"There will be massive shifts in enterprises' demand for technology as they use technology to transform the way they develop products, engage with customers, and run their businesses. The DX economy will require not only technical skills from company's leaders, but also creativity in how to harness the potentials of technology to the benefit of the company," saysMichael Araneta, Associate Vice President, IDC Financial Insights Asia/Pacific & Country Manager, IDC Thailand.
Michael Araneta and IDC Research Thailand's team of technology industry analysts in Thailand also revealed the strategic top predictions that will unfold in 2017 and beyond and make the biggest impact to organizations in the country.
1: Dawn of the DX Economy. By 2020, 30% of the Top 500 Thai enterprises will see the majority of their business depend on their ability to create digitally enhanced products, services, and experiences.
For the past two years, more and more Thai organizations have embarked on digital transformation journeys, using the cloud, analytics, social technologies, and more to create competitive advantage through new offerings, business models, and relationships. But for most Thai enterprises, digital transformation has been at the level of "projects" or "initiatives" or perhaps as big as special business units.
By 2020, DX will shift to an entirely different scale — a macroeconomic scale —as many businesses generate more than half of their business from digitally transformed offerings, operations, and supplier, distribution, and customer networks.
In effect, every (growing) enterprise will become a "digital native" and the Thai government's push toward "Thailand 4.0" will be reshaped in the process.
2: Digital Revenue. By 2019, 25% of IT projects will create new digital services and revenue streams that monetize data.
In the DX era, information transformation is one of the key factors for success. Information transformation is the focused approach to extracting and developing the value and utility of information relative to customers, markets, transactions, services, products, physical assets, and business experiences. Data becomes a true digital capital. The monetization of data will drive the need for an enterprise-wide information architecture and maturity in analytics.
Enterprises will have to manage information and data as value-adding assets and CIOs must create a corporate strategy for productizing information and data based on identified customer needs and opportunities. New information architecture allowing real-time data analysis and market intelligence as well as data mining skills will be required to fully realize digital revenue.
3: Digitalized Support. By 2018, 60% of customer support interactions will be digitalized and occur in online communities.
Customer support and service has become a part of 'brand experience' rather than just a service. With an increasing proportion of the Thai population, reaching 40 million in 2016, actively using social media, IDC expects more organizations to interact with customers through social and online communities.
Online customer support help solve customer problems but it also improves brand image. Additionally, a successful community will create brand champions or advocates and will not only recommend the product or the service to customers but will help solve customer problems on behalf of the brand. This will make the theme of customer reciprocity strong moving forward. Also in the near future, more organizations will use IT to integrate existing customer services and support systems like integrating pre-built connectors, mining the community for insight to customers' behavior, and proactively solve any emerging issues.
4: Immersive Interfaces Gaining Traction. In 2018, 30% of consumer-facing Top 100 Thai enterprises will experiment with AR/VR as part of their marketing efforts.
Interfaces are an essential gateway to customer engagement, and currently evolving faster than many have anticipated. Over the next three to four years — through augmented and virtual reality and advances in integrating all senses with the digital world (notably voice) — Thailand will see more of the digital world interfaced with the real world, people immersed into the digital world, and greatly intensified individual engagement in the DX economy.
By 2020, the "coolest" mobile and web experiences of today will seem very boring. Consequently, marketers around the country will have to be more innovative and leverage AR/VR content to find new means to engage with customers.
5: Industry Growth. In 2017, connected vehicles, insurance telematics, personal wellness, and smart buildings will be the four most prevalent IoT use cases across Thailand, accounting for THB7 billion in spending.
IDC forecasts that the Thailand IoT investment will reach THB7 billion in 2017 with various investment trends, attitude, and use case adoption that will be strongly driven by different business structures and scenarios, regulation, and innovation levels.
The connected vehicles use case will take center stage as heralded by innovation from a concentration of players from specific sectors namely automotive manufacturing, IT players, and utilities. Insurance telematics will continue its growth, slowly becoming the new normal for players in the sector. Personal wellness will be an emerging use case in the coming years, with devices that will enhance their connectivity and analytics features to the next level.
