A new year usually starts with lots of predictions of what is to come upon us – from summer fashion to politics and mobile handsets.
i2i wants to chime in with our 2 cents about relevant trends in the new year. Of course we will focus on topics we understand – IT and telecommunication.
1) Security: The NSA scandal created a lot of awareness of the vulnerability of our daily communication. Especially corporations will increase their security measures to protect themselves against industrial espionage. This offers huge potential both for vendors and service providers.
The average private users will probably not change their communication behaviour, but offerings by service providers with a focus on increased security and privacy may still be appreciated by this customer segment.
2) Convergence of IT and telecommunication: This trend is nothing new, but considering the enormous potential, there still is a lot of potential for integration, especially in countries with outdated telecommunication infrastructure. For service providers offering services that combine IT and telecommunication (like Unified Communication) has huge growth potential, especially in the Small and Medium Enterprise market. LTE will accelerate this trend even further.
3) Network automation: The mergers of the past, and also the emergence of new, competitive hardware vendors have led to large service providers with a fragmented hardware ecosystem. This is expensive to operate and prone to failure. Technologies that help service providers to optimize their network management and reduce operation costs will be more and more in demand.
4) Life science meets IT: Costs for healthcare are rising everywhere. Technologies that help to reduce these costs by automating certain activities, aggregating, analysing and distributing data will be sought after by health insurances and medical institutions.
5) Social niche communities: Facebook may be on the decline or not. But one thing is certain: Niche communities are becoming more relevant. People like to engage with likeminded, and they don’t necessarily want to do that “in public”. The same applies to brands, who want to engage with their advocates, without relinquishing all their data to the big social networks.
Of course there will be more trends than these ones, and we are not pretending to provide a finite list.
But if you happen to be active in any of the listed areas, you will be in for lots of opportunities in 2014!