Page 25 - Optus Future of Business Report 2013

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OPTuS FuTuRe OF BuSINeSS
The evolving multi-channel organisation
Integration and the
‘Third Platform’
The most important events this
year will cluster around what IDC,
a leading provider of global ICT
research and advice, calls the
Third Platform. These areas for IT
growth and innovation will be built
on mobile devices, cloud services,
social technologies, and enormous
amounts of unstructured data (also
called ‘big data’).
IDC expects to see much greater
urgency and much bigger moves
on these technologies as the market
shifts beyond the exploration stage
to mature competition.
The ability to compete on the Third
Platform will reset leadership ranks
in the IT market and every industry
that uses IT, IDC says.
IDC defines this new computing
reality as an outgrowth of previous
eras, which started with the first
mainframes that catered to millions
of users and supported thousands
of applications. For 20 years from
the mid-’80s, this evolved into the
Second Platform of client-server
and internet-enabled platforms with
hundreds of millions of users and
tens of thousands of applications.
Today’s Third Platform era is
predicated on cloud technologies
to support billions of users, millions
of apps and trillions of things. IDC
predicts worldwide IT spending in
2013 will exceed US$2.1 trillion,
up 5.7% from 2012. This spending
will be driven by double-digit
growth in the Third Platform
and in emerging markets.
IDC also points to mobile
technologies as big beneficiaries
of this shift, accounting for 57% of
growth, while cloud technologies
including software-as-a-service,
platform-as-a-service and
infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) will
rise to dominance in many sectors.
“The increasing familiarity that
line-of-business owners have with
cloud solutions will improve their
adoption but will also create IT
integration challenges,” IDC says.
In its May 2012 Asia/Pacific Cloud
Computing Study, IDC also found that
two-thirds of businesses were not
ready to manage cloud environments,
although as the technologies mature
and organisations become more
familiar with them, it expects this
number to decline.
Vendors and service providers will
play the lead role for organisations
as they integrate their systems and
deployment models. These are
especially important for organisations
deploying automated management
tools without which their clouds
won’t scale.
IDC believes the shift in the centre
of IT decision making also puts
more power into the hands of the
chief marketing officer (CMO). This
will result in closer cooperation
between the chief information and
marketing officers. The CMO will
become an IT buyer in their own right
who is reliant on the CIO to ensure
scalability, data quality, security and
compliance along with integration
to back-office applications such as
customer databases.
But organisations that do tap their rich
vein of customer data and combine
them with incoming information
from contact centres and other
customer engagements stand to
identify opportunities early on. This
combined with the ability to discern
how customers feel about a brand,
its product or its service through
social media, for instance, allows
organisations to have a rich pool from
which to gain valuable insights.
This will help them to create a more
personalised experience for their
customers, which will keep them
coming back to their brand and its
offerings or even as advocates.
In the future, the role of the
lead services provider will be to
orchestrate the automation and
service management between
these various old world and Third
Platform IT. The organisations that
can adopt and deliver value on Third
Platform technologies, based on
similar transitions in the past, will
thrive and are expected to be the
new industry leaders.
InSIghTIDc InSIghTTechNoloGy
Cloud adoption
Organisations are increasingly
turning to cloud technologies as they
look for flexible IT models to more
quickly respond to business and
customer demands. Across business
and government, half say they use
software-as-a-service. On-premise
cloud and hybrid cloud, a combination
of in-house and outsourced services,
are used by 41% and 29% of
organisations respectively.
However, our research finds that the
number of organisations deploying
hybrid clouds in three to five
years will lift to nearly 50%, while
infrastructure-as-a-service is expected
to be used by 45% of organisations
during this time, up from 27% today.
However, adoption of software-as-
a-service, which is currently used by
50% of organisations, will fall to 46%
as organisations increasingly adopt a
broader range of cloud technologies.
CLOUD ADOPTION – BUSINESS
50
CURRENT EXPECTED IN 3–5 YEARS
48
41 46
29 45
27 41
19 32
15 30
21
(%)
PLATFORM
AS A
SERVICE
PUBLIC
CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE
AS A SERVICE PRIVATE
ON-PREMISE
CLOUD
SOFTWARE
AS A SERVICE
NONE
OF THESE
HYBRID CLOUD
(A COMBINATION
OF IN-HOUSE
AND OUTSOURCED
SERVICES)