Published on the 12/06/2014 | Written by Newsdesk

After 205 years’ continuous operation Australia Post has confirmed its original business model has been savaged by technology, this week re-organising itself and confirming 900 job losses in the process…

Around 700 people gathered at the CIO Summit 2014 this week in Auckland to listen to IDC chief analyst Frank Gens’ keynote speech in which he discussed the key challenges for CIOs in the era of the 3rd Platform (the intersection of cloud computing, big data analytics, mobility and social media).

Gens said that while the 3rd Platform has been growing since 2007 – something that he “without wanting to brag” personally predicted for IDC – we are now seeing it mature and 2014 will be the year of the battle for dominance of the 3rd Platform as it enters the ‘innovation stage’. Over the next five years the 3rd Platform will account for 100 percent of CIOs’ growth in spend, so from a strategic C-suite perspective the 3rd Platform is the only technology that matters.

CIOs need to check their second platform vendors can take them to the 3rd Platform and work with other executive and line of business managers to create a 3rd Platform enterprise. “If you (CIOs) are not becoming experts on 3rd Platform tech, then you’re missing where business execs need you to be,” he said.

Gens said he sees five key “battlefields” in the 3rd Platform that CIOs need to understand in order to succeed in the emerging landscape. They are the race for the mega cloud data centres; the ability to integrate with connected ‘things’; picking the winners among the PaaS development platforms; predicting and backing new killer apps; and, lastly, leveraging infrastructure innovations.

First, cloud data centres will be key. IDC predicts that cloud infrastructure capacity will double over 24 months thanks to Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others’ huge building sprees. We’ve recently seen a rash of data centres opening in Australia, but Gens said he expects the market to eventually consolidate down to six to eight global players. Now is the time, he said, to be assessing cloud IaaS vendors as a lot of the IaaS battles will be concluded in next 36-48 months.

While the mobile battle, and what constitutes a mobile device, is yet to be decided, the number of intelligent edge devices is set to double in the next five years according to IDC, with an explosion of smart gadgets, including wearables. IDC recently said the worldwide market for the ‘internet of things’ (or IoT) solutions will grow to $7.1 trillion in 2020 and CIOs need to identify the possibilities within their industry.

On the PaaS front the story is similar to that of the cloud data centre market. Industry platforms will disrupt a third of the top 20 market leaders in most industries by 2018 with the ‘Amazonning’ of industries. Gens predicted that 80 percent of new cloud apps will be hosted on just six platforms in the near future as they compete for space. The choice of PaaS supplier will be the CIOs next big decision and the deciding factors will be the inclusion of big data and industry vertical data availability. “Developers are going to pick winners of the big data platform players,” he said, “because people follow the apps”.

The next battlefield is in applications where “killer apps” offer a “long tail” of very focused and high-value solutions, said Gens. The creators of these apps are more likely to be industry-experts-cum-citizen-developers who are responding to a gap in their industry’s market. These 7.5 million citizen developers (and growing x3) are the Bill Gates of tomorrow. To leverage this innovation Gens said CIOs should keep an eye on what is happening in the “Hang Out garage communities” for their industry.

And finally, in the infrastructure world, cloud infrastructure is where we will see the richest variety of new computing, storage, and application architectures as cloud-readiness is embedded into every piece of ICT hardware and software.

Based on these trends, the watch words for successful CIOs are scale, consolidation, innovation and value migration. For Gens the next wave is a reverse of the digitisation trend we’ve seen in recent times. The next phase, he predicted, will be “materialisation” where cognitive systems, 3D printing and robotics combine to create physical things about of digital information.