This next year will see new pressures on the way in which IT solutions and services are brought to market. JJ Milner, MD and chief cloud architect at Global Micro predicts some of the key shake-ups that we will see in 2014.
* Channel conflict – in this year we will see more vendors going direct, and channel lines will no longer be clear-cut. The channel and vendors will need to become accustomed to this new trend as they start to step into
each other’s territories and experience a new type of competition.
One strategy for dealing with this will be differentiation – channel partners will need to become more than just a billing conduit and will be under pressure to come up with a strategy for adding value.
* Small IT shops will feel the pressure – scale is going to matter more than ever before as costs rise and the South African rand continues to weaken. Smaller “lifestyle” businesses rely on face time and are not in the
position to market themselves as well as larger businesses are. They also can’t charge a lot for their skills, which will pose a problem in a highly competitive market.
These lifestyle businesses are going to become more like lifestyle traps if they can’t find a niche.
* An increase in hybrid-based deployments – because of exchange rate fluctuations, South Africans might begin to employ local services for cost predictability as opposed to dollar-based transactions. This may well
lead to more hybrid deployments, where customers will select overseas products only when their benefits trump data gravity and price points offered by local vendors. The two will need to work together.
* The emergence of an African start-up ecosystem for cloud services – there is already an entrenched start-up culture in South Africa, but this will spread to the rest of Africa, and we’ll start to see the rise of the
“boutique” provider.
This will necessitate a shift in mindset. In Silicon Valley, failure is a badge of honour. It means you have tried and you have learnt valuable lessons. Here, if a start-up fails, you can’t show your face. A start up culture
will offer small businesses the chance to fail fast – and learn the iterative lessons to get them back on their feet and trying again.
* The NSA surveillance hype will fizzle out – although many headlines were grabbed by Edward Snowden’s revelations and many companies preached the value of IT security and data protection, people will simply start
to forget this in 2014. The NSA isn’t really making that much of a difference to businesses and individuals, for this story to continue to have traction.
Milner believes that data gravity – that is to say – the practical implications of managing and accessing large amounts of data will drive the need for high speed, secure, localised access – which will ultimately matter
more than the Protection of Personal Information Bill and the NSA for local adopters of cloud.
All in all, Milner says 2014 looks set to be a year that will see global trends gaining a foothold in Africa, with South Africa as the stepping stone.
“While global financial volatility will have an impact on the way that we do business, this also has a chance to drive local development and innovation, so it may turn out to be a good thing,” he says. “And of course,
some of the biggest stories that will shake up 2014 have yet to emerge, so we wait in anticipation to see what will happen next.”
