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Posts tagged ‘SaaS’

Apr 14

Public Cloud Soaring To $331B By 2022 According To Gartner

Gartner is predicting the worldwide public cloud services market will grow from $182.4B in 2018 to $214.3B in 2019, a 17.5% jump in just a year. Photo credit: Getty

  • Gartner predicts the worldwide public cloud service market will grow from $182.4B in 2018 to $331.2B in 2022, attaining a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.6%.
  • Spending on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is predicted to increase from $30.5B in 2018 to $38.9B in 2019, growing 27.5% in a year.
  • Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) spending is predicted to grow from $15.6B in 2018 to $19B in 2019, growing 21.8% in a year.
  • Business Intelligence, Supply Chain Management, Project and Portfolio Management and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) will see the fastest growth in end-user spending on SaaS applications through 2022.

Gartner’s annual forecast of worldwide public cloud service revenue was published last week, and it includes many interesting insights into how the research firm sees the current and future landscape of public cloud computing. Gartner is predicting the worldwide public cloud services market will grow from $182.4B in 2018 to $214.3B in 2019, a 17.5% jump in just a year. By the end of 2019, more than 30% of technology providers’ new software investments will shift from cloud-first to cloud-only, further reducing license-based software spending and increasing subscription-based cloud revenue.

The following graphic compares worldwide public cloud service revenue by segment from 2018 to 2022. Please click on the graphic to expand for easier reading.

Comparing Compound Annual Growth Rates (CAGRs) of worldwide public cloud service revenue segments from 2018 to 2022 reflects IaaS’ anticipated rapid growth. Please click on the graphic to expand for easier reading.

Gartner provided the following data table this week as part of their announcement:

  • Business Intelligence, Supply Chain Management, Project and Portfolio Management and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) will see the fastest growth in end-user spending on SaaS applications through 2022.  Gartner is predicting end-user spending on Business Intelligence SaaS applications will grow by 23.3% between 2017 and 2022.  Spending on SaaS-based Supply Chain Management applications will grow by 21.2% between 2017 and 2022. Project and Portfolio Management SaaS-based applications will grow by 20.9% between 2017 and 2022. End-user spending on SaaS ERP systems will grow by 19.2% between 2017 and 2022.

Sources: Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud Revenue to Grow 17.5 Percent in 2019 and Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2016-2022, 4Q18 Update (Gartner client access)

Jan 16

3 Ways To Improve Selling Results With SAP Integration


sap-integrationThe more integrated the systems are supporting any selling strategy, the greater the chances sales will increase. That’s because accuracy, speed, and quality of every quote matter more than ever. Being able to strengthen every customer interaction with insight and intelligence often means the difference between successful upsells, cross-sells and the chance to bid and win new projects. Defining a roadmap to enrich selling strategies using SAP integration is delivering results across a variety of manufacturing and service industries today.

Getting more value out of the customer data locked in legacy SAP systems can improve selling results starting with existing sales cycles. Knowing what each customer purchased, when, at what price, and for which project or location is invaluable in accelerating sales cycles today. There are many ways to improve selling results using SAP integration, and the following are the top three based on conversations with SAP Architects, CIOs and IT Directors working with Sales Operations to improve selling results. These five approaches are generating more leads, closing more deals, leading to better selling decisions and improving sales productivity.

 3 Ways SAP Integration Is Improving Selling Results

  1. Reducing and eliminating significant gaps in the Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) process by integrating Salesforce and SAP systems improves selling and revenue results quickly. The following two illustrations compare how much time and revenue escape from the selling process. It’s common to see companies lose at least 20% of their orders when they rely on manual approaches to handling quotes, pricing, and configurations. The greater the complexity of the deal is the more potential for lost revenue.  The second graphic shows how greater system integration leads to lower costs to complete an order, cycle time reductions, order rework reductions, and lead times for entire orders dropping from 69 to 22 days.

