Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud accumulatively referred as SMAC happens to be the new model for enterprise IT. While individually each of this new digital technologies has already been invincible part of enterprise IT in varying level, their accumulative power to transform the business model altogether has become the new force.
What is SMAC?
The Social platforms, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud computing represent four closely related technologies that are continually converging, joining forces, overlapping one another and getting lead from one another in offering viable consumer focused solutions for enterprises.
Social technologies: Thanks to social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, Four Square and many others connecting people beyond all geographic, demographic and socio economic boundaries became extremely convenient.
- Social platforms contributed tremendously to the real time collaboration, communication and decision making across the business niches.
- These virtual platforms let people connect, share, discuss and exchange views, insights, rank, rate and validate content and collaborate on tasks.
- This widespread participation on social platforms helps consumers engage more effectively with business models.
Mobile technologies: Convenience and accessibility is the key beneficial aspect of mobile technologies and there should be no surprise that this consumer driven technology quickly took over the business IT as well. Thanks to widely adopted ‘Bring-Your-Own-Device’ principle now mobile devices became integral part of workplace and IT infrastructure.
- The convenience of accessing information, take action and collaborate on them anytime and anywhere made mobile devices invincible.
- Latest location technologies and mobile payment technologies further made these devices irreplaceable in enterprise IT.
- Mobile steadily becoming to be the principal computing device is already at the center of enterprise IT strategy.
Analytics: Analytics is the data processing and utilization field geared for producing relevant insights, trends, models and any inherent aspect that can help decision making and evaluating process.
- Big Data analytics is already here. Analytics is continuing to be the biggest focus area for driving growth and with the latest data tools, solutions and infrastructure businesses can take analytics further to deal with larger data volume from diverse sources.
- Thanks to Internet of Things that corresponds to wide array of gadgets and digital interfaces analytics is no longer limited to specific domains but took an interconnected and interdisciplinary character ready to deliver diverse business insights.
Cloud technologies: Thanks to advanced servers, networking technologies, emergence of mobile web and other factors now accessing data over internet became as easy as accessing them from device drives. This situation gave rise to more dependence on cloud computing. For enterprises cloud computing makes things further easier as one can access business data on a range of devices irrespective of business locations.
- Cloud typically makes things easier for enterprise IT as far as data storage and accessibility is concerned.
- Thanks to cloud convergence of diverse facets and sources of digital data and business specific utilization of Big Data analytics became easier.
- Mobile cloud apps and business driven data cloud further facilitated integration other digital interfaces and technologies with Cloud.
Emergence of SMAC was Inevitable
SMAC though represents four different technologies, as a combined and integrated technology platform it is always greater than the sum its components. For instance, considering SMAC as a automobile it holds together different parts but the mere function of all these parts do not make the vehicle unless they are put together to function in a coherent and mutually complementing manner.
As digitization became a force businesses today are more focused to present themselves on virtual platforms. SMAC stack namely represents this integration of different digital maneuvers without which a business risks having an outdated model. Below are some of the reasons that make SMAC inevitable for any business.
- It unleashes the diversified maneuvers to combine different technologies for a new approach to business.
- It abolishes the so called boundaries in an industrial value chain and facilitates a collaborative business process involving employees, business partners and customers.
- By unleashing the power of accessing information and analytics on all digital fronts it makes businesses more knowledge and insight driven.
SMAC for addressing post-digital customers
Besides the huge boost in enterprise addressing post-digital customers is another big reason for enterprises to integrate these technologies in the business model. The change in customer behavior of post-digital customers is visible in both types of businesses, respectively business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) enterprises.
Access to product and service information prior to any sales on digital platforms now help customers decide over a variety of buying options. Thanks to virtual stores and digital engagement concerning products and services informed buying decision and pre-sales browsing are two vital aspects of buying behavior.
Naturally, addressing this change in buying behavior and tapping the business opportunities is bound to be the focus area for any business. On the other hand data analytics corresponding to customer behavior, demographics, trends and location helps businesses drive better campaigns, create better strategy to tap new customers and tune customer engagement better to retain customers. What SMAC does for business, let us see in some relevant points below:
- Drives sales and growth by monetizing demand
- Makes marketing and retention campaigns more effective.
- Offers helpful insights in acquiring business strategy for product development and services.
- Helps business implement a strategy for addressing customers across the channels.
- Improves customer engagement and feedback.
- Integrates work flow, data processing and work force collaboration within a business model to deliver insights capable to drive growth.
These digital maneuvers are no longer stand alone aspects but rather integral parts of enterprise IT model and corresponding business strategy. A business can only undertake a strategy for growth and competitive edge after embracing this transformation through SMAC.
Author Bio:
Juned Ahmed is a co-founder at IndianAppDevelopers Company which offering Mobile app developers for hire. Juned has been in the digital marketing industry for last 8 years, he is also tech blogger who writes on various blogs on different mobile tech subjects.
