FURTHER INTO THE FUTURE

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Updated : February 2, 2014 0:0  ,
By R. Narayan

The year is going to be a testing phase for the channel to keep pace with the changes that will require them to develop expertise in new areas.

2014 would be yet another year wherein the transformations to a new world order in terms of Technology adoption would go a further level up. There is no going back and therefore the channel needs to gear up for a more focused assault on the opportunities that beckon them in the areas of Virtualisation, the cloud, BYOD, Big Data Analytics, SDN (software defined networks) etc.

It is easy to know why these trends will only pick further pace from hereon. While most of them might have seemed like vaporware not too long ago, we understand better with each passing day, the relevance of the Technologies that back these buzzwords.

Big data analytics will get to play a more decisive role in influencing the go to market strategies of manufacturers and services companies as they derive better actionable insights from more mature Technology tools. The Internet of Things (IoT) is now being talked about more and will be trend to watch in 2014. IoT which essentially is about having sensors in things that gather data and relay them over the internet to a data collection point, will have a significant role to play in the Big Data analytics scheme of things.

The role of agile networks is seen to be decisive in extracting performance and do away with bottlenecks that Businesses can ill-afford in a very competitive landscape, whichever industry they belong to. However SDN deployments are likely to rise only at a modest rate this year. As some analysts suggest, we may have to wait until next year to a widespread adoption of SDN with 2014 likely to be the year of early adopters.

This is an era of technology crossovers, perhaps similar in some way to the early years of the 20th century when people saw the introduction of several new technologies or facilities from the Airplane to the Telephone that significantly changed the way of life. The year is going to be a testing phase for the channel to keep pace with the changes that will require them to develop expertise in new areas. 2014 could be the year that channel companies could reimagine their go to market methodologies.