While Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is more than 10 years old, the technology has not captured a level of market success commensurate with its mindshare – and has indeed lagged either SaaS or IaaS in terms of market presence. Yet in spite of its slow market growth, PaaS technology has continued to diversify and evolve to support the intensifying developer need for agility and productivity, especially as developers have assumed a front seat at the enterprise digital transformation table.
IDC has been tracking technology spending in the Worldwide Black Book since the 1980s, and you’d be forgiven for thinking there are fewer surprises and unexpected statistics today. The technology industry is now a much more mature sector of the global economy, even compared to as recently as the early 2000s.
Overall IT spending may be more predictable than in the past, as an increasing share of end-user tech spend moves from volatile Capex to relatively stable Opex thanks partly to the growth of cloud and mobile, but the key to gaining competitive advantage still lies in being first to recognise significant shifts, anomalies and surprising trends. Here are just five of them.
Today, enterprises are outsourcing their logistics business process services primarily to lower operating costs and transportation costs, which is not an atypical benefit sought after when outsourcing any business function. Beyond the main driver of cost savings, enterprises are challenged to manage customer expectations by improving product delivery and order visibility, managing risk and compliance, and continuously meeting SLA’s.
For the past 30+ years organizations have purchased technology platforms and deployed them on-premises. Most of these legacy systems create a technical debt that organizations find is a nightmare to manage. Customizations, maintenance, hardware and even version control have put the organization at an operational disadvantage.
There is an often-quoted economic theory that describes the balance that occurs when competitors in a market of a fixed size win or lose share depending on the success or failure of the other. The “zero sum game” (as it is known) has been cited so often since the financial crisis of the late 2000’s slowed global growth, that its continued use is becoming something of a cliché.
The enterprise infrastructure market is crowded and complex, with several market segments that organizations must take into account when evaluating…
The proliferation of data types and quantities should be a major advantage for enterprise organizations. More data and more types of data should offer complex insights into challenges and opportunities in how the business runs and should lead to better decisions and business outcomes. However, ask any data analyst, and they’ll share this reality: data analysts spend a bulk of their time on search, data preparation, management, and governance activities, and not on data analytics where the true value lies.
Seven years ago, I embarked on my smart home journey, although I didn’t know it at the time. Being an avid gamer and student in college, I subscribed to a broadband internet service and setup my wireless home network. This allowed me to compete in online video games through my gaming console, connect my laptop to the internet, and stream movies on my tablet. What I didn’t realize back then was that I had just laid the necessary infrastructure in my home to support a lifestyle of comfort, convenience, security, and cost savings that I would come to enjoy seven years later.
Twenty years ago, I went to my first NHL game, and was lucky enough to join five other friends in a luxury box overlooking the rink at center ice. Shortly after arrival, a server showed up to take our drink orders, and in an effort to get our drinks quickly and watch the game, we all ordered the same thing. The server dutifully took them down, punched them into his handheld device, and processed our order. Moments later, by the time he had finished, our drinks arrived from another server. What sort of magic was this? A server can bring us our drink orders in the time it takes us to order? Can he do it again? The answer to that last question was ‘yes,’ even when we ordered complex (and to his delight, more expensive) cocktails.
