ITBiz | lekasina.com

In 2014, big data will grow bigger, wearable devices will become more abundant, and online retailing will become more prevalent amongst business-to-business.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (www.frost.com), Top 14 Ideas and Innovations for 2014, finds that the trends mentioned above are the top three key global game changers for 2014.

Big data is growing at a rate of 40 percent annually generating a massive pool of data offering valuable insights and opportunity for predictive analytics. This year will see increased activity from businesses in using this big data to offer personalized, customized and intelligent services that are more real-time or proactive, thus making its augmentation the top prediction of 2014.

“Virtualization of data and analytics will become imperative to businesses.” said Frost & Sullivan’s Visionary Innovation Team Leader and Senior Research Analyst Archana Vidyasekar. “Online retail giants, such as Amazon, have already launched interesting services, such as Amazon Kinesis, that analyses data in the real-time to offer customized services.”

Much like the first trend, wearable devices have already started to create a buzz that is only expected to become louder in 2014. Last year saw the launch of wearable smart gadgets, such as smart watches and Google Glass that emulated functions of a smartphone perfectly. While there is skepticism and hype surrounding this market, its potential in regards to new services, such as undisputed monitoring of health, has propelled these gadgets to the forefront of products to watch in the wellness industry. In fact, most of big technology and web companies are actively pursuing this market.

Finally, while e-Commerce has recently grown tremendously through B2C retail, many do not realize that there has been a massive upturn on B2B online retailing in the past few years, contributing more to the e-commerce market than B2C.

“Electronic B2B that was traditionally comprised of conventional Electronic Data Interchange platforms with minimum choice of vendors and a costlier implementation system, is moving to the wider web of the internet toward online platforms that offer more choice, flexibility and price options,” said Vidyasekar.”These online platforms provide instant quotes, thus offering quicker responses and much more agile procurement and supply services.”