Social media, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) convergence turned out to be one of the most impactful trends for both consumer and enterprises across industry verticals. SMAC encourages an organization to build and deploy integrated solutions as opposed to the traditional approach of implementing solutions separately.
Solutions market for SMAC has been predicted to generate significant revenue through 2020 holding 80% of total enterprise IT investment. Individually, mobile applications will dominate a significant share of the SMAC market. SMAC allows internal and external customers to interact with enterprise and to become more informed decision maker. New business models such as analytics and cloud-based services, that are part of SMAC is helping the Indian software industry to grow exponentially.
The SMAC convergence
SMAC forms a symbiotic relationship between Social media, mobile, analytics, and cloud. The four elements are as follows:
Social media: This technology helps in marketing products and services, simultaneously collecting a social trail of data about user’s perceived value of products and services. Social networks can be easily integrated across any platform, and can be used for both mobile and traditional web sites and applications.
Mobile: This set of technologies allow users to connect to social networks from anywhere at any time. It helps the user to provide social feedback more frequently increasing the volume of their data trail. Besides, it also provides a significant data trail from a machine-to-machine perspective.
Analytics: It involves combining social data with other data sources, enabling improved business decision making. These decisions affect the way products and services are marketed.
Cloud: The infrastructure for cloud provides efficient and elastic computing power to enable social media functionality, mobile apps and websites, Big Data and Big Analytics and has brought enterprises and SMEs on a similar level playing field.
SMAC impact for India
SMAC is the tool for organizations to see maximum returns on their marketing investments and can be approached in two ways:
SMAC for Enterprises: Enterprise communications today are increasingly powered by social media, mobile connectivity, layers of analytics, and network of cloud computing. Companies employ SMAC driven marketing plans to not only reduce expenses, but also save resources. Moreover, the utilization of analytical tools makes it easier for enterprises to measure returns from each campaign. The growth realized as a result of leveraging SMAC, not only creates better market scenario, but also leads to better entrepreneurial initiatives.
SMAC for Professionals: Besides streamlining industrial processes, SMAC has also bloomed into a landscape serving as a career opportunity for millions of professionals. The number of opportunities are in abundance, however, there is a big shortage of SMAC skilled professionals to meet future demands. Universities and institutes are gearing up to meet the demand by introducing specialized programs in SMAC.
Leading a SMAC-driven strategy
Adopting and implementing a SMAC-driven strategy can be a taxing challenge. Organizations are increasingly undertaking initiatives to explore one or more of the SMAC disruptors, however, most of these efforts are siloed. Thus, implementing a fully integrated SMAC solution can be challenging, that could result in delayed investment returns. Let’s look at the systematic approach that one can use to build a SMAC infrastructure:
- It’s important to define business objectives, assess the current state, and identify a realistic set of initiatives to start
- Enterprises must define manageable discovery projects to build up capabilities with each of the SMAC forces
- It’s advisable to take an architecture-focused approach that leverages modern best practices to both isolate and integrate SMAC technologies
- Businesses must build on those early successes to generate momentum and show business value at every step
The building block approach to SMAC
Convergence between the four doesn’t necessarily complement business processes all the times, particularly outside of a consumer-facing context. However, some projects are better off on the desktop than on a mobile platform, and not every initiative needs to have a social element. Moreover, various technologies that make up SMAC have matured at different rates. The issue organizations face today when it comes to leveraging SMAC is the fact that the “ecosystem” continues to exist largely as a set of disparate technologies.
It’s easier to identify the technologies that will help a project succeed on a case-by-case basis by, relying on a building block approach. The approach entails picking and choosing elements that can be combined into a cohesive architecture that supports the business’s overall goals. This allows enterprises to take takes a portfolio approach, picking and choosing the most relevant to meet a business need. Companies not only become more agile as a result, but also development incurs less expenses.
Looking into the Future
Emerging technologies can be both transformative and disruptive, depending on what enterprises want to achieve. Companies need to figure out how any component of SMAC, or an emerging tech can meet an organizational goal or revamp a current business process.
SMAC also supports growth of corporates and the growth of SMEs, besides boosting implicating business growth. The domain also provides job opportunities to millions of professionals. In India, a fresher can get a package upto INR 7 to 8 lakhs per annum. And those with a fair amount of experience can expect remuneration not less than INR 10 lakhs per annum. A
