Interconnected era
The interconnected era is one of four eras of technological transformation that mark the development of the digital economy.[1] The interconnected era is characterized by the emergence of interdependent business models by which companies forge advantage by collaborating in communities with other companies via secure, reliable, and internetworked connections among many participants.
The interconnected era was enabled by advances in technology that simultaneously connected multiple machines and people to massive amounts of data in real time. Being interconnected within this expanding digital fabric gave businesses an unprecedented ability to collaborate and scale up [2] and led to significant productivity gains. Companies could no longer function as islands unto themselves – they had to function and interact with other platforms, services, and sites in order to cater to the widest possible customer base.[3]
The emergence of cloud computing technology accelerated the growth of the interconnected era by exponentially increasing data mobility and access to computing power by removing IT from the constraints and heavy capital investment associated with physical infrastructure.
Preceding Eras
The interconnected era was preceded by three successive eras of the digital economy.
The Computing Era
Computers – once the exclusive domain of businesses and governments – were adopted in individual households worldwide in the computing era. The IBM PC was launched in 1981, Time magazine called the computer the "Machine of the Year" in 1982, and Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984.[4] But the available connectivity had significant limitations for both business and personal computing. In some cases, data still had to be moved manually from computer to computer.[5]
The Network Era
Floppy disks were replaced by file servers and a succession of networks, including local area networks and networks encircled the globe. Companies pioneered new switching and routing technologies that harkened a new level of connectivity.[6]
The Connected Era
As networks became more common, they expanded their scope beyond regional enclaves and became open thoroughfares that carried data globally. This growth was enabled by data center companies which offered neutral facilities where providers could exchange data traffic and extend their reach. The proliferation of multiple networks to every major market made one-to-one connections between parties around the globe an everyday reality.[7]
The Rise of Business Interdependence
The interconnected era drove the growth of a new level of connectivity that allowed multiple parties across industries, businesses, and locations to connect to each other simultaneously. Technology advanced by cloud computing, mobile, social media, and data center companies spurred the development of business ecosystems that allowed organizations to achieve widespread collaboration, both inside and outside their discrete industries. Boundaries between industries began to blur as they evolved into interconnected ecosystems.[8]
At the same time, products also became smarter and more connected. This exponentially expanded opportunities for new functionality, far greater reliability, much higher product utilization, and capabilities that cut across and transcended traditional product boundaries. Yet the changing nature of products also disrupted value chains, forcing companies to rethink and retool nearly everything they did internally.[9]
The result was a growing interdependence, as business, product, and IT models were increasingly constructed around hundreds of complex tasks divided among dozens of enterprises and service providers in different geographies. Priority was placed on extreme speed, real-time responsiveness, and coordination between parties. Businesses began demanding the ability to mix many best-of-breed cloud services to form the optimal multicloud solutions.[10] Enterprises were challenged to begin linking people, locations, clouds, and data in distributed areas as if they were all local.
Enterprises with traditional IT architectures and networks struggled to meet these growing requirements. These gaps created performance problems including high network latency and bandwidth costs and long provisioning lead times. Access to cloud services could be slow, expensive, and insecure. And the massive amounts of data being generated couldn’t be processed quickly enough to provide useful insight. It was no longer enough to view IT as a transaction enabler.[11] IT became a critical part of corporate strategy as companies worked to increase their capacity for interconnection and the advances in business performance it enabled.
See also
References
- ↑ "http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=716772". External link in
|title=(help) - ↑ http://techtrends.accenture.com/us-en/it-technology-trends-2015.html
- ↑ http://techtrends.accenture.com/us-en/it-technology-trends-2015.html
- ↑ http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?category=cmptr
- ↑ http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?category=cmptr
- ↑ http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?category=net.
- ↑ http://www.equinix.com/resources/analyst-reports/gartner-colocation-network-connectivity/
- ↑ http://techtrends.accenture.com/us-en/it-technology-trends-2015.html
- ↑ https://hbr.org/2014/11/how-smart-connected-products-are-transforming-competition
- ↑ http://www.infoworld.com/article/2611544/hybrid-cloud/why-you-should-care-about-multicloud.html
- ↑ http://www.gartner.com/imagesrv/cio/pdf/cio_agenda_execsum2015.pdf
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