Thursday, March 12, 2015

Enterprise Digital Analytics

Digital analytics play an important role in nearly each enterprise’s digital marketing strategy, not just for following and measurement web site traffic, but for following and measurement different digital channels, as well. With the explosive growth of social media, video, and mobile, the importance of understanding the contributions and relationships of those channels to web site traffic and conversions has increased significantly.

Key areas for digital marketers:
  • Ensuring consistency of messaging across all channels
  • Understanding how mobile users research/buy products
  • Understanding where and when customers use different devices
  • Using online data to optimize offline experience
  • Using offline data to optimize online experience
  • Attributing Big Data for more effective marketing

The benefits of digital analytics platforms:
  • Developing actionable insights across the enterprise
  • Harnessing powerful, real-time analytics
  • A better understanding of user demographics.
  • Improved tracking of on-site user behaviour
  • Greater ability to monitor site performance and usability
  • Increased measurability and marketing effectiveness 

Source: 2014 Third Door Media, Inc

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Enterprise Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing strategy uses the core values of an enterprise to make use of digital channels to promote or market products and services to consumers and businesses.

Components of Enterprise Digital Marketing Strategy: 
  • Network Building Strategy
  • Engagement strategy
  • Content Marketing Strategy
  • Recommendations
  • Client Centric Strategy
  • Employee Engagement Strategy
  • Visibility Strategy
  • Measurement and Follow-ups 

Digital Advantage:




Friday, November 14, 2014

Worldwide Business Analytics Software Revenue by Segment and Leading Vendors: 2009-2018

Business Analytics

Business analytics (BA) refers to the skills, technologies, practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning. Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods.

The Business Analytics Software Market in 2013

In 2013, the worldwide business analytics software market grew 8.2% to reach $37.7 billion. The market is now forecast to grow at a 9.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2018.

Within BA market, the business intelligence and analytics tools segment grew, at 8.6%, reversing the trend of the previous two years when the data warehousing platform segment had the leading growth rate. In fact, in 2013, the data warehousing market grew only 6.4%, the worst performance since the recession of 2008–2009. The analytic applications segment grew 9.4% in 2013.

For over a decade, IDC has defined the business analytics software market as the combination of the data warehouse (DW) platform software with performance management and analytic applications and business intelligence (BI) and analytic tools. Key observations about the business analytics software market include:

  • 2013 market growth rate of 8.2% was essentially unchanged from the 8.6% growth rate in 2012. The overall market is in a period of steady growth, but there is variability in the expected growth rates of the individual market segments.
  • In 2013, the market experienced a noticeable shift toward cloud-based solutions. Although these cloud-based solutions had been available for years, supply of cloud services from the largest vendors accelerated rapidly in 2013 and is expected to continue throughout the forecast period
  • Increasingly, the distinction between business analytics and big data is blurring, and the hype about the latter phenomenon has subsided. As a result, more organizations are looking to develop comprehensive business analytics strategies that address all of their data access, analysis, and management requirements.
  • There is a broad theme of "self-service" in the business analytics market that applies to all user groups. This trend is putting increasing pressure on IT departments to address end-user requirements faster and yet without increasing IT resources. Methods used by IT to address this demand include relying more on cloud services, outsourcing, consulting services, and technology automation, including appliances.
  • At the same time, IDC estimates that about 60% of IT project funding is now controlled or significantly influenced by business units. This has resulted in many more "shadow" IT and analytics efforts to support analytics and business intelligence needs of end users. It is part of the reason for the rapid growth of the visual discovery sub-segment of the end-user query, reporting and analysis segment of the business analytics market.
Worldwide Business Analytics Software Revenue by Segment ($M): 2009–2018 
Worldwide Business Analytics Software Revenue by Leading Vendor: 2011–2013

Source: SAS, IDC 2014




Indian Healthcare Market Revenue, Trend and IT Spending

Health care providers in India are expected to spend $1.1 billion US Dollars (USD) on IT products and services in 2014, an increase of 5 percent over 2013. This forecast includes spending by healthcare providers (includes hospitals and hospital systems, as well as ambulatory service and physicians' practices) on internal services, software, IT services, data center, devices and telecom services.


IT Services, which includes consulting, implementation, IT outsourcing and business process outsourcing, will be the largest overall spending category throughout the forecast period within the health care providers sector. It is expected to reach $300 million USD in 2014, up from $280 million in 2013 – with the consulting segment growing 10 percent.

Internal Services will achieve the highest growth rate amongst the spending categories – forecast to be 18 percent in 2014. Internal services refer to salaries and benefits paid to the information services staff of an organization.

