No matter what industry your business or organization belongs to, you simply cannot survive in the competitive market without technology. There continue to be advancements in the way people across industries do business, and it would be suicide for your enterprise to get left behind in the times.

Staying competitive means you need to anticipate the most technology trends, particularly those that affect your industry in a major way. These trends continue to shape the way your customers view you and interact with you, and if you don’t take advantage of incoming technology, your competitors will.

Here are 10 of the game-changing technological trends that will create both opportunity and disruption across markets in 2014. You need to harness them and change the way you communicate, market, sell, collaborate, innovate, and educate, among many others:

1. 1. Big Data – this is another term for technological tools and systems that are utilized to capture and harness rapidly growing streams of data, such as customer information and purchase histories. This data can be ran through high speed analytics technology to make critical decisions about customer intelligence, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), industry partners, and more. In fact, Big Data is rapidly emerging as a service among cloud providers that are gearing to offer up larger streams of data relevant to smaller and mid-size organizations. Learn more about Big Data (its benefits and applications to your business) here.

1. Advanced and Personalized Cloud Computing Services – one of the fastest growing technologies for 2014, businesses across markets are predicted to spend over $13 billion on Cloud Architecture as it continues to evolve. As customers increasingly make use of personal mobile clouds, there is likely to be a shift of focus on services, and less on the devices people use to access these services. This shift will do away with some of the limiting factors presented by mobile devices, such as memory, processors and battery life.
2. On Demand Services – these include Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS), Software-as-a-service (SaaS), Collaboration-as-a-Services (CaaS), Networkking-as-a-Service (NaaS) and many others. Companies that need to launch new services immediately will find that these advancements will help cut down on costs by providing them access to the latest technology and powerful software programs without having to employ a large IT department or go through expensive and time-consuming upgrades.
3. Virtualization of Everything – large and small businesses will come to accept this technology as security improves. Soon storage, desktops, application, networks and processing power will be run on Virtualization, allowing any mobile device to link to supercomputer capabilities for purchasing and logistics use, among many others. If you want to learn more about virtualization, we have several related topics about it. You can read them here.
4. IT Consumerization – by consumerizing applications, companies will be able to recommend the use of third party apps and hardware that are both safe and secure for consumers as this sector of the market becomes the source for technology and innovation.

This is just the first part of the series. Part two will be published tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Four Cornerstone can help you with all of these tech trends. Contact us now and improve the way you do business this year!

Photo courtesy of jamesduval2.