Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2015.  Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed article by Mike Azevedo, CEO of Clustrix

2015: Taking Advantage of the E-Commerce Boom

Heavily driven by expanding online and mobile user bases, emerging international markets, and advances in shipping and payment options, the worldwide B2C e-commerce sales will surpass two trillion dollars by 2016. As such, in 2015 we will continue to see rapid developments in the e-commerce space and upwards near 20 percent in annual industry growth. 

To stay competitive in this growing market, e-commerce vendors will look to ramp up their marketing efforts in 2015. As a result, we will see greater use of customer data analytics to help develop personalized offers for customers and to customize the shopping experience. With the vast and growing variety of vendor and product options available to consumers, such techniques will help to differentiate businesses from the competition, increase sales conversion rates and further improve customer relationships.

The e-commerce industry will also continue shifting to utilize additional sales channels as we see an expansion of mobile users. Gartner predicts there will be almost five billion connected devices by the end of next year and 25 billion, (that's three per person on the planet!) by 2020. As consumers continuously shift between their smartphones, desktops and tablets, e-commerce business should optimize their digital storefronts to sync across these devices as well. In fact, Clustrix recently conducted a survey and revealed that over 80 percent of consumers already use their mobile devices to shop online. Based on the existing mobile user base along with the projected growth of connected devices, 2015 will bring more e-commerce vendors optimizing their websites for mobile to further capitalize on revenue opportunities.

Additionally, as e-commerce businesses continue to grow and evolve, so will the need for a scalable database solution. We will see e-commerce vendors abandoning their MySQL databases, which are inadequate for managing the increasing web traffic, and adopting scale-out database technology to support their growing businesses. While many businesses begin with a MySQL database, scaling up will no longer be an option due to the increasing rate of online shopping and MySQL's limited database capacity. In fact, Clustrix found that over 40 percent of consumers shop online on a daily basis and nearly 30 percent shop online on a weekly basis. With the e-commerce space projected to grow substantially over the next few years, 2015 will surely be the year of the scale-out database as e-tailers must prepare their websites to handle greater online traffic.

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About the Author 

Mike Azevedo serves as CEO of Clustrix in San Francisco. He has more than 25 years of sales and executive leadership experience in scale-out analytic applications, grid computing, storage infrastructure, security and retail.