The information services staff includes all company employees that plan, develop, implement and maintain information systems. Software will achieve a growth rate of 8.4 percent in 2014 to reach $98 million USD in 2014, up from $90 million in 2013, led by growth in vertical specific software (software applications that are unique to a vertical industry. These are stand-alone applications that are not modules or extensions of horizontal applications).

India has a new government, and the Ministry of Health will closely examine ways to deliver cost effective healthcare across the country. Delivering wide access to healthcare in an affordable manner will be a top priority for the wider public healthcare system.

The organized private healthcare sector will continue its expansion across Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, as well as niche sectors like maternity and child health. We expect emphasis on eHealth, mobile health, telemedicine, public private partnership and leveraging innovative delivery models.


Source: Gartner, Inc., IBEF

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Top Strategic Technology Trends: 2015

Enterprises have to look at possibilities to build solutions that integrate business value with intelligence. Gartner The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2015 are:

1. Computing Everywhere

The Internet of Things will continue to expand, propelled by the ubiquity of user-oriented computing.

The mobile devices continue to proliferate with an increased emphasis on serving the needs of the mobile user in diverse contexts and environments. Phones and wearable devices are now part of an expanded computing environment that includes such things as consumer electronics and connected screens in the workplace and public space. "Increasingly, it's the overall environment that will need to adapt to the requirements of the mobile user. This will continue to raise significant management challenges for IT organizations as they lose control of user endpoint devices. It will also require increased attention to user experience design."


2. The Internet of Things

The Internet of Things will continue to expand, propelled by the ubiquity of user-oriented computing. The combination of data streams and services created by digitizing everything creates four basic usage models — Manage, Monetize, Operate and Extend. These four basic models can be applied to any of the four "Internets." Enterprises should not limit themselves to thinking that only the Internet of Things (IoT) (assets and machines) has the potential to leverage these four models. For example, the pay-per-use model can be applied to assets (such as industrial equipment), services (such as pay-as-you-drive insurance), people (such as movers), places (such as parking spots) and systems (such as cloud services). Enterprises from all industries can leverage these four models.

3. 3D Printing

Worldwide shipments of 3D printers are expected to grow 98 percent in 2015, followed by a doubling of unit shipments in 2016. 3D printing will reach a tipping point over the next three years as the market for relatively low-cost 3D printing devices continues to grow rapidly and industrial use expands significantly. New industrial, biomedical and consumer applications will continue to demonstrate that 3D printing is a real, viable and cost-effective means to reduce costs through improved designs, streamlined prototyping and short-run manufacturing.

4. Advanced, Pervasive and Invisible Analytics

Analytics will take center stage as the volume of data generated by embedded systems increases and vast pools of structured and unstructured data inside and outside the enterprise are analyzed. Organizations need to manage how best to filter the huge amounts of data coming from the IoT, social media and wearable devices, and then deliver exactly the right information to the right person, at the right time. Analytics will become deeply, but invisibly embedded everywhere.

Big data remains an important enabler for this trend but the focus needs to shift to thinking about big questions and big answers first and big data second.

5. Context-Rich Systems

Ubiquitous embedded intelligence combined with pervasive analytics will drive the development of systems that are alert to their surroundings and able to respond appropriately. Context-aware security is an early application of this new capability, but others will emerge. By understanding the context of a user request, applications can not only adjust their security response but also adjust how information is delivered to the user, greatly simplifying an increasingly complex computing world.

6. Smart Machines

Deep analytics applied to an understanding of context provide the preconditions for a world of smart machines. This foundation combines with advanced algorithms that allow systems to understand their environment, learn for themselves, and act autonomously. Prototype autonomous vehicles, advanced robots, virtual personal assistants and smart advisors already exist and will evolve rapidly, ushering in a new age of machine helpers. The smart machine era will be the most disruptive in the history of IT.

7. Cloud/Client Computing

The convergence of cloud and mobile computing will continue to promote the growth of centrally coordinated applications that can be delivered to any device.

Cloud is the new style of elastically scalable, self-service computing, and both internal applications and external applications will be built on this new style. While network and bandwidth costs may continue to favor apps that use the intelligence and storage of the client device effectively, coordination and management will be based in the cloud.

In the near term, the focus for cloud/client will be on synchronizing content and application state across multiple devices and addressing application portability across devices. Over time, applications will evolve to support simultaneous use of multiple devices. The second-screen phenomenon today focuses on coordinating television viewing with use of a mobile device. In the future, games and enterprise applications alike will use multiple screens and exploit wearables and other devices to deliver an enhanced experience.