3 Ways To Improve Selling Results With SAP Integration

3 Ways To Improve Selling Results With SAP Integration

  1. Having customer order history, pricing, discounts and previously purchased bundles stored in SAP ERP systems integrated into Salesforce will drive better decisions on which customers are most likely to buy upsells, cross-sells and new products when. Instead of having just to rely on current activity with a given customer, sales teams can analyze sales history to find potential purchasing trends and indications of who can sign off on deals in progress. Having real-time access to SAP data within Salesforce gives sales teams the most valuable competitive advantage there is, which is more time to focus on customers and closing deals.  enosiX is taking a leadership role in the area of real-time SAP to Salesforce integration, enabling enterprises to sell and operate more effectively.
  1. Improving Sales Operations and Customer Service productivity by providing customer data in real-time via Salesforce to support teams on a 24/7 basis worldwide. The two departments who rely on customer data more than sales need to have real-time access to customer data on a 24/7 basis from any device at any time, on a global scale. By integrating customer data held today in SAP ERP and related systems to Salesforce, Sales Operations, and Customer Service will have the visibility they’ve never had before. And that will translate into faster response times, higher customer satisfaction and potentially more sales too.

Additional Reading:

Accenture, Empowering Your Sales Force

Aberdeen Group, Configure-Price-Quote: Best-In-Class Deployments that Speed The Sale

Aberdeen Group, Configure/Price/Quote: Better, Faster Sales Deals Enabled

Aberdeen Group, Sales Enablement Advances In Configure/Price/Quote Solutions

Forbes, What’s Hot In CRM Applications, 2015: Why CPQ Continues To Accelerate

Forbes,  Cloud-Based CPQ Continues To Be One Of The Hottest Enterprise Apps Of 2016

Forbes, Five Ways Cloud-Based CPQ Increases Sales Effectiveness And Drives Up CRM Adoption

The Sales Management Association,  The Impact of Quoting Automation: Enabling the Sales Force, Optimizing Profits, and Improving Customer Engagement

Dec 3

Analytics, Data Storage Will Lead Cloud Adoption In 2017

  • cioU.S.-based organizations are budgeting $1.77M for cloud spending in 2017 compared to $1.30M for non-U.S. based organizations.
  • 10% of enterprises with over 1,000 employees are projecting they will spend $10M or more on cloud computing apps and platforms throughout this year.
  • Organizations are using multiple cloud models to meet their business’s needs, including private (62%), public (60%), and hybrid (26%).
  • By 2018 the typical IT department will have the minority of their apps and platforms (40%) residing in on-premise systems.

These and many other insights are from IDG’s Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey, 2016. You can find the 2016 Cloud Computing Executive Summary here and a presentation of the results here.  The study’s methodology is based on interviews with respondents who are reporting they are involved with cloud planning and management across their organizations. The sampling frame includes audiences across six IDG Enterprise brands (CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, ITworld and Network World) representing IT and security decision-makers across eight industries. The survey was fielded online with the objective of understanding organizational adoption, use-cases, and solution needs for cloud computing. A total of 925 respondents were interviewed to complete the study.

Key takeaways include the following:

  • The cloud is the new normal for enterprise apps, with 70% of all organizations having at least one app in the cloud today. 75% of enterprises with greater than 1,000 employees have at least one app or platform running in the cloud today, leading all categories of adoption measured in the survey. 90% of all organizations today either have apps running in the cloud are planning to use cloud apps in the next 12 months, or within 1 to 3 years. The cloud has won the enterprise and will continue to see the variety and breadth of apps adopted accelerating in 2017 and beyond.

use-of-cloud-technology-continuously-expanding

 

  • Business/data analytics and data storage/data management (both 43%) are projected to lead cloud adoption in 2017 and beyond. 22% of organizations surveyed are predicting that business/data analytics will be the leading cloud application area they will migrate to in the next twelve months. 21% are predicting data storage/data management apps are a high priority area for their organizations’ cloud migration plans in 2017. Three of the market leaders in analytics are Tableau, QlikView and Microsoft Power BI. They are analyzed in this recent post from SelectHub, accessible here.

data-storage-and-analytics-moving-to-the-cloud

 

  • 28% of organizations’ total IT budgets is dedicated to cloud computing next year. Of that, 45% is allocated to SaaS, 30% to IaaS and 19% to PaaS. The average investment organizations will make in cloud computing next year is $1.62M, with enterprises over 1,000 employees projected to spend $3.03M. The average investment in cloud computing remains constant in organizations with $1.62M invested in 2014, $1.56M in 2015 and $1.62M in 2016. 10% of enterprises with over 1,000 employees are projecting they will spend $10M or more on cloud computing apps and platforms throughout this year.

