This week, the eyes of the technology industry are trained on Las Vegas and CES 2013.
The Consumer Electronics Show has grown to be far more than just toys and gadgets. Meanwhile, the increase in BYOD policies in the enterprise has made what happens at CES more important than ever to the plans of enterprise IT.
Sifting through mounds of press releases and product announcements reveals three key areas in which the “consumer” industry is going to be speaking to IT executives in various industries this week.
BYOD systems
A few years ago, computer vendors could pretend that the systems sold to consumers would never see the inside of a corporate network. Today, though, a growing number of individuals buy a personal device with the intent of using it in both business and personal environments. We’re talking about personal computers, tablet devices, and smartphones that not only have the graphics and animation-rendering power needed for gaming but the security and privacy capacity required for easier integration into the enterprise world.
At CES this week, look for devices that come pre-loaded with management hooks to make it easy for “personal toys” to become business platforms during work hours (and beyond). Some will be sold with BYOD as part of the marketing plan, while others are “stealth” business devices. Either way, business and personal uses will get equal billing in many of the products on display this week.
Big-data
It may seem odd to think about big-data in a consumer context. But much of the data flowing into Hadoop and other systems comes from social networking and life-sharing applications that make up a large part of modern consumer electronic life. At CES, there will be a focus on how companies can understand that data in order to improve their social media strategies.
The biggest news, of course, is that it’s getting harder and harder to find a company that doesn’t have a social media strategy. In a few short years, social networking has changed from something that companies were barring from enterprise platforms and work-day time to something that is a core piece of the overall enterprise marketing and customer relationship strategies. Software, utilities, and appliances that help companies gather and analyze social network data will be on display, and even more of each will be talked about during business meetings in hotel suites around the Las Vegas strip.
Personal healthcare
The healthcare industry is in the midst of an electronic revolution that covers many aspects of the profession. One of those aspects is the extent to which individuals can measure their own statistics, analyze the results, and share raw data and analysis with their healthcare providers. CES 2013 will see scores of new products that link various sorts of sensors with personal computers, tablets, and smartphones to make gathering and sharing personal health information easy, fast, and thorough.
Taken together, the products on display this week will add dramatically to the amount of data available for people in different professions to analyze and convert into information for business use. Coping with that huge wave of data is the work of another week.
