Tech Prediction for 2014: Targeting the Value Office to Transform IT Business

John F. Kennedy once said, “Change is the law of life and those who only look to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” Nowhere is this truer today than in the world of IT.

That world as we know it is shifting rapidly from the client/server-based “2nd Platform” days to the “3rd Platform” era driven by the onslaught of Big Data, Mobile, Social, and Cloud technologies. Companies are not only challenged with managing massive amounts of data, but also protecting, optimizing, and ensuring that the right information is accessible to the right users at the right time.

If done unsuccessfully, their entire business is at risk.

If done right, it’s a game-changer.

I believe this transformation starts where work happens – at the intersection of Content, Process, and Collaboration. The real enabler lies in meeting the need for 3rd platform-enabled, enterprise-grade cloud solutions aimed at the Value Office.

High Value, Industry-Specific Solutions

The Value Office is the core and lifeblood of every business – the set of work and employees chartered solely with creating value for the organization. Creating real solutions to help solve their customers’ toughest business problems. But there is even more opportunity to be had here… enter the cloud.

By leveraging cloud technologies, businesses can extend and enrich their existing Value Office capabilities – and that has far-reaching implications, especially when you think about the transformative impact within specific industries like Healthcare, Life Sciences, and Energy and Engineering.

Take big pharmaceutical companies for example, who have an extremely long and costly product development lifecycle. By leveraging cloud-based solutions, these organizations can collaborate on Research and Development activities with external development partners and subsequently reduce clinical trial durations.

Every additional day that a blockbuster drug is on the market within patent generates $3M in additional revenue.*

Enabling Transformation

Naturally, the stakes are high. While customers in these industries have domain knowledge, they may lack the necessary infrastructure, content management expertise, or resources to develop solutions in-house. They also may not have a clear path to the cloud or possess the capabilities needed to get there.

To succeed in each of these endeavors, companies need to carefully evaluate and select an enterprise content management (ECM) vendor that brings to the table the following: top-grade ECM, industry knowledge, best practices, a broad partner ecosystem, and a flexible deployment model that provides “just as much cloud as they need” based upon where their company sits in its transformation.

All of this should be backed by a proven history of trust in infrastructure and cloud deployment. It’s not an either/or scenario, but the combination of these things that will drive real business benefits.

And what company does not want to increase its productivity, ensure compliance, fuel innovation, lower costs, and speed up time to value?

At EMC, we get this. My eyes are on the future, and helping customers transform their businesses.

*Picking Up the Pace of Life Sciences Discovery, BIO·IT World

More Tech Predictions for 2014

SDx (Software-Defined Everything) by Amitabh Srivastava, President, Advanced Software Division

A Battle Cry for Protected Storage by Stephen Manley, Chief Technology Officer, Data Protection & Availability Division

Software-Defined in Two Architectures by Josh Kahn, Senior Vice President, Global Solutions Marketing

Bringing Hadoop to Your Big Data by Bill Richter, President, Isilon

A Whole New World by CJ Desai, President, Emerging Technologies Division

IT’s Ability to Evolve Quickly by Vic Bhagat, Chief Information Officer

As BYOD Matures, BYOI is Waiting in the Wings by Art Coviello, President, RSA

Service Orientation, Big Data Lakes, & Security Product Rationalization by Tom Roloff, Senior Vice President, Global Services

About the Author: Rick Devenuti