I attended this year's Gartner IT Expo in
India, held in the beautiful sea side town of
Goa. It was a rather large gathering (1200+ participants as I hear), blocking
the capacity of most Goa hotels already in holiday season. The talks were
rather interesting and engaging (including one by Guy Kawasaki),
but I guess the opportunity of catching up with technologists from peer
companies and other industries was the high note.
Here were my major takeaway themes.
User experience: Digital UX is increasingly becoming
conversational, immersive and ambient. As AR-VR tech (Google Glass equivalents)
merge with conversational interfaces (Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, MS
Cortana) and messaging, we are seeing the emergence of a new set of rich UX
channels. This will require new "shared state services" in the
back-end to synchronize journeys between channels while managing complex
context. For that matter, "context" management - sensing, modeling
and applying context information intelligently - seems to be an emerging holy
grail capability in addressing these evolving user experience channels.
Data: As Big Data becomes the state of the play across industries, the value
of metadata becomes more prominent. Particularly in an era where the boundaries
of analytical insight span data sources beyond the enterprise, the value of metadata
in establish trust is rather immense. We no longer "collect" data,
but rather "connect" to it from multiple sources to create temporary
data structures to run analytics (with mechanisms such as data virtualization).
Blockchain: Given
that this was a cross industry event, I was surprised by how much everyone was
talking about this topic. It was not just the bankers and insurance teams, but
everyone from manufacturing to agriculture-tech was talking about its potential
in enhancing trade across industries and managing assets more effectively.
Every industry seems to be running a pilot and exploring its practical
potential.
Digital Platforms: While
the concept of platforms has been around for some time, the value from the
platform model is becoming more apparent (as Gartner mentions, a majority of
the largest capitalized companies in the world today are platform heavy like
Amazon, Google and even GE with its Predix). In addition, the construct of
digital platforms is itself becoming more complex. Platforms are moving from
being two-sided (buyer and seller) to becoming N-sided (including aggregators,
advisors, service providers and brokers), and spanning multiple industries. For
example, take the case of Uber financing car owners or Starbucks with its
loyalty cards.
Connected ecosystems and IOT:
This was a big theme, particularly for the manufacturing, automotive,
industrial and consumer industry areas. The 7 Billion connected people and 30
Billion connected things (as Gartner projects by 2020) will create a huge
potential for a new services. An interesting presentation was on
connected cars, where they highlighted the case of a fully autonomous car of
the future with all seats were turned inwards - resulting in the need for new
forms of entertainment and allied services to engage commuters.
I also picked up some interesting FinTech statistics along the
way.
- The total valuation of Fintech startups firms is already at 30% of valuation of global banks! That was news.
- A huge number of non-banking entrants to banking: For example, Starbucks which currently processes $9-10B in quarterly float due its loyalty payment solution (and without any associated financial regulation)
Overall, a rather useful forum, not just to pick up these
nuggets, but for meeting interesting people.
