Now that we’re careering rapidly towards the end of the year, the
internet is awash with predictions for the year ahead. We’ve had a look
at three such reports that we found most interesting, and condensed them
into bitesized chunks. We have also drilled down to a couple of
concepts that have been at the front of our minds this month: social
business and the Internet of Things.
Looking ahead to 2014
Forrester published a report this month which pointed out the top ten technology trends to watch from 2014-2016. Peter High of
Metis Strategy gave a
detailed run-down of
the report for Forbes. Forrester’s trends touch on the expansion of
concepts that have been cropping up in the second half of this year,
such as APIs, BYOD and the Internet of Things (more on that later).
Peter outlined that the report highlights the tightening technological
link between the consumer world with the business world, and suggests
that customers build their impressions on a company (thus a company
builds its reputation) on the digital experience and engagement they
have with that business. Consequently, organisations need to make the
move towards more sophisticated applications that work seamlessly with
cloud and mobile, so that infrastructure becomes an enabler of
engagement as opposed to a barrier to progress. This rings true with us
at HighQ, as our products are designed to make engagement, productivity
and collaboration come naturally.
In
this article for Gigaom Research,
David Linthicum
highlighted three emerging cloud computing trends for 2014. He suggests
that PaaS and application migration are the most important trends for
the year ahead as more businesses prepare to move to cloud-based
platforms. He explains that cloud data integration and cloud management
and governance will come to the fore next year too, with reference to
the need to reconcile private and public cloud as enterprises begin to
transfer data between them, and managing the different types of cloud
within one ‘ultimate’ cloud management platform. This is particularly
important when we consider the latest predictions about cloud traffic,
which
according to a report by Cisco Systems is set to quadruple by 2017.
Another article on Forbes by
Mark Fidelman gave
IBM’s opinions on the forthcoming trends in social business over the
next year. Social listening was high on the list, as businesses begin to
tap in to social behavioural data from customers. This data can be used
for targeted marketing as well as adapting products and services to
perceived needs. Similarly, social data gathered from employees could be
valuable to HR through recruitment and increase employee engagement and
satisfaction. Next year, the article explained, social business will be
about more than collaboration; instead, knowledge sharing and social
learning will be key to building a smarter enterprise, something we’ve
been talking about for
a while. SoMoClo will get an overhaul next year too as it merges with
Big Data to become SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud).
Turning to social business
As social becomes a key part of business, it is vital to encourage
everyone within a firm to engage in their enterprise social network. An
interesting Twitter chat took
place this month which discussed this issue, and why company leaders
must make sure they participate in their ESNs too. Jason Quesada (
@jqsmooth) explained
that enterprise social networks ”should break the hierarchy model to
give everyone in the company a voice”, and Jakkii Musgrave (
@slybeer) agreed,
stating that the ”great power of ESNs with execs is cutting through
that hierarchy & allowing them to be human. Encourage them to
embrace it.” Cara Marzilli (
@CaraMarz),
pointed out that ”Execs who view ESN as “just a technology” (not a
business driver) have a narrow view & need more data in order to see
value”, which is clearly a view that needs changing if executives want
to keep up with the latest social business trends for next year.
The Internet of Things
This month we attended the
Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Barcelona. You can read our review of the keynote speeches
on our blog. One
of the topics covered in the keynote speech was the Internet of Things,
which has been popping up frequently this month. If you’re not familiar
with what the Internet of Things is,
this post by our friend
Ryan McClead (who wrote
a great guest post for
us this month, by the way) will fill you in excellently. The short
explanation is that the Internet of Things is a concept whereby more and
more devices and objects are becoming connected to the internet (rising
to an estimated 30 billion by 2020). An increasing number of these
objects will start communicating with one another via the internet,
automating processes and ultimately changing the way we live.
This post by Esmeralda Swartz of
MetraTech
for the Cloud Computing Journal takes the concept a step further by
talking about how the Internet of Things will evolve into the Internet
of Agents. By this, she refers to the services that these Things
provide, arguing that there is more value in what something can do for
us, than the Thing itself. An interesting concept, and we’re definitely
excited to see where it takes us in the year ahead!
Source: http://highq.com/enterprise-collaboration-news-november-2013-round/
