Disruptive technologies that will make or break your business

Disruptive technologies are going to affect your business and your customers’ business, so it’s essential to anticipate and capitalise on the opportunities they offer.

These technologies have the potential to alter the way people live and work while rearranging value pools.

Business leaders need to understand which technologies will matter to them and prepare accordingly.

“These disruptive technologies are going to erode business models, but if you react correctly, you will be able to make a lot of money. If you don’t, you will be dead,” says Jacques du Toit, Vox Telecom CEO.

“The rate of technology innovation is relentless, and the role we play today is going to be obsolete in 10 years. We need to keep adapting, keeping up with the pace of innovation.”

Here are the top 4 disruptive technologies that will affect your business in the next 10 years:

Mobile internet

Mobile internet is becoming increasingly inexpensive and is no longer a luxury but the way of life for more than one billion people who own smartphones and tablets.

“More than 4 billion users are now connected to the net via smartphones and tablets. In 2004, smartphones didn’t exist and by 2014 1.3 billion people were connected,” says du Toit.

The technology of the mobile Internet is evolving rapidly and has applications across businesses and the public sector.

It is enabling more efficient delivery of many services and creating opportunities to increase workforce productivity.

The Internet of Things

The Internet of Things allows businesses and public-sector organizations to manage assets, optimize performance, and create new business models.

This extends from monitoring the flow of products through a factory to measuring the moisture in a field of crops to tracking the flow of water through utility pipes.

With remote monitoring, the Internet of Things also has great potential to improve the health of patients with chronic illnesses and attack a major cause of rising health-care costs.

Cloud technology

With cloud technology, any computer application or service can be delivered over a network or the Internet, with minimal or no local software or processing power required.

IT resources are made available on an as-needed basis, and when extra capacity is needed it is seamlessly added, without requiring up-front investment in new hardware or programming.

The cloud is enabling the explosive growth of Internet-based services, from search to streaming media to offline storage of personal data.

It is also enabling the background processing capabilities that enable mobile Internet devices to do things like respond to spoken commands to ask for directions.

The cloud can improve the economics of IT for companies and governments, as well as provide greater flexibility and responsiveness.

It can also enable entirely new business models, including all kinds of pay-as-you-go service models.

Big data

Big data will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus.

The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future.

The use of big data will become a key basis of competition and growth for individual firms, and all companies need to take big data seriously.

Data-driven strategies can be leveraged to innovate, compete, and capture value from deep and up-to-real-time information.

Vox Telecom’s view

“These disruptive technologies sit in our space and are already affecting us and our customers directly,” says du Toit. “It is a priority for us to ensure that we can deliver on these four technology priorities.  If we get it right, we will be well positioned for continued future growth.”

Over the last 18 months the Vox Telecom business has evolved, and through strategic acquisitions today boasts a product stack that is made up of more than 80% cloud based solutions and products across communication, infrastructure and applications, all carried across its core network.

In addition, it has created a specialist consulting division that develops custom Microsoft CRM and ERP solutions for driving operational efficiencies.

Backed by best-of-breed technology vendors, guaranteed support and managed services as an option across the entire product and solution stack, ideally positions Vox Telecom to take the complexity out of technology for customers.

Concludes du Toit, “our philosophy is simple.  We want to be a turnkey, integrated technology partner for our customers. We want to manage their technology needs while they focus on growing their business.”