The evolution of technology especially, Cloud, Mobile, and Social at the same time during the last few years has changed the business landscape quite dramatically. Also on the horizon are wearable/ IoT, robotic, and Big Data technologies that are also going to have groundbreaking impact on commerce in the next few years, continually shifting consumer expectations and behaviors. While this will be challenging to deal with for some companies, others will use these to their advantage and speed ahead of the competition.

From Google Glass and Nest Thermostats to several types of Tech Watches and Health Bands, consumer technology is moving at a pace never seen before; but how about the technology to run these companies that design, manufacture, market and sell products to consumers in this ever changing and fast paced environment. Do these companies need to do something different to manage their customers, products, internal workflows and data or keep doing what they have been for the last 20 years?

Savvy businesses of all sizes understand these trends well and are using technology to produce smarter goods, faster, and deliver consistent experience to all stakeholders across all sales channels. Newer and upcoming businesses do have an advantage though of not having the baggage of outdated technology and mindset and are usually ahead in adopting newer technology products versus a majority of larger companies that only want to go with proven age old solutions regardless of the fact that those solutions were proven in a very different environment for a very different type of customer. As businesses work on their technology strategy to deal with the magnitude of this change a few considerations to keep in mind that have transitioned from being important to critical in this new environment-

Use of formal collaboration tools to manage business processes and workflows with extended enterprise including suppliers and customers has become a necessity now since most companies large or small have a global ecosystem. Cloud based collaboration and workflow tools can help in this area. While continuing to evolve, cloud technology has already gained a certain level of maturity and prices have come down significantly, thus the Small and Medium Business (SMB) market is tapping into these tools with unprecedented ability to communicate, collaborate, and innovate. This is huge, as smaller to mid size businesses can now use these low cost technologies to easily source materials globally and make decisions fast, an advantage once held only by larger enterprises with many physical locations.

In order to scale and grow effectively companies also continue to move towards data driven decision making as well as increase their reliance on automation in decision making by use of vast amounts of data that is being collected today. Their success in doing this will be defined by two aspects:
1. Their ability to understand and identify relevant linkages between their data sets within and across structured as well as unstructured data.