Digital is core to every enterprise and technology spending towards Digital Transformation is going to increase further in 2016. Many enterprises are embracing the consumer centric technologies like Mobility, Analytics and Cloud Computing. However it is going to be more systematic and aligned towards achieving complete digital and consumer driven organization, translating in increase the wallet share and single view of customer.
Technological advancement in new areas of bluetooth beacon based marketing, location based targeting and machine learning are fuelling the growth of IT spending in area of disruptive technologies. The proliferation of these new technologies are further coercing business owners and decision makers to invest ahead of competition.
Here are Top Technology Trends to watch in 2016
Internet of Every Things: The multifold increase in devices be it mobile, tablet, home and automotive automation systems, wearables, IPTV etc. have built huge amount of data. This data is a gold mine for many enterprises that can help in personalization, segmentation and customer profiling. Since these devices are not talking to each other, the data is resting in isolation i.e. in disparate systems and siloed databases. We see the focus will be on connecting multiple devices to one data source or building connectors to get real Internet of everything.
Deep Learning
The explosion of data and data sources have put forth many challenges in front of practitioners to get the real value from the data. The Proliferation of databases and increase in complexity of information makes manual classification and analysis difficult and time consuming. Deep Learning (advance machine learning) concept works on neural nets move beyond classic computing and information management to create systems to provide Artificial Intelligence that can perceive the world on their own.
Advanced Security Protection
Over the last few years security remains major concern for CIOs and CISOs and we believe this year too, it is going to be cynosure of all eyes. There was a rampant surge in DDOS (distributed denial of services) attack in 2015 across all major verticals such as ecommerce, Internet companies, Banking and Telcos. Mobile Payment systems and mobile wallets are also vulnerable to security threats thus demand for several positive security features such as the use of a PIN, password and most importantly biometric authentication (fingerprint, retina scan etc.)
Though these technologies remain central to business, yet there are certain business priorities that will drive IT spending towards achieving business goals.
Managing customer expectations
In the era of mobile devices and high speed internet, consumers are sitting in the driver’s seat, challenging enterprises to innovate and provide rich customer experience. Consumers are expecting personalized offerings, promotions and seamless experience across channels. For e.g. in a retail Omni channel scenario, an offline (In-store) customer would like to be get recognized when shopping online via website/mobile app and vice versa. Or he / she would order products online but like to collect from the nearest store. To meet this kind of customer expectations require flawless inventory system, analytics driven demand forecasting and seamless supply chain processes.
Increasing top line using multichannel strategy
Majority of business owners agree that substantial revenue growth will come from investing in technology areas of e-commerce, m-commerce and following mobile app strategy. These multichannel investments can be coupled with digital channel strategy to reduce cost of acquisition per customer per channel. The growth can be further fuelled by investing in the area of business analytics to provide complete Omni channel experience, product recommendations, personalization to end customers and increase the wallet share of customer.
Controlling cost using cloud based technologies
The adoption of cloud technologies remain in the limelight. While it helps in reduce the overall cost of the infrastructure, at the same time it increases risk of data breach and other security concerns. This year too, cloud adoption is vertical centric – Banking and financial services on on-premise private cloud while retail, start-ups are on public cloud and focussing more on their core business. The volume of cloud centric technologies are going to increase across IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service. But we see a lot of growth and adoption by enterprises in PaaS (Platform as a service) due to multifold increase in mobile devices (phone, tablet, wearables, and internet of things).
Published with permission from Author.
Image courtesy of [Stuart Miles] at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