cloud-budget

 

  • CIOs, IT architects and IT networking/management control cloud spending in the enterprise. In contrast, CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs are driving small and medium business (SMB) cloud spending this year. The following graphic compares how influential the following groups and individuals are in the cloud computing purchase process.

cloud-investment

 

  • Just 46% of organizations are using Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) to integrate with databases, messaging systems, portals or storage components. 40% are using them for creating connections to the application layer of their cloud and the underlying IT infrastructures. The following graphic provides insights into how APIs are being used and which teams see the most value in them.

apis

 

  • In 18 months the majority of organizations’ IT infrastructures will be entirely cloud-based. IDG found that in 18 months nearly one-third (28%) of all organizations interviewed will be relying on private clouds as part of their IT infrastructure. Just over a fifth (22%) will have public cloud as part of their IT infrastructure, and 10% will be using hybrid By 2018 the typical IT department will have the minority of their apps and platforms (40%) residing in on-premise systems.

it-shifts-to-the-cloud

 

  • Concerns about where data is stored (43%), cloud security (41%) and vendor lock-in (21%) are the top three challenges organizations face when adopting public cloud technologies. Private and hybrid cloud adoption in organizations is also facing the challenges of cloud security and vendor lock-in. Private and hybrid cloud adoption are being slowed by a lack of the right skill sets to manage and gain the maximum value from cloud investments.

challenges

Nov 11

6M Developers Are Creating Big Data And Advanced Analytics Apps Today

  • analytics-development2M developers are working on IoT applications, increasing 34% since the last year.
  • Over 50% of the developers working on IoT applications are writing software that utilizes sensors in some capacity.
  • 4M enterprise developers play decision-making roles when it comes to selecting organizational IT development resources. Another 5.2 million hold decision-making authority for selecting IT deployment resources.
  • 4M developers (26% of all developers globally) are using the cloud as a development environment today
  • The APAC region leads the world with approximately 7.4M developers today, followed by EMEA with 7.2M, North America with 4.4M and Latin American with 1.9M.

These and many other fascinating insights are from the Evans Data Corporation Global Developer Population and Demographic Study 2016 (PDF, client access) published earlier this week. The methodology Evans Data has created to produce this report is the most comprehensive developed for aggregating, analyzing and predicting developer populations globally. The study combines Evans Data’s proprietary global developer population modeling with the current results of their semi-annual global developer survey.

Key takeaways from the study include the following:

  • 6M developers (29% of all developers globally) are involved in a Big Data and Advanced Analytics project today. An additional 25% of developers, or 5.3M, are going to begin Big Data and Advanced Analytics projects within the next six 13% or 2.6M of all developers globally are going to start Big Data and Advanced Analytics projects within the next 7 to 12 months.  The following graphic provides an overview of the involvement of 21M developers in Big Data and Advanced Analytics projects today. Please click on the image to expand for easier viewing.

involvement in big data analytics

  • 4M developers (26% of all developers globally) are using the cloud as a development environment today. Developers creating new apps in the cloud had increased 375% since Evans began measuring developer participation in mobile development in 2009 when just slightly more than 1.2M developers were using the cloud as their development platform. 4.5M developers (21% of all global developers) plan on beginning app development on cloud platforms in the next six months, and 3.9M (18% of all global developers) plan on starting development on the cloud in 7 – 12 months. Please click on the image to expand for easier viewing.

plans for cloud development

  • 8M developers in APAC (24% of all developers in the region) are currently developing on cloud platforms. 29% of APAC developers are planning to start cloud-based development in six months, and 20% in 7 – 12 months. The following graphic compares the number of developers currently using the cloud as a development environment today and the number who plan to in the future. Please click on the image to expand for easier viewing.

plans for cloud development by region

  • 34% of all Commercial Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) globally today (1.8M developers) are using the cloud as a development environment. An additional 1.4M are planning to begin cloud development in the next six months.  28% of developers globally creating apps in the cloud are from custom system integrators (SI) and value-added resellers (VARs).  23% or approximately 1.2M are from enterprises.  The following graphic compares the percent of developers by developer segment who are currently creating new apps in cloud environments. Please click on the image to expand for easier viewing.

