Great Expectations

Last week, in this series about megatrends, I spoke about virtualisation and its application not just in the home, but how it's helping to disrupt industries too. Another reason we're seeing disruption on a large scale right now is because of the rising demand for personalised services and experiences over products.

Expectations are great among consumers, because the on-demand and instant service offerings we currently have are expanding, and will be the norm in the future. Consumers expect flexibility and tailoring to their needs, as well as high-class services and experiences.

For services delivered online, networks critically underpin the customer experience. Education, for example, is a booming online sector, where security of the service is critical. This has spurred the rise of many local data centres such as the Clayton Data Centre, which focuses on delivering maximum security for Australian businesses requiring cloud infrastructure and data services via a trusted network.

Local data centres also need to reduce latency and increase speed. Expectations in e-commerce are already such that a delay of more than two seconds during a transaction is considered unacceptable, leading to increased abandonment of transactions. In e-health applications too, latency in the network could prevent a surgeon from conducting a remote operation.

In the film and television sector, I would say transmission of content via data networks is fully mainstream, as well as being a more flexible parallel to traditional broadcast methods. Seamless delivery of online film and television services is critical to the business model. Users who have a poor experience while watching the latest episode of their favourite drama will quickly turn to a competitor if they can have a more seamless viewing experience. Having high speed, high quality broadband has become 'Game of Thrones critical'.

The rise in 2015 of online content offerings through the likes of Stan and Netflix caused a massive increase of data on Australian networks, with some networks suffering slower speeds due to insufficient traffic backhaul and interconnection.

From these examples we can understand that the 'great expectations' predicted in the trend can come from any audience, user, customer or sector. As the expectations rise, so must the technology that underpins and delivers them.

I hope you've enjoyed reading my series of thoughts over the last few weeks. There's no doubting that massive change has occurred in recent years, and that the pace of change is only going to get quicker. Perhaps the most exciting thing is that we're still at the beginning of what will be a huge tidal change in the way the world runs through technology.

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