Each year, Verizon’s senior staff outlines the issues that we think are most likely to impact our customers’ business in the coming 12 months. Last year, we outlined how five technology trends — linked to solutions, customer service and the very fabric of organizational IT — would help give enterprises greater control over innovation and business success in 2014. The question is: were we right?
Our first prediction was that the ‘Customer of One’ would come of age. By that, we meant that the ability to tailor a customer’s experience to meet personalized needs would increasingly be a brand differentiator. We think we got that one right. Omnichannel connections have proliferated throughout the year, helping connect customers to brands in unprecedented ways, and opening up new market possibilities all around the globe. However, we also said that big data analytics would transform the customer engagement model, and we believe that this is yet to come. The promise of big data is widely referenced, but today it is still just that, a promise. Turning big data into business differentiation is not yet, in most industries, a reality.
We also said that 4G LTE wireless service and the availability of machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions “as a service” — on demand, over the Internet and ready to use — would finally overcome concerns preventing M2M adoption. In this, we were also perhaps a little premature. The promise of the Internet of Things remains the same, but take up has been slower than we thought it would be. Of course, there have been huge leaps forward in specific areas — telematics being an obvious example, with the driverless car suddenly closer to reality — but, barring the early adopters, M2M adoption remains just beyond the comfort zone of many organizations.
Our third prediction was that the shortage of security expertise would force changes to cybersecurity management. Security remains a key priority for our customers, and rightly so. As was reported in this year’s Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), most organizations cannot keep up with cybercrime. It’s true that security expertise is in demand and hard to find, so to combat the cybersecurity threat, our customers are increasingly adopting hybrid cybersecurity/management models, combining in-house expertise with trusted external managed security services. There is a realization that organizations simply can’t do everything themselves — and particularly when ‘everything’ encompasses identity management, security analytics and cyberintelligence, governance, risk, compliance and more. However, the DBIR also showed that 92 percent of the 10,000 security incidents analyzed over the past 10 years could be traced to just nine basic attack patterns. It’s all about the data, and applying big data analytics to security risk management has the potential to bend the curve, and help organizations combat cybercrime more effectively.
Next, we said that IT would decentralize. What we’ve observed here is that the IT team is increasingly moving right to the heart of business, helping to develop solutions to real-life business challenges. So it’s actually not so much about IT decentralizing, as becoming all-pervasive. Technology is increasingly the valued enabler, rather than the end game; those organizations that have not taken IT out of the server room — and given the CIO a seat at the decision-making table — are fast learning the error of their ways. The proof here is in a study we conducted with Harvard Business Review Analytics Services, which showed that IT Pioneers — companies that believe strongly in the benefits of adopting new technologies and pursue ‘first-mover advantage’ — are more likely to lead in both revenue growth and market position than their peers. The study also showed that interdepartmental collaboration is critical, and that segregating IT from business operations can be a significant disadvantage to business. It’s all about integrating innovation as part of corporate culture if its value is to be realized.
Finally, we said that providers would add gravity to the cloud. We thought that adding software and services to the cloud would be a key focus for cloud providers, and — in a world where mobile is the norm and rich media content is a given — the cloud would become an integral location where growing data volumes can be stored, accessed and analyzed on demand. We’ve certainly put our money where our mouth is here, announcing a series of for Verizon Cloud, and working hard to expand our ecosystem — and it seems that we were right. Our State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud report stated that 65 percent of enterprises are now using cloud technology, and enterprises are increasingly adopting cloud not just for small-scale or non-critical workloads, but to support the services they deliver to customers (e-commerce in retail, risk analytics in insurance or product development). In the last year, we’ve seen enterprise IT departments expand spend on cloud and increase the sophistication and rigor of their specification and selection processes. We expect to see this trend continue as cloud becomes more important and is relied upon for increasingly important workloads.
What do you think? Were we right? We’ll be announcing our view of key trends for 2015 shortly. Watch this space.