Plans for cloud development by developer segment

  • 30% of developers (6.2M developers globally) are currently developing software for connected devices or the Internet of Things today, with an additional 26% planning to begin projects in 6 months. Evans Data found that this increased 34% over the last year. Also, 2.1M developers plan to begin development in this area within the next 7 to 12 months. The following graphic compares the number of developers globally by stage of development for creating software for connected devices or the Internet of Things. Please click on the image to expand for easier viewing.

Plans for Internet of Things Development

  • 41% of global developers creating connected device and IoT software today are from 27% are from North America, 24% are from EMEA and 7% from Latin America.  There are 6,072,048 developers currently working on connected device and IoT software today globally.  The following graphic provides an overview of the distribution of developers creating connected device and IoT software by region today. Please click on the image to expand for easier viewing.

Development for Connected Devices By Region

  • 34% of developers actively creating software for connected devices or the Internet of Things work for custom System Integrators (SI) and VARs today. ISVs are the next largest segment of developers working on IoT projects (30%) followed by enterprises (21%). The following graphic provides an overview of the global base of developers creating software for connected devices and IoT. Evans Data found there are 6.1M developers currently creating apps and solutions in this area alone. Please click on the image to expand for easier viewing.

Development for connected devices by developer segment 2

Jun 18

2015 Gartner CRM Market Share Update

  • Worldwide customer relationship management (CRM) software totaled $26.3B in 2015, up 12.3% from $23.4B in 2014.
  • SaaS revenue grew 27% yr-over-yr, more than double overall CRM market growth in 2015.
  • Asia/Pacific grew the fastest of all regions globally, increasing 9% 2015, closely followed by greater China with 18.4% growth.

These and many other insights into the current state of the global CRM market are from Gartner’s Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Management Software, Worldwide, 2015 (PDF, client access) published earlier this month.  The top five CRM vendors accounted for 45% of the total market in 2015. Salesforce dominated in 2015, with a 21.1% annual growth rate and absolute growth of over $902M in CRM revenue, more than the next ten providers combined. Gartner found that Salesforce leads in revenue in the sales and customer service and support (CSS) segments of CRM, and is now third in revenue in the marketing segment. Gartner doesn’t address how analytics are fundamentally redefining CRM today, which is an area nearly every C-level and revenue team leader I’ve spoken with this year is prioritizing for investment. The following graphic and table compare 2015 worldwide CRM market shares.

CRM Market Share 2015

table 1

Adobe, Microsoft, and Salesforce Are Growing Faster Than The Market

Adobe grew the fastest between 2014 and 2015, increasing worldwide sales 26.9%. Salesforce continues to grow well above the worldwide CRM market average, increasing sales 21.1%. Microsoft increased sales 20% in the last year.  The worldwide CRM market grew 12.3% between 2014 and 2015.

Spending by vendor 2015

 Analytics, Machine Learning, and Artifical Intelligence Are The Future Of CRM

Advanced analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) will revolutionize CRM in the next three years. Look to the five market leaders in 2015 to invest heavily in these areas with the goal of building patent portfolios and increasing the amount of intellectual property they own. Cloud-based analytics platforms offer the scale, speed of deployment, agility, and ability to rapidly prototype analytics workflows that support the next generation of CRM workflows. My recent post on SelectHub, Selecting The Best Cloud Analytics Platform: Trends To Watch In 2016, provides insights into how companies with investments in CRM systems are making decisions on cloud platforms today. Based on insights gained from discussions with senior management teams, I’ve put together an Intelligent Cloud Maturity Model that underscores why scalability of a cloud-based analytics platform is a must-have for any company.
cloud-maturity-model

Sources:  Gartner Says Customer Relationship Management Software Market Grew 12.3 Percent

Mar 2

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The Best Cloud Computing Companies And CEOs To Work For In 2016

careeer startEmployees would most recommend Zerto, FusionOps, Google, OutSystems, AppDirect, Sumo Logic, Cloudera, HyTrust, Tableau Software and Domo to their friends looking for a cloud computing company to work for in 2016. These and other insights are from an analysis completed today to determine the best cloud computing firms and CEOs to work for this year.

