Las Vegas, Nevada: The proliferation of mobile devices coupled with the extraordinary growth of mobile data and social media are major drivers of the third-generation (3G) technology platform, which enterprises should embrace, says global IT firm EMC Corporation.
Joe Tucci, EMC chairman and chief executive, says the world is moving to 3G technologies and the cloud/mobile era is redefining IT architectures and how organisations run their business.
Chairman and chief executive Joe Tucci said the world is moving to 3G technologies built on mobile devices, big data, cloud computing and social networking technologies with billions of users, billions of connected devices and millions of apps accessed.
The 3G platform is larger than the 2G system, which is used in personal computers and client servers and handles only hundreds of millions of users and tens of thousands of apps.
Vernon Turner, senior-vice president of global research firm IDC, said 3G will transform the business world, predicting that a third of businesses will shift from the second to third IT platform.
He said the 3G platform will dominate IT spending this year, accounting for 29% of expenditure. It will cannibalise the second platform as 40-50% of 3G growth this year will come at the expense of 2G.
IDC has done research and analysis for EMC, releasing a study in April titled "The Digital Universe of Opportunities: Rich Data and the Increasing Value of the Internet of Things". The study showed that the digital universe is huge and growing exponentially.
Mr Turner estimated that the digital data volume will increase 10-fold to 44 zettabytes by 2020, up from 4.4ZB last year. One ZB equals 1 billion terabytes.
"If the digital universe was represented by the memory in a stack of 128GB iPad Airs each 0.29-inch thick, in 2013 it stretched two-thirds of the way to the moon," he said.
By 2020 there would be 6.6 stacks from the earth to the moon, the study forecast.
"The market is in transformation," said Mr Turner. "We're transforming from a make-and-sell business model to a send-and-respond environment."
In 2020, the number of things connected to the internet will rise to 30 billion from 20 billion in 2013.
At the same time, mobile-connected things will generate 27% of the digital universe by 2020, from 18% this year.
Mobile-connected things are not only mobile phones and tablets but also include radio frequency identification (RFID), tags, GPS devices, smart cards, airplanes, cars, dishwashers, toys and even dog collars.
The internet of things will contribute an increasingly to the digital universe and will subsume the information and communication technology (ICT) industry.
Mr Turner said these internet things will create five new opportunities: business models, real-time information on mission-critical systems, diversification of revenue streams, global visibility, and efficient, intelligent operations.
According to the world-leading IT research firm Gartner, IT has the highest business priority in more than a decade. Revenue generation tops the five-year tech-related investment agenda.
"IT is now transforming enterprises and helping enterprises redefine themselves,” said Mr Tucci. “More CEOs see IT as the driver of digital business innovation and growth."
He said organisations will need to understand huge amounts of data quickly, analyse it and act on it in real time.
"It’s a tremendous opportunity for IT professionals to really help companies make this challenging change in strategy, in the way they develop products, the way they react to customers and to the market in general,” he added.
Mr Tucci said the cloud/mobile era is redefining IT architectures and how organisations conduct business.
“The future promises to be both extremely disruptive and rich in opportunity for IT professionals and IT vendors alike, creating new sets of winners and losers across a rapidly evolving industry," he said.
Last year, less than 20% of the digital universe was touched by cloud computing which will more than double to 40% in 2020.
Surak Thammarak, senior systems engineer of EMC Information Systems (Thailand), said data volume and user demand is driving enterprises to shift from 2G to 3G.
For instance, he said Facebook users want to use it without any crash.
In the US, a supermarket knows what favourite food or items people who just entered the store like. It traces that data from Facebook and sends electronic discount coupons to their mobile phones as they move around the store.
"That is how real-time big data works," said Mr Surak. "When we walk into the supermarket, a cell site will trace our mobile phone and create electronic discount coupons for products we frequently buy or products our Facebook friends love."
Mr Surak said big data will make a consumer analysis from their behaviour via the use of social networks. Its accuracy is around 70%, compared with the 50% of traditional market surveys.
In Thailand, the sectors which will initiate a move to 3G are banking, telecommunications, retail, online businesses and food & beverages. They are stimulated by go-to-market need.
"Today it takes up to a day for enterprise in Thailand to know what customers want," he said. "They need a platform to allow them to analyse large volumes of data in real time."
To help enterprises make the transition to the 3G environment, EMC bridges the gap with the federation strategy — a group of companies working together to provide solution technologies focusing on software-defined data centres and the 3G platform.