Cloud Expo 2015: How the '3rd Platform' is set to disrupt industry
The rise of the "3rd platform" is set to cause huge disruption across a wide variety of industry sectors, according to the opening talk at the second day of this year’s Cloud Expo event in London.
Bernard Golden vice president of strategy at ActiveState Software, claimed that the growth of the 3rd platform is another example that the "pace of change is accelerating remorselessly".
The 3rd platform is driven by the cloud and promises anytime and anywhere access to applications. It is also viewed as a confluence of social activity, mobility, cloud computing and big data. According to IDC, by 2018 a third of market share leaders in most industries will be "significantly disrupted" by competitors using the 3rd platform.
Golden cited Uber as an example of a relatively new business that has completely unsettled the traditional practices of its industry. For example, in San Francisco (one of Uber’s hotbeds of popularity) taxi trips have fallen by 65 percent over the last 15 months, and yet Uber’s revenue has grown to three times that of the taxi industry.
During his talk, Golden indicated that once companies were aware of the 3rd platform and the impact that it will certainly have, they then need to know how to embrace it themselves. Primarily, he highlighted three steps that businesses must follow in order to prepare themselves for the oncoming wave of technological change.
Firstly, they must improve their agility, bringing apps to market quicker, experimenting more and enabling IoT support. They must also embrace technological innovation, including polyglot programming. Finally, infrastructure choice is critical, with a lightweight, hybrid cloud offering the most flexible solution.
Golden emphasized that businesses cannot afford to stand still when considering the growth of the 3rd platform. He pointed to BlackBerry as an organization that struggled to keep pace with new technologies -- 10 years ago they dominated the smartphone market, but now are simply an "afterthought".
Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Net Communities Ltd Publication. All rights reserved.