2015 is promising to be a big year for IT, and data strategy will take center stage. The advances in Cloud technology will usher in new and exciting ways of doing business. Below is a list of trends to watch out for in 2015.
IT confides in the Cloud
It is time to eliminate the phrase “this is how we’ve always done it” and embrace the changing tech landscape. In 2015, IT leaders will continue to adopt new cloud services regularly to drive the agenda for their organization’s IT strategy. This agile mentality will be to the benefit of the entire organization, with the aim of increasing competitive edge and staying ahead of current (and forthcoming) technology trends.
Continued Deployment of Cloud ERP
As we transition into 2015 we should see the continued rise of cloud based enterprise resource planning, one of them being the integration of Internet-connected devices into factories & supply chains. The Aberdeen Group comparing Cloud ERP to on-premise ERP systems found that Cloud ERP solutions are implemented, on average, 63 percent faster to implement than on-premise ERP solution. The same study found that organizations with Cloud ERP solutions achieve return on investment 75 percent faster than companies with on-premise ERP software. Finally, Cloud ERP solutions can reduce a company’s IT department workload. Cloud ERP solutions outperform on-premise ERP solutions in IT workload reduction by 27 percent.
Additionally Cloud ERP offers a number of clear benefits to manufacturers:
- Visibility into every function across many departments
- Increase the speed of innovation
- Improve productivity
- Improve efficiencies
- Mobile integration
IoT will bolster Supply Chain Management
As Internet-enabled technologies and analytical capabilities push to the edge of the manufacturing network, new modes of manufacturing will be enabled. This will include the creation of cyber-physical and self-organizing systems that will move away from central orchestration to distributed orchestration. Machines, materials, assets, and people will communicate independently and make local decisions based on connectivity to the larger supply and demand chains that will increase flexibility and enable new modes of manufacturing like mass-customization.
We expect 2015 to be a year of increased investment in IoT technologies as forward-thinking companies explore different applications of the technology, standards architects develop consensus and refine platforms and solution providers invest and refine IoT-related offerings, jockeying for position on what will surely be a rapidly snowballing economic potential beyond 2015.
The Emergence of Data Strategy & Preparation
The data preparation market itself has been enabled and advanced by major technological breakthroughs in areas such as semantic algorithms, distributed computing, machine learning, and cloud computing. This year will also see the industry delivering data preparation technologies at scale for all users. The proliferation of ungoverned data will become so large and problematic that companies will need to shift their emphasis to data standardization, governance and data preparation.
The emergence of an all-in-one data prep stack will arise as CIOs and CDOs demand new approaches to end-to-end information management. The industry will respond by moving from delivering fragmented, point products to cohesive platforms built on elastic architectures that can scale and be delivered in a hybrid-cloud model.
Riding the Wave
In 2015 many of us may find ourselves discussing Salesforce’s new cloud product for data analytics, Wave. With Wave, companies can spot links between business units, like the relationship between the number of times salespeople have had a successful call with a customer and the failure rates gathered by sensors on the equipment sold to that client.
This cloud-analytics platform encompasses a back-end data-management service plus developer/power user and end-user-facing query-and-analysis "lenses" for data exploration and dashboards for persisted reporting and key performance indicators delivering new insights to your business users however, wherever, and whenever they want them. Uncover every opportunity at the speed of your business.