GLOBAL CHALLENGES

Making 'The 700 Club' Part of Emerging IT Strategies for Business in 2010

Dennis McCafferty | Date: 02-01-10 | Comments

Business intelligence solutions, such as those predicting behaviors of consumers with credit scores over 700, will all be in demand within top industry niches in 2010.

With IT spending forecasted to return to pre-recession levels in 2010, look for organizations to seek better solutions when it comes to cloud services, mobile devices and "mashup" technologies that best leverage information and insights from social and collaborative networks.

In its annual industry forecast reports, Framingham, Mass.-based industry researcher IDC projects that worldwide IT spending will increase to $1.5 trillion, a 3.2 percent increase over 2009. More than 1 billion mobile devices will be used to access the Internet, for example, and the number of iPhone apps will triple to 300,000.

�In last year�s predictions, we talked about how a slow global economy would act like a pressure cooker on the IT market, speeding the development and adoption of new technologies and business models,� says Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC. �What�s different about 2010 is that the economic recovery will release some of the pressure on spending, enabling a number of transformational tipping points to be reached in a year of economic upswing.�

IDC also shed light on what�s ahead for three critical industry niches for the IT industry: retail, health care and financial services. Here�s what Gens and his team found:
- In retail, technologies must better enable retailers to predict the behaviors of the "700s," valued consumers with credit scores over 700 (which account for 69 percent of the market). While they�re considered low-risk for defaulting on payments, they�re also less likely to buy something on a whim. So tools are needed to help retailers understand how these consumers get and use information from social networks, price-comparison sites and other online resources. Online social commerce is a particular area of interest, as the top 10 social networking sites now oversee 1.3 billion accounts, and retailers need to take maximum advantage of what users are saying and reading about their products.
- Business intelligence solutions will emerge in great demand among health care industry organizations, as more than 90 percent of surveyed health care-based participants in IDC�s research indicate they�re planning new or expanded investments in these products. Health care organizations will invest heavily in administrative applications, and will also seek to improve information availability to the public due to ongoing federal and state government mandates. Also: More than 70 percent of health care industry organizations are planning to invest in or upgrade sales/member acquisition and customer-service technologies.
- After facing a historically rough year in 2009, the financial services industry will see considerable consolidation, driving a need for automated products to enhance services, all in the interest of getting consumers to open banking accounts on Websites and apply online for mortgage loans. With institutional loyalty among customers rocked by the recent crisis, financial services companies will need better business analytics tools to more effectively target consumer markets and retain them, according to IDC.