Finally, smart buildings will capture a great level of investments in Thailand - boosted by pending legislation that favor the adoption and deployment of supporting technologies.
6: Connected Vehicle. By 2019, 25% of model year vehicles will report their own health, request service calls, identify design improvements, and validate warranty claims.
Vehicles have had the ability to provide information about their health through telematics to varying degrees for some time, but the increasing use of sensors and telematics is enabling a new level of capability for connected vehicles. Soon, the innovation around diagnosing problems in a vehicle's mechanical or electrical systems will shift from historic views to real-time insight that can combine with machine learning to provide "next best action" directions. Automotive OEMs offer versions of this today that result in a customer care agent calling the driver to schedule the visit. The ability of the vehicle to do that itself is around the corner.
The rise of 3rd Platform technologies (mobility, cloud and big data analytic), as well as innovation accelerators like IoT and cognitive systems have all contributed to making autonomic features in a connected vehicle possible and identifying problems predictively.
7: Patient Engagement. In 2017, patient engagement across the life science/healthcare ecosystem will jump from passive to active.
Access to smartphones and tablets has become commonplace in Thailand – with Thailand reaching 73% penetration by 2017. The life science and healthcare industries have recognized this foundational change in the way that consumers, through apps, interact with their environment and seek to extend consumer engagement into their health engagement.
Increased patient engagement promises to improve medical outcomes, increase patient satisfaction, shorten the time needed to bring new drugs to market, and reduce costs. Working with required regulatory boundaries, the life science and healthcare industries will leverage social engagement best practices to advance specific patient engagement initiatives, with the goal of developing a fuller relationship with their patients and transition the patient from a clinical trial participant or drug consumer to an active key stakeholder impacting all facets of the industry.
8: Multi-cloud. More than 55% of enterprise IT organizations will commit to multi-cloud architectures by 2020, driving up the rate and pace of change in IT organizations.
Thai enterprises are migrating from traditional IT to cloud platforms, which has been commonly ranked as the most important technology gaining pace across Thailand. The deployment of cloud technology has already impacted Thai businesses not only in terms of cost benefits but also in operational efficiency, quick deployment of functionalities, and scalability.
Leading enterprise IT organizations have shown strong intentions of moving on-premises infrastructure to off-premises and have already started to implement a consolidation of multiple cloud services toward a multi-cloud architecture.
9: Pay TV Overhaul. In 2018, Over-the-Top linear TV subscriber growth will drive traditional pay TV overhaul via cloud migration.
2017 will be a pivotal year for video infrastructure and enabling technology solutions. IDC expects incumbent pay TV providers to compete more aggressively with the evolution of TV Everywhere multiscreen video applications and to continue to execute on multiscreen strategies not only with TV Everywhere extensions of traditional services but also by launching new OTT-only services. This will eventually drive an industry-wide migration to the cloud.
This cloud-centric approach to video services requires solutions capable of handling live and linear OTT video distribution along with a host of other micro-services built on a modular, cloud-based platform. Pay TV service providers will need technology partners that offer a road map to where service evolution isgoing rather than simply solutions that support today's video offerings.
10: Cognitive Cybersecurity. By 2019, more than 30% of enterprise cybersecurity environments in Thailand will use cognitive/AI technologies to assist humans in dealing with the vastly increasing scale and complexity of cyber threats.
Cybersecurity has long been a "cat-and-mouse game" of bad actors creating new attack methodologies and security professionals subsequently creating measures to defeat such attacks.
In a connected world with new architectures such as cloud, a growing number of endpoints interacting with networks, including BYOD and IoT devices, protecting the networks where data resides can be more complex than ever.
Since cybersecurity is an analytics-heavy discipline, the industry will look into advanced analytics and cognitive for analysis of threat behaviors. Cognitive technologies in particular will allow the build-up of information bases that can be mined and analyzed resulting in automated cybersecurity that can learn and predict the threats and respond with appropriated measures.
In closing, IDC predicts that the 4th platform is already on the horizon. In fact, by 2020, one-third of health/life science and consumer product companies will begin to develop the first wave of products and services tightly integrating 3rd platform with the human body. Moreover, "Augmented Humanity" offerings are expected to mainstream in the mid-2020s.