IDC last week releasing its report “IDC Predictions 2013: Competing on the 3rd Platform.
” What exactly is the “3rd platform”?
It’s an IDC amalgam of mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies — which tend to be procured outside the usual enterprise IT channels.
According to the report, these technologies will together drive approximately 90 percent of the growth in IT spending from 2013 through 2020.
“The coming of the 3rd Platform changes many of the game rules and moves the entry point upmarket in a number of ways,” says Al Gillen, program VP, System Software, IDC. “We like to say this is a revolutionary transition that will be adopted in an evolutionary way. The truth is there remains much that needs to change, but that change will take place over a long term, and much of today’s infrastructure software lives on in tomorrow’s world.”
The ‘3rd Platform’ of information technology and its four pillars – big data and analytics, mobility and broadband, social business, and cloud services – is creating an ecosystem within which retail business and IT strategies will continue to rapidly evolve.
The ‘3rd Platform’ is already playing out in retail, creating new line of business roles, bases of competition, applications and analytics, and the adoption of consumer and associate online devices inside stores.
Together these forces create an information environment within which retailers earn customer loyalty, bring successful new products to market, collaborate through supply chains with business partners, enable associates, reduce risk, ensure compliance, promote their brand. However to do this effectively, retailers need to capitalise on big data and analytics.
Predictive analyticse goes beyond marketing e,g into healthcare planning and insurance risk assessment.
Four quadrants of the intelligent retail economy – customer data sources, social data sources, market data sources, and supply data sources produce constant streams of data creating millions of transactions and billions of interactions,” said Greg Girard, program director of IDC Retail Insights. “The returns on investment in big data and analytics can be monetised through traditional levers of customer loyalty, revenue growth, cost reduction, and new business models.
“Value creation requires aligning big data and analytics projects with three imperatives of omni-channel retail – insight, personalisation, and personalised community engagement with the brand. Retailers will derive more value from big data and analytics as they successfully manage five dimensions of change – intent, process, people, data, and technology.”
Solid state dsiks, new multiprocessor chips, and in memory processing tools e,g. Power Pivot, Haddop are maing complex analysis tasks of massive datasets relatively fast and easy. The trend was started long back e.g. Google analytics and all those government super computers monitoring text messages, and cctv cameras and emails. Our icrceasing on line, social media driven, digital presence provdes mote and more data for analysis.
Amazon Web Services is designed as a service to automate the process of parsing large sets of data. For example, one pipeline can move log data from an AWS EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) instance to the AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) once a day, and then, once a week, evoke an analysis job on the data on an AWS Elastic MapReduce cluster. The company also recently unveiled a data warehouse service and an auto-discovery service to ease the management of its ElastiCache. It has also cut the prices of some of its storage services and created two new EC2 instance types, for high-memory usage and large data usage.
Cloud services are starting to dig deep into vertical industry areas with the potentail for rapdi growth of PaaS [platform as a service]for the creation of industry-specific application platforms.
IDC sees a $65 billion market in these industry solutions for 2013, rising to $100 billion in 2016. Businesspeople will use these platforms to create new innovation and new value in new markets.
Note: Some of this blog is an abstract from https://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/how-it-will-be-blown-bits-208216?source=IFWNLE_nlt_cloud_2012-12-03 win which infoworld blogger Eric Knorr recounts a discussion with IDC Senior Vice President Frank Gens
