12 Days of PEXmas, Day 12: Future investment is technology-rich

In the year ahead, all categories of technology investment look set to experience growth over last year (see the chart below), perhaps an indication that an improving outlook for the global economy means that companies are starting to loosen the purse-strings on investment.

Interestingly, the technology that has emerged as a frontrunner for investment is big data and analytics technology. Over 30% of process professionals (33.8%) indicated the data analytics and big data technologies were an area of investment in the next 12-18 months.

While big data is somewhat of a woolly term – the software industry uses it to describe data that is of greater variety, volume and velocity than computers were able to effectively process until recently – clearly companies are starting to look more seriously at how data can be integrated andutilized more effectively to aid business operations.

"Today, we can monitor almost anything with embedded sensors that simply send data at unprecedented frequencies," says Rob Speck, Vice President of Global Services at K2. "When we look at that exponential growth you can store in the enterprise, we can see that there's value to having tools that can understand what's going on, perhaps trends, correlations, patterns, that can actually help aid in future decisions."

Adobe’s Devin Rickard says that within his company, data is becoming a much greater part of process excellence projects.

"Business people are increasingly savvy about data and their need to be able to make sense of it," he explains. "With every project that we have going on, a huge piece is how are we going to measure things? Where are we going to get our data from? Are you going to be able to produce for me the reports and information that I need in order to be able to make decisions?"

Find out more about future tech and where you should be investing intelligently at this January’s PEX Week USA in Orlando, Florida. For more information or to find out who will be in attendance, download the agenda below.

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