To keep the rankings and analysis completely impartial and fair, the latest Computer Reseller News list, The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2016 is the basis of the rankings. Cloud computing companies are among the most competitive there are about salaries, performance and sign-on bonuses and a myriad of perks and benefits. They are also attracting senior management teams that have strong leadership skills, many of whom are striving to create distinctive company cultures. The most popular request from Forbes readers are for recommendations of the best cloud computing companies to work for, and that’s what led to this analysis.

Using the 2016 CRN list as a baseline to compare the Glassdoor.com scores of the (%) of employees who would recommend this company to a friend and (%) of employees who approve of the CEO, the table below is provided. You can find the original data set here. There are many companies listed on the CRN list that doesn’t have than many or any entries on Glassdoor, and they are excluded from the rankings shown below but are in the original data set. If the image below is not visible in your browser, you can view the rankings here.

best cloud computing companies to work for in 2016 large

The highest rated CEOs on Glassdoor as of February 3rd, 2016 include the following:

  • Ziv Kedem, Zerto, 100%
  • Gary Meyers, FusionOps, 100%
  • Christian Chabot, Tableau Software, 100%
  • John Burton, Nintex, 100%
  • Rob Mee, Pivotal, 100%
  • Rajiv Gupta, Skyhigh Networks, 100%
  • Ken Shaw Jr., Infrascale, 100%
  • Beau Vrolyk, Engine Yard, 100%
  • Ramin Sayar, Sumo Logic, 99%
  • Sundar Pichai, Google, 98%
  • Lew Cirne, New Relic, 97%
  • Daniel Saks, AppDirect, 96%
  • James M. Whitehurst, Red Hat, 96%
  • Marc Benioff, Salesforce, 96%
  • Tom Kemp, Centrify, 95%
  • Jeremy Roche, FinancialForce, 95%

Dec 22

4 Comments

Five Key Take-Aways From North Bridge’s Future Of Cloud Computing Survey, 2015  

  • bostonSaaS is the most pervasive cloud technology used today with a presence in 77.3% of all organizations, an increase of 9% since 2014.
  • IT is moving significant processing to the cloud with 85.9% of web content management, 82.7% of communications, 80% of app development and 78.9% of disaster recovery now cloud-based.
  • Seeking simple and clear relationships, over 50% of enterprises opt for online purchasing or direct to provider purchasing of cloud services. Online buying is projected to increase over the next two years up to 56%.
  • Vendor leadership/consolidation continues to take hold with 75% of enterprises using fewer than ten

These and many other insights are from North Bridge Growth Equity and Venture Partners’ Future of Cloud Computing Survey published on December 15th. North Bridge and Wikibon collaborated on the study, interviewing 952 companies across 38 different nations, with 65% being from the vendor community and 35% of enterprises evaluating and using cloud technologies in their operations  The slide deck is accessible on SlideShare here:

Key takeaways from the study include the following:

  1. Wikibon forecasts the SaaS is worth $53B market today and will grow at an 18% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2026. By 2026, the SaaS market will be worth $298.4B according to the Wikibon forecast. The fastest growing cloud technology segment is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which is valued at $2.3B today, growing at a CAGR of 38% from 2014 to 2026.  Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has a market value of $25B and is growing at a 19% CAGR in the forecast period.  Please see the graphic from the report below and a table from Wikibon’s excellent study, Public Cloud Market Forecast 2015-2026 by Ralph Finos published in August.

SaaS Graphic from North Bridge study

 

Public Cloud Vendor Revenue Projection

  1. Cloud-based applications are becoming more engrained in core business processes across enterprises. The study found that enterprises are migrating significant processing, systems of engagement and systems of insight to the cloud beyond adoption levels of the past.  81.3% of sales and marketing, 79.9% of business analytics, 79.1% of customer service and 73.5% of HR & Payroll activities have transitioned to the cloud. The impact on HR is particularly noteworthy as in 2011; it was the third least likely sector to be disrupted by cloud computing.
  1. 78% of enterprises expect their SaaS investments to deliver a positive Return on Investment (ROI) in less than three months. 58% of those enterprises who have invested in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) expect a positive ROI in less than three months.
  1. Top inhibitors to cloud adoption are security (45.2%), regulatory/compliance (36%), privacy (28.7%), lock-in (25.8%) and complexity (23.1%). Concerns regarding interoperability and reliability have fallen off significantly since 2011 (15.7% and 9.9% respectively in 2015).
  1. Total private financing for cloud and SaaS startup has increased 4X over the last five years. North Bridge and Wikibon found that average deal size rose 1.8X in the same period. The following graphic provides an overview of cloud and SaaS finance trends from 2010 to present.

