It’s the time of year when every blogger seeks, Nostradamus-like, to pierce the veil and lay bare the secrets of the future. No different, I hereby offer my 5 predictions for CI in the New Year. Enjoy!
1. The biggest will get bigger – sort of. Scale begets scale, and the very largest companies will continue to pour massive amounts of moolah into databases, analytics, modelling, and all things Customer Intelligent in 2012. Results will continue to be mixed, however, as the largest companies will rely on the vendors that they trust – not surprisingly, other very large companies like IBM, ACXIOM, Experian, Dun & Bradstreet – and miss out on the agility and cutting-edge innovation that smaller, more nimble vendors can provide.
2.Innovation will come from the small. A corollary to my first prediction, while the largest companies work with other large vendors and do more of the same (i.e., spend lots of money for not very much benefit), smaller firms will drive innovation. An example is Palantir, a company named after the seeing stones in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, that specializes in understanding very large amounts of data very quickly and has been at the forefront of innovation in big data solutions. Sorry, IBM, but Palantir and others like them will continue to eat your lunch.
3. Continued consolidation will engulf the industry. OK, maybe “engulf” is kind of dramatic, but the point is that consolidation will continue and even increase in 2012 as larger players try to teach themselves to dance by acquiring smaller, more nimble competitors (see predictions one and two above). Consolidation won’t be limited to the large swallowing the small, however; smaller players realize they need scale or will become irrelevant, so they will merge and become engines for growth and change.
4. Big Data will get small. Innovations in storage, processing power, and analytics will wrestle the Big Data problem down to size so that even smaller companies can tackle the problems posed by Big Data. In fact, many companies will rely on ever-more-sophisticated 3rd party solutions, including cloud-based platforms, to solve their Big Data headaches so that they can stop worrying about the data and concentrate on the anaytics and execution – which is where the real Customer Intelligence occurs.
5. Customer Intelligence will go mobile. Innovations in data security, cloud computing, and mobile platforms and technologies will finally push Customer Intelligence out to where it’s really needed – where the sales teams and relationship managers, out on the front lines acquiring new customers and working to help expand and deepen existing customer relationships. Salesforce and other CRM vendors already offer mobile versions of their platforms for phones and tablets, but analytics and true Customer Intelligence applications will catch up in 2012.
