The ability to remotely connect and collect data, coupled with the immediacy, breadth and depth of the insights generated by all that data, will impact healthcare over the next 12-24 months, greatly influencing payers, providers and patients alike, as all three seek better experiences, more proactive treatments and lower costs. Join John Spooner, Senior Analyst for Internet of Things, as he discusses his perspectives from HIMSS18 and beyond, including views on the overall status of healthcare digital transformation and its impact on payers, providers and patients as well as semiconductors, devices, infrastructure, applications and platforms that serve them.

Contextual experiences are driven by changes in user behavior, empowered by technologies such as smartphones, machine learning and the cloud. However, they have as much to do with demographic and lifestyle changes as they do with the technology that enables them. Given that 80% of online purchases in 2018 will be influenced by mobile, and within a decade the average person will have more conversations with bots than with other humans each day, organizations that fail to deliver contextual experiences will be passed over for those that do.

Users, not organizations, will increasingly determine how they consume information, engage with brands and get work done. Today's empowered users can now dictate the terms of their business engagements. According to data from 451 Research's Voice of the Connected User Landscape (VoCUL): 1H 2017 Corporate Mobility and Digital Transformation, 82% of businesses say that machine learning for automated contextual recommendations is important to creating personalized experiences. Growth in data for contextualized experiences, empowered by technologies such as mobile, cloud and machine learning, will create a significant gap between digital leaders and laggards when it comes to using technologies for strategic innovation.

Matt Aslett, Research Director, Data Platforms & Analytics
John Abbott, Founder & Distinguished Analyst

'Intelligence' is the ability to capture, analyze, understand and act on information, including the ability to recognize patterns, comprehend ideas, plan, predict, problem-solve, identify actions and make faster decisions. Traditionally, business intelligence has almost exclusively involved humans analyzing data generated by enterprise applications. But we are now in the midst of a revolution toward 'Pervasive Intelligence,' fueled by self-service analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning, and business process automation tools and techniques – and enabled by the new economics of generating, storing and processing data.

Pervasive Intelligence has the potential to rapidly change the technology product and services landscape. Vendors that are able to translate data into value will survive and thrive. Those that do not will be left behind. We expect Pervasive Intelligence to be a significant catalyst for the rapid evolution of products and services. Those applications and services with the analytics and AI capabilities to translate data into intelligence will succeed, while those without will fall by the wayside. However, incumbent data platforms and analytics vendors hold the best cards due to their established installed customer bases and their substantial cash reserves, enabling them to acquire potential challengers and invest in research and development.

The following is an excerpt of 4Sight, 451 Research's newly-released research framework. In the coming months, we'll be releasing a series of Spotlights on 4Sight and its major themes--Invisible Infrastructure, Pervasive Intelligence, Universal Risk and Contextual Experience.

William Fellows, Founder & Research Vice President, Cloud
John Abbott, Founder & Distinguished Analyst
Al Sadowski, Research Vice President, Voice of the Service Provider

In the course of two decades, the hardware layer of infrastructure has mostly commodified, with the value shifting to software and services; consequently, to the consumers, the actual infrastructure itself – the place where logic is processed and data is stored – is less relevant. As long as it is secure, compliant, reliable, available on demand and cost-effective, they are happy. To the end consumer, the underlying infrastructure is almost entirely invisible. Service providers of all types have to automate service delivery and process – infrastructure is an afterthought at this point – and continually improve their speed and efficiency of reliable, repeatable, profitable services. The cloud era's consumption-based, service-driven, retail model discipline is the engine of transformation.

According to 451 Research's Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud, Hosting and Managed Services, Budgets and Outlook 2017, enterprises cite moving workloads off-premises as the top reason for increasing IT budgets – the clear beneficiary of this transition to hosted applications being hosters and public cloud providers. Every company is becoming a service provider, and software is the new hardware in the digital enterprise. Consequently, service providers will need to raise their software IQs in order to remain relevant.