cloud and saas financing

 

Oct 24

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The Hottest Cloud-based Marketing Startups of 2015

  • What's Hot in CRM, 2012 Apttus, Booker, Lattice Engines, Segment and Tubular Labs are the five hottest cloud-based marketing startups of 2015.
  • 13 of the hottest 34 cloud-based marketing startups are from the Bay Area, followed by Los Angeles with 3, and Bangalore and New York, both with 2.
  • 14 are in Pre Series A, 7 in A-Stage, 5 in B-Stage and 3 in C-Stage funding rounds.

These and other insights are from a quick analysis completed today using Mattermark Pro, in response to reader requests for more research on marketing startups.

Mattermark uses a combination of artificial intelligence and data quality analysis to provide insights into over 1 million private companies, over 470,000 with employee data, and over 100,000 funding events. In the interest of full disclosure I’m not today and have never done any consulting work of any kind with Mattermark.

Finding The Hottest Cloud-based Marketing Startups

To find the hottest cloud-based marketing startups, an initial query requesting startups competing in the cloud computing and marketing industries was completed. Next, advanced query tools in Mattermark Pro were used to filter out all startups that had exited as indicated by their stage status in Mattermark’s data. This filtered out startups who had been acquired, completed an IPO or had exited through other means. The table below is the result of an analysis completed today with Mattermark data.  You can download the table here in Microsoft Excel format.

hottest cloud-based marketing startups

The Mattermark Growth Score shown in the table below and downloadable Excel file is a measure of how quickly a company is gaining traction at a given point in time. It incorporates the Mindshare Score (web traffic, social traction) as well as business growth metrics (e.g. employee count over time, funding). The underlying assumption is that companies who see growth across these signals are shipping product and talking to customers, and are more likely to continue to grow as a result. This score is not meant to provide guidance on which startup to invest in.  Rather it’s a measure of momentum across the metrics and KPIs that Mattermark measures.

Oct 23

Businesses Adopting Big Data, Cloud & Mobility Grow 53% Faster Than Peers

  • London sykline duskOrchestrating big data, cloud and mobility strategies leads to 53% greater growth than peers not adopting these technologies.
  • 73% of midmarket companies say the complexity of their stored data requires big data analytics apps and tools to better gain insights from.
  • 41% of midmarket companies are using big data to better target marketing efforts.
  •  54% of midmarket companies’ security budgets are invested in security plans versus reacting to threats.

These and many other insights are from Dell’s second annual Global Technology Adoption Index (GTAI 2015) released last week in collaboration with TNS Research. The Global Technology Adoption Index surveyed IT and business decision makers of mid-market organizations across 11 countries, interviewing 2,900 IT and business decision makers representing businesses with 100 to 4,999 employees.

The purpose of the index is to understand how business users perceive, plan for and utilize four key technologies: cloud, mobility, security and big data. Dell released the first wave of its results this week and will be publishing several additional chapters throughout 2016. You can download Chapter 1 of the study here (PDF, no opt-in, 18 pp.).

Key take-aways from the study include the following:

  • Orchestrating big data, cloud and mobility strategies leads to 53% greater growth than peers not adopting these technologies. Midmarket organizations adopting big data alone have the potential to grow 50% more than comparable organizations. Effective use of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) mobility strategies has the potential to increase growth by 53% over laggards or late adopters..

orchestrating tech for greater growth

  • 73% of North American organizations believe the volume and complexity of their data requires big data analytics apps and tools.  This is up from 54% in 2014, indicating midmarket organizations are concentrating on how to get more value from the massive data stores many have accumulated.  This same group of organizations believe they are getting more value out of big data this year (69%) compared to last year (64%).  Top outcomes of using big data include better targeting of marketing efforts (41%), optimization of ad spending (37%), and optimization of social media marketing (37%).

