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Frost & Sullivan tackles convergence, big data

The firm's Growth Innovation Leadership congress will unpack new developments in convergence and big data.

Joanne Carew
By Joanne Carew, ITWeb Cape-based contributor.
Johannesburg, 30 Jul 2014

The intensity of competition in business has increased and will continue to do so. But the fundamentals of business remain the same.

This is the word from Hendrik Malan, operations director for Frost & Sullivan Africa, who chatted to ITWeb ahead of Frost & Sullivan's Growth Innovation Leadership congress in Cape Town in August.

According to Malan, there have also been significant changes in the nature of competition and how companies are leveraging customers in order to increase revenues.

"The key factor underpinning all this is convergence. It links up everything and connects everyone to each other," said Malan. Convergence is not only an area of focus within the information and communication technology (ICT) industry but is also a talking point in other industries, spanning, among others, energy, the automotive sector and healthcare, he added.

But Malan warned, if you do not converge fully, the organisation's ability to customise is very limited, which can prove complicated. For service providers in particular, noted Malan, converging fully enables them to serve their customers in a more tailored way.

Gareth Mellon, Frost & Sullivan senior industry analyst, said many businesses have taken a piecemeal approach to convergence and have tried to adopt only select elements with limited success. "You will only have the full impact of convergence if you have a completely integrated solution. By combining cloud and big data, with mobility and all the other emerging trends - you will get more bang for your buck."

Within the enterprise market, an important element of this move towards convergence is starting with each customer's unique needs and then working backwards, rather than starting with the technology and working forward, said Malan. Companies that have the ability to secure the most secure access to customers are the organisations that will be able to prescribe what is being sold to that customer and this will allow them to remain competitive, he noted.

Big data wave

Malan went on to say that big data, and the effective use of this data, is essential should companies wish to remain relevant in this ever competitive business landscape. He highlighted the importance of strategic data usage at the enterprise level; something which he believes is not being done successfully, particularly because of the sharp increase in the amount of data being generated.

GIL 2014 AFRICA

GIL 2014 Africa is taking place on 14 August, 2014 at the Table Bay Hotel in Cape Town. For more information about the congress, click here.

He cited the work of South African immigrant, surgeon and entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong as an example of the enormous potential of big data. Currently the wealthiest man in Los Angeles, Soon-Shiong's Nantworks project will see the incorporation of big data into a system that will allow doctors to share DNA data about various cancer patients.

"This sort of thing is all based on convergence on the one end and the utilisation of big data and an influx in data traffic on the other," he noted, adding that enterprises are only just beginning to scratch the surface of what big data can do within their organisations.

To demonstrate the scale of the current data landscape, Mellon and Malan referred to a recent Frost & Sullivan research report, which outlined that in 2013, mobile data traffic was nearly 18 times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000. They highlighted that the number of mobile devices and connections in 2013 grew to 7 billion, up from 6.5 billion in 2012. The same report also outlined that smartphones accounted for 77% of that growth and that mobile network connection speeds more than doubled in 2013.

"A very small fraction of the data being generated is actually being utilised. Big data allows businesses to draw clear lines between investment and return," he said.

Malan continued that when dealing with such vast amounts of data, it is not surprising that various privacy concerns come into play and will continue to be a hot topic for years to come. "Ultimately, it is a trade-off and it is about what you get in return. Privacy is not dead; it is just up for sale."

For Mellon, this is where analytics comes into play. "Up to now, much of the work has centred on identifying sources of data and trying to collect it. The next step is how to manage this information and how to innovate and translate it into something of value for both businesses and individuals."

The level of innovation in Africa is very high, with a lot of innovation happening at the roll-out level rather than at the implementation level, which Mellon and Malan agree is actually a significant advantage. A lack of legacy systems in Africa means that the continent has to be quite innovative in order to remain at the cutting edge of the latest technological developments.

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