8. Software-Defined Applications and Infrastructure

Agile programming of everything from applications to basic infrastructure is essential to enable organizations to deliver the flexibility required to make the digital business work.

Software-defined networking, storage, data centers and security are maturing. Cloud services are software-configurable through API calls, and applications, too, increasingly have rich APIs to access their function and content programmatically. To deal with the rapidly changing demands of digital business and scale systems up - or down - rapidly, computing has to move away from static to dynamic models. Rules, models and code that can dynamically assemble and configure all of the elements needed from the network through the application are needed.

9. Web-Scale IT

Web-scale IT is a pattern of global-class computing that delivers the capabilities of large cloud service providers within an enterprise IT setting. More organizations will begin thinking, acting and building applications and infrastructure like Web giants such as Amazon, Google and Facebook. Web-scale IT does not happen immediately, but will evolve over time as commercial hardware platforms embrace the new models and cloud-optimized and software-defined approaches reach mainstream. The first step toward the Web-scale IT future for many organizations should be DevOps — bringing development and operations together in a coordinated way to drive rapid, continuous incremental development of applications and services.

10. Risk-Based Security and Self-Protection


All roads to the digital future lead through security. However, in a digital business world, security cannot be a roadblock that stops all progress. Organizations will increasingly recognize that it is not possible to provide a 100 percent secured environment. Once organizations acknowledge that, they can begin to apply more-sophisticated risk assessment and mitigation tools. On the technical side, recognition that perimeter defense is inadequate and applications need to take a more active role in security gives rise to a new multifaceted approach. Security-aware application design, dynamic and static application security testing, and runtime application self-protection combined with active context-aware and adaptive access controls are all needed in today's dangerous digital world. This will lead to new models of building security directly into applications. Perimeters and firewalls are no longer enough; every app needs to be self-aware and self-protecting.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Worldwide IT Spending on Pace to Grow 2.1 Percent in 2014 – Gartner

Worldwide IT spending is on pace to total $3.7 trillion in 2014, a 2.1 percent increase from last year, however, this grow rate is down from earlier projections of 3.2 percent growth.  The slower outlook for 2014 is attributed to a reduction in growth expectations for devices, data center systems and to some extent IT services.

Worldwide IT Spending Forecast (Billions of U.S. Dollars)



IT services is forecast to total $967 billion in 2014, up 3.8 percent from 2013. Following weak vendor performance in 2013 across multiple geographies and segments, modestly improved spending is expected through 2014. IT outsourcing is growing slower than expected as sharply reduced pricing by the largest vendors is impacting the cloud storage services market. In addition, public cloud services are proving increasingly cannibalistic to more traditional data center outsourcing services. Implementation services are also growing slower than expected as risk-averse buyers remain focused on smaller, safer projects and some of the largest sellers remain focused on maintaining margins over growing revenue.
 

In the enterprise software market, spending is on pace to total $321 billion, a 6.9 percent increase from 2013. Slightly increased growth expectations for infrastructure software are balanced out by slightly lower growth expected for applications software. Within infrastructure, the database management system (DBMS) software market is expected to have strong growth as DBMS adoption is driven by big data and digitalization initiatives. Slower growth is expected in the applications market, specifically office suites and digital content creation (DCC), which are being impacted by slow PC sales and the rapid move to cloud-based offerings by many organizations and professionals.

Source: Gartner

Friday, June 6, 2014

Big Data to Drive Software Market - IDC

The global software market is expected to grow 5.9% year over year, driven largely by Big data and analytics and enterprise applications.

Structured data management software, collaborative applications and data access, analysis and delivery solutions are expected to show the strongest growth in the next 5 years, growing at a CAGR near 9% from 2013-2018.

Leveraging the social dimension of the Internet keeps fueling the collaboration growth, much of which is in the form of software as a service. This is complementary to the increased attention to Big Data and analytics solutions, which help enterprises understand and act on anticipated customer behavior and new insights into product reliability and maintenance. 

In the enterprise applications category, customer relationship management, enterprise resource management, supply chain management, and operations and manufacturing applications will continue to show CAGR rates around 6%.

Enterprises are starting to adopt applications that either didn't exist or weren’t needed in the past, such as commerce applications in all industries, not just retail, but also manufacturing, hospitality, food and beverage, and even the public sector.

On a regional basis, the emerging economies will continue to see stronger growth than the mature economies. The average 2013-2018 CAGR for Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan), Latin America, and Central Eastern, Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) is 8.5% while the average CAGR for the mature regions – North America, Western Europe, and Japan will be nearly 6%.

Source: IDC, InformationWeek