delivered via cloud. But
turbulence and danger remain. Not all workloads find clouds suitable or safe.
Cloud SPs face a pricing bloodbath for commoditized services (like VMs) and are
challenged with on-boarding and cost-effective, timely provisioning. Vendors,
Systems Integrators, the Channel reshape and acquire (even disappear?) to
adjust to new business models.
3. “Business funds technology
projects”–The pie gets bigger
Overall worldwide IT spending is
expected to grow 5% year over year to $2.1T in 2014. However, the big change
for the industry is who is requiring, authorizing and funding this investment.
IDC predicts that business (ie outside IT) will fund 61% of all technology
projects.
4. “Big Data and Predictive
Analytics”– We want to know what you ‘will’ do
Business is enamored with IT, not
because it is impressed by Big Data (that’s a problem!), but because of the
promise of Predictive Analytics (PA) and the potential PA offers. Leaders want
to determine what is about to happen so that faster, smarter decisions can be
made. Epidemics, tsunami, accidents, crime, heart failure are events that we would
like to know about ‘before’ they happen. But it is not just about people. It is
about automation – computers analyzing data from sensors, tags and other
intelligent end-points (such as jet engines) to automatically enhance
performance or predict failure or error.
5. “Collaboration and the modern
workplace”--‐ If work is what you do, not where you are… then how do
you do more?
As we digest and adjust to recent
waves such as Wi-Fi, iPads, BYOD, Activity Based Work (ABW) and a more mobile
workforce, in order to ‘cross the chasm’ into mainstream adoption and improve
productivity pervasively and permanently, the importance of non-technical
elements such as human behavior, business process change and the design of the
modern workspace will escalate. To do more, workers need to be able to focus
(not be distracted by social media, for example), collaborate, learn and
socialize. The technology will evolve too--‐the
biggest changes we can expect include delivery via the cloud, proliferation of
video and simplification of the user interface. Social media will evolve (for
example Facebook will struggle with churn especially with under 20s).
6. “Cybersecurity”–Did you know
you’ve been hit?
John Stewart, Cisco’s Chief Security
Officer, claims that 100% of our supported customers are under attack. Melissa
Hathaway, advisor to both the Bush and Obama administrations suggests that if
GDP metrics were to consider the impact of cyber-crime, most countries would
have a zero or negative GDP. And if the Cisco Visual Networking Index is
accurate, matters will only get worse. The Cisco VNI predicts that there will
be more than 10 billion mobile devices/connections by 2017, including more than
1.7 billion M2M connections. As the number of connections increase, so do the
vulnerabilities. The NSA/Snowden incident has significant impact on governments
and businesses globally. Securing information assets will not be discretionary,
it will be essential.
7. “Virtualisation is good”–Beyond
the VM
Now that the virtualisation of the
computer/server has become mainstream, the benefits to users are clearer. Today
there are many choices of hypervisor and means of consumption and the VM has
become a commodity. Focus is now on the workload and service functions and how
the entire infrastructure can be virtualised to lower costs and enhance
business agility and time-to-market. The Software Defined Networks (SDN) lens
will expand to consider Software Defined Anything (SDx), Software Defined
Infrastructure (SDI) and Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). Telcos will
study the viability of SDN and Network Function Virtualisation (NfV) in which
control functions are virtualised and run on standard processers, flexibly
deployed in the most advantageous location.
8. “IoE/IoT”– Next phase of the
Internet revolution drives the network effect
Cisco’s Internet of Everything (IoE)
Research shows that if we can intelligently connect people, data, process and
things we can generate significant value for economies, industries and
organisations. Indeed it estimates the ‘Value at Stake’ for the private/public
sector to be $14.4T/$4.6T respectively over the next 10 years. Considering
other pending 2014 developments above such as wearables, intelligently
connected cars, diverse new mobile payment options, drones, lower cost tags and
much more, the opportunity to make constructive, structural change by
intelligently connecting everything, is significant.
9. “Beachhead Technologies”–Innovations
with potentially quantum impact
Memory: Memristors, first theorized in 1971, which stored data at
the atomic level, are expected to appear in consumer products, significantly
reducing physical size [FutureTimeLine]. CPUs: In the same way that
phones have become smartphones, new processors enable homes to become smart homes
and cars to become smart cars. 14nm chips enter the market. Data
Centre Architecture: Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) will
transform how workloads can be provisioned, distributed and decoupled from
infrastructure. 3D: 3D printing market grows 75% disrupting traditional
manufacturing and distribution.
10. “Industry Consolidation and
Adaption Continues”– Are you surprised?
With the normal caveats that these
are my own predictions based on many years in the industry, I offer these
viewpoints. No surprise, industry consolidation
and adaption will continue. We are still waiting for companies with divergent
portfolios to breakup and sell divisions (such as HP, Alcatel-Lucent);
Riverbed, Ruckus, Aruba make appetizing acquisition material; Apple doesn’t do TV,
it does a TV/video ecosystem disrupting content creation and distribution and
opening new startup opportunities; Google, Amazon, Apple acquire to accelerate
into the enterprise; IBM, Oracle, Samsung, Microsoft, Cisco acquire to
accelerate into cloud. Non-IT companies (such as GE, GM, watchmakers) acquire
technology companies for analytics, wearables, IoT etc.
0 comments:
Post a Comment