2017 prediction 7 – suppliers will rethink mega-theme marketing

Figure 7 – 2017 marketing themes

Source: ITCandor, 2017

Perhaps because real differences in technology are hard to grasp, our industry is full of meta-language used by suppliers to persuade users to spend money with them. In 2017 a number of these have reached their sell-by date. I need to be careful here as I often use them as short-cut terms myself, however let me explain what I mean:

• Big Data – spending on storage systems market declined every quarter between Q1 2012 and Q2 2016, while there has been massive vendor consolidation among their suppliers (including the market leader, EMC) as well as among manufacturers of disk, NAND drives and DRAM memory. In Q1 2016 there was even been a simultaneous decline in revenue, net profit, capacity and unit shipments of all raw storage and systems – putting paid to the claims of exponential capacity growth included in many of the Big Data marketing pitches I’ve seen. The words ‘Big Data’ add nothing to the meaning of ‘Analytics’ either, apart from underlining the hope that users will spend money on arrays as well as application tools. Big Data does not define a different style of computing from ‘traditional’ storage techniques either. I propose using ‘scale up’ and scale out’ to define the differences in style of storage as they are by some in the server market.
• Internet of Things/Everything – these are relatively pointless terms for embedding processing, sensors and Internet connections into machinery, tools and processes. Of course there is an on-going expansion of the number of devices which can supply information to and be controlled within the digital domain, but ‘things’ is too general – and ‘everything’ too broad – to define this expansion of our industry.
• Cloud Computing – no longer a useful term due to its general meaning and universal adoption to describe vendor strategies and offerings. It would be less prejudicial and more helpful to use a mix of ‘on’ and ‘off’ premise, ownership (customer or supplier) and system management (ditto) to describe the differences in IT system deployment, as well as PaaS, IaaS and SaaS to describe ‘cloud’ services. At heart eBay is an auction company, Amazon – a bookseller and salesforce.com, a sales automation services supplier. Making lots of noise about Cloud Computing in 2017 is the equivalent of still printing the word ‘quartz’ on clock faces long after the market for (once competitive) analogue equivalents has died.

Branded marketing support products such as Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and IDC’s Digital Transformation also have little value for guiding user purchasing decisions, despite the revenues and profits they make for their originators; suppliers will spend more on long-tail marketing in future.

My seventh prediction is (more in hope than expectation perhaps) that new and more useful marketing campaigns will replace the current (increasingly irrelevant) Cloud, IoT, IoE and Big Data themes.

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