Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud Create Formidable Combo

The adoption of social, mobile, analytics and the cloud, collectively known as SMAC, has been rapidly accelerating across the enterprise, according to the findings of a new survey from IBM of 1,447 decision makers in and out of IT. The report finds that seven out of 10 of these organizations have already embraced SMAC technologies. From a solution provider's perspective, the most compelling thing about the IBM report is that it suggests organizations are going to boost their investments in all these areas. The opportunity for the channel, of course, is to stitch these technologies together in a way that creates IT solutions that are greater than any sum of the proverbial IT parts. Among the companies citing these technologies as critical investments, the most interesting thing from the channel's perspective is how willing they are to look to outside help to deploy such projects. The survey also finds that more advanced organizations are much more willing to look to startup vendors for strategic IT insights. Solution providers clearly need to develop expertise in all these areas. The challenge is to make sure that all those investments wind up complementing each other in as profitable a manner as possible.