Your car is parked in that super expensive parking garage. It’s late and the sun is going down. The parking garage across the street, analyzing sensor data on the sunlight, and calculating the capacity of its structure, automatically issues a coupon to all devices within its field. The coupon is for lower hourly rates to attract new customers. Your fully wired car receives the rate drop alert, compares the cost to move vs. stay, selects which, and relocates itself (driver free) to the new lot. When it gets there, it texts you at your office with coordinates of its new location, and details the cost saving for switching locations. Driverless cars. M2M (machine-to-machine) communication. Automated decision-making. The future is now, Gartner tells its CIO and CTO audience. But to truly engage in that future tech and non tech firms need to become more agile and partner. They need to prepare to grab hold of a software whirlwind. That whirlwind just so happens to be the sweet spot of Belatrix Software – helping companies today build the software to enable the future of technology.

Gartner refers to this evolution as the Nexus of Forces (Social-Mobile-Information-Cloud) and says that these are some of the themes that will become increasingly important:

• Consumerization – the consumer is highly sophisticated and demands a constantly superior technological experience or overall higher value. This is putting pressure on all business (tech and non tech) to constantly innovate to keep their existing customers loyal, and win new customers with features and functionality that’s better than other products.
• Gamification – Game theory is becoming mainstream. Companies are creating experiences that support their product. These experiences are designed to change behaviors, develop skills, or innovate. For example, Nike has created the Nike+, a community of 11+ Million users that have collective fueled more than 44 million marathons. The community helps members track their progress, receive rewards, and share that with friends through social channels. Khan Academy is using this strategy to revolutionize online learning. Gartner says that increasing companies will be looking to gamification engage and motivate people (customers, employees, community)? What are the steps in designing a gamified experience?
• BYOD – The pervasiveness of mobile combined with employee interest in using their equipment at work has spurred the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) discussion. Employees are asking their enterprises to support multiple devices vs. simply one single Corporate standard. This is increasing complexity and triggering the need for secure data mechanisms, data storage, etc. For example, Cloud is also becoming part of this, as employees look to storing corporate data in the Cloud vs. on their personal devices.