Analyst Insight: October 2015

IDC: Explosive growth in IoT market

The Internet of Things (IoT) is fast gaining momentum with huge growth expected. IDC predicts the market will hit $1.7 trillion in 2020, up from $655.8 billion in 2014, creating huge opportunities for enterprises. Devices, IoT connectivity and IT services will make up the make up the largest slice of the IoT market. By 2020, IDC expects the IoT purpose-built platforms, applications software and ‘as a service’ offerings to take the lion’s share of percentage revenue.

“While wearable devices are the consumer face of IoT, and where recognition of IoT appears to being, the real opportunity remains in the enterprise and public sector markets,” explains Vernon Turner, senior vice president and research fellow (IoT) enterprise systems at IDC.  “The ripple effect of IoT is driving traditional business models from IT-enabled business processes to IT-enabled services and finally to IT-enabled products, which is beginning to disrupt the IT status quo.”

Gartner: Digital business leaders pull ahead of the pack

Now is the time to invest in digital business initiatives as a widening gap forms between enterprises that have already kicked on with digital business against those that are in the planning stage. Only 32 percent of leaders at organizations with $250 million or more in annual revenue said they have a business that is a digital business, up from 22 percent in the same survey carried out by Gartner last year. 

Respondents were asked to rank the importance of the five success factors, breaking down the results according to whether companies were utilizing digital marketing techniques (a forerunner to digital business), were planning digital business or had implemented digital business.  The results highlighted how business leaders are more likely to target design and creation of new digital business moments, which trigger the start of a series of actions involving a network of people, businesses and things that span or cross multiple industries and multiple ecosystems.

Business leaders concurred that over the next five years the upside of the disruptive effects of digital business anticipated would be improvements in customer experience and engagement, enhanced IT and sales organization and increased workforce productivity.

Analysys Mason: UK leading Europe on broadband

The UK will outperform other major European countries on a range of fixed telecoms measures for the next five years, and become one of the best performing countries worldwide by 2020. The analyst says that the UK is already ahead of its European peers on areas such as superfast broadband coverage, take-up and average speeds. The UK also compares well with the countries often cited as the most advanced in the world, like Japan and South Korea.

In the UK, 78% of premises could access superfast broadband at the end of 2014. This compares with 77% in Germany, the next best-performing country. Analysys Mason expects that by 2018, more than 95% of UK premises will have access to superfast broadband, keeping it ahead of the other large European markets.  The UK will also outperform Japan (64%) and the USA (69%).

The UK government's approach to extending superfast broadband access is costing less than state-supported initiatives in other countries. It is also exploiting private-sector investment to a greater degree in providing superfast coverage in rural areas. 

Forrester: Robots will not take our jobs

Various studies have claimed that the rise of robots will take our jobs, but they have ignored one important factor – that of automation and the jobs that will actually be created. Forrester forecasts that robots will realize a 16% job lost between now and 2025, due to driverless cars and cognitive computing, for example. The good news is the jobs it will create in areas such as software, engineering and maintenance. Automation will create 13.6 million new jobs over the next decade, equivalent to 9% of the workforce.

Robots will also transform jobs: 25% or more of every job sector across every industry to be exact. In health, for example, cognitive computing will transform how doctors diagnose and prescribe treatment for patients. The report concludes that rather than serving customers as cheaply as possible, business should take a look at the bigger picture.  Automation should be a means to delivering a customer experience that meets their expectation.  This means robots and humans working side by side, not in opposition.