
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Mani Zarrehparvar, president of Visage Mobile
2014: Telcos Come to Roost and Data (Finally) Makes Sense
Having spent the better part of my career in mobile, it
pains me to say that 2014 will be a relatively status quo year for mobile. It's
been a while since we've seen anything really transformative come out of
mobile. On the consumer side, developers continue to fight the feature/function
battle. On the enterprise side, the industries that typically have the might to
push mobility forward-such as healthcare and financial services-well, let's
just say they will have bigger fish to fry in 2014.
That doesn't mean 2014 will be boring. In the coming year, I
see the technology industry beginning a major transformation as major telecommunications
companies extend their reach and developers make real inroads in turning the growing
zettabytes of data into something more meaningful on both a a business and
personal level. Here's what I see on the horizon.
The Empire Strikes
Back
Large telcos are sitting on tremendous piles of cash and are
hungry for growth. Their traditional way of spending-acquiring smaller players
in the market or expanding to other markets-has been stymied by government
regulation.
In 2014, I predict that telcos will expand in new markets, disrupting
the technology industry in the process. Cloud-based infrastructure, hosting and
storage, application development, field force enablement, and managed services
companies will all feel the impact.
Social Data: Giving
Social a Much Needed Filter
The ubiquitous use of mobile technologies and vastly
improved mobile social apps have given us all the ability to push content to
our social network, without constraint. However, our patience for how much
information we want to consume is decreasing; mobile devices just don't work
for long reading or browsing. And our social networks are only getting bigger. The
result: The content we truly care about is diminishing by the day.
In 2014, we'll see someone introduce a filter that sits on
top of all of our social networks that will automatically sort out the stuff we
simply don't care about. Just as Google was able to make sense of the exploding
Internet content in the 1990s to help us find the information we wanted, this
filter will do the same for our social feeds. However, because social networks
have inherently different interests and are more focused on acquiring and
keeping customers and increasing revenues, this change will likely come from
the outside.
Mobile Data: Sensor
Technology and the Next Mobile Revolution
Mobile technologies and infrastructure have advanced to the
point where we have sufficient hardware and network bandwidth to handle just
about any amount of data. Vendors have also figured out how to package and
display content in ways that have profoundly impacted the way we work and
interact with one another. So, once the industry figures out how to develop
small, reliable and cost-effective sensor technologies, they will take mobile
to the next level by allowing us to connect things and places- not just people.
In 2014, developers will begin introducing better hardware
sensors that can more reliably capture data in a multitude of use cases. In the
next couple of years, these sensors will include software that will enable sensors
to interpret and translate raw data into something meaningful-without human
intervention.
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About the Author
Mani Zarrehparvar is president of Visage Mobile,
overseeing operations, product development, strategy, engineering, finance and
marketing for the enterprise mobility management company. Previously, he held
senior product leadership positions at AT&T and Asurion.