SVForum Panelist Jasmin Young of PwC discusses the fast growth of SMAC at a breakfast event in Palo Alto on Tuesday.
My favorite IT acronym now is SMAC.
SMAC stands for social, mobile, analytics, and cloud computing. It’s an area of IT growing at a phenomenal rate according to the April 23rd SVForum “Cloudy with a Chance of . . .” Panelist Jasmin Young, director of PwC’s Cloud Center of Excellence.
She quoted a 2013 IDC figure when she said SMAC is a $2.1 trillion dollar market expected to increase to $5 trillion not too long from now.
Other panelists included Serial Entrepreneur Rajan Raghaven Founder of the The Fabric, which is his sixth company, and VCs Arif Janmohamed from Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Peter Lee of Bessemer Venture Partners.
The latter two companies manage several billion dollars in funds. The companies they all have backed are an impressive who’s who list of tech firms from Netezza which was acquired by IBM, WebEx which was bought by Cisco and Fusion I/O, just to name a few.
By the way, SVForum is a non-profit organization based in the Silicon Valley that fosters innovation and community among the emerging technology community. Many start-ups, investors and IT executives participate in its many weekly panels, events and mixers. Law firm Pillsbury hosted the event at its Palo Alto office.
Here are some of the more memorable comments from panelists:
>Jasmin Young, PwC:
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Fifty-one percent of CEOs say their priority is to grow the customer base. They also want to create a profitable business, transform operations and create the new IT platform.
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New technologies are adopted because of how well they work, not how innovative they are.
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The CIO is not the chief information officer any more. She’s now the the chief innovation officer.
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Moving IT to the cloud means faster agility.
>Rajan Raghaven, The Fabric — https://svforum.org/Rajan-Raghavan
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Cloud adoption is real. Many organizations are moving all of their IT to the cloud.
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667 exabytes of data is flowing over the internet this year. Big data is growing at 59 percent per year.
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There are huge infrastructure related issues related to moving to the cloud. A huge transformation is taking place.
>Arif Janmohamed, Lightspeed Venture Partners — http://lsvp.com/
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The move to cloud computing has produced big opportunities in big data, networking, software as a service and mobile.
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It’s about the unboxing of the data center.
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A long time ago, people moved their money from under their mattresses to banks. Banks then became centers of excellence for security. Now companies are moving their data to the cloud. Cloud centers must be like banks. They also must become centers of excellence for security.
>Peter Lee, Bessemer Venture Partners — http://www.bvp.com/
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Eighteen months ago, companies said, “Let’s design with cloud first in mind.” Now it’s, “I’m a cloud-only shop.”
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Now it’s how to manage apps across devices and how to maintain governance policies.
Final notes:
IBM was not on the panel but its Cloud Services VP Ric Telford discusses SMAC trends in the “Thoughts on Cloud” blog, so if you are as interested in this area as I am, you might want to check out his posts once in a while.
According to the latest IBM earnings report, Big Blue’s cloud business has grown at a nice rate. Here’s the URL for the post that mentions SMAC:
http://thoughtsoncloud.com/index.php/2013/04/the-space-between-where-is-the-real-value-in-smac/
To keep on top of emerging technology trends, follow @SVForum and @FromMichelle on Twitter.
Disclosure: I own IBM stock.
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––––––––––– MMC ––––––––––––– Michelle McIntyre Communications 