top outcomes

  • 54% of an organization’s security budget is invested in security plans versus reacting to threats. Dell & TNS Research discovered that midmarket organizations both in North America and Western Europe are relying on security to enable new devices or drive competitive advantage.  In North America, taking a more strategic approach to security has increased from 25% in 2014 to 35% today.  In Western Europe, the percentage of companies taking a more strategic view of security has increased from 26% in 2014 to 30% this year.

security strategic

  • IT infrastructure costs to support big data initiatives (29%) and costs related to securing the data (28%) are the two greatest barriers to big data adoption. For cloud adoption, costs and security are the two biggest barriers in midmarket organizations as is shown in the graphic below.

security costs

  • Cloud use by midmarket companies in France increased 12% in the last twelve months, leading all nations in the survey.  Of the 11 countries surveyed, France had the greatest increase in cloud adoption within midmarket companies.  French businesses increased their adoption of cloud applications and platforms from 70% in 2014 to 82% in 2015.

Sources: Dell Study Reveals Companies Investing in Cloud, Mobility, Security and Big Data Are Growing More Than 50 Percent Faster Than Laggards. October 13, 2015

 

Oct 16

Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends For 2016

2016 Gartner technology trends graphicGartner announced their top 10 strategic technology trends for 2016 at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo held October 4 – 8th in Orlando. David Cearley, Vice President and Gartner Fellow, presented the company’s Top Ten Strategic Technology Trends for 2016.  You can find the video here.

Key take-aways from his presentation and the trends announced are provided below:

  • Enterprise 3D-printing shipments will attain a 64.1% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) through 2019. David Cearley mentioned during his keynote that jet engines are being 3D printed today.  He gave the example to illustrate that 3D printing will continue to gain adoption in more demanding manufacturing environments including aerospace, automotive, energy, medical devices and military-based markets and industries.
  • Emergence of an entirely new class of business models based on smart machine technologies, advanced analytics and big data. Combining machine learning, continued adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and supporting data models, and advanced intelligence to interpret and act on the data, Gartner’s predictions set the stage of an entirely new class of business models. Manufacturing-as-a-Service and paying only for the production time used in a factory are within reach for more companies than before based on these predictions.
  • The device mesh will expand to include IoT-based devices that scale well beyond the enterprise. Gartner is predicting that in the next three years traditional computing and communication devices, including desktop and mobile devices will increasingly be augmented by wearable devices, home electronics including appliances with sensors, transportation-based sensors and data collection devices, and environmental devices all capable of capturing data in real-time.
  • A digital mesh will continue to proliferate, aligning apps and devices to individuals’ specific roles and tasks.  Gartner sees this digital mesh as an expanding series of devices, services, platforms, informational networks and individuals that integrate together and provide contextual intelligence and enabling greater collaboration. The proliferation of the digital mesh will lead to more ambient, contextually intelligent and intuitive app design over time Gartner predicts.
  • The next twelve months will also see the proliferation of algorithm-based businesses enabling automated background tasks including smart machines. Gartner’s technology trends for 2016 set a solid foundation for the growth of globally-based smart factories and production centers. Acumatica, Plex Systems and other Cloud ERP providers are ideally positioned for this trend, having proven their ability to provide manufacturing intelligence from the shop floor to the top floor. In addition to cloud platforms, these algorithm-based businesses will need to support unstructured data analysis including latent semantic indexing (LSI), data taxonomy and classification algorithms to ensure data fidelity and scalability, and more robust analytics and predictive modeling systems.
  • Combining algorithms, analytics, data architectures and smart machines have the potential to revolutionize manufacturing quickly. General Electric’s Predix platform, IBM’s IoT Foundation and several other cloud-based IoT platforms are already making progress on transforming the vision of algorithm-based smart machine production strategies into a reality for manufacturers globally.
  • Gartner sees a new IT reality taking shape. Adaptive security, advanced systems, Internet of Things (IoT), mesh app & service architectures are the catalysts of the new nature of IT that Gartner is predicting.

A graphic illustrating the top 10 strategic trends is show below:

top ten technology trends 2016

Sources:

Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2016.  Press Release Announcement, October 6, 2015.

Video replay of the keynote: The Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2016

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