Making 'The 700 Club' Part of Emerging IT Strategies for Business in 2010
Dennis McCafferty | Date: 02-01-10 | Comments: 0
- 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.
