WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

The leader in digital retail, of course, is Amazon. It’s well known how they’ve revolutionized retail (and, more impressively, continue to revolutionize it). What’s less well known is how they’ve done it.

We did some analysis recently to understand how Amazon continuously moves the bar ever higher. In that analysis, we think, are clues for how multichannel retailers can improve their own operations and create the kind of customer experiences that Amazon has made standard across so many industries. Here is a short slideshow of the most intriguing insights we found:

The SaaS software market will increase 25 percent in 2013 to $59 billion, a 25 percent increase. In 2014, the market is expected to total $75 billion. Forrester uses the term “smart computing” to define apps that, for instance, provide direct access to data for decision-making. It also includes data analytics and business intelligence in the category.

The research firm forecasts the smart computing software market to be $41 billion in 2013, increasing to $48 billion in 2014. According to Forrester, these smart-process apps overlap with SaaS products “because the browser-based access model for SaaS products works better for collaboration among internal and external participants than behind-the-firewall deployments.” As a corollary, these smart computing products, like SaaS, are growing far faster than the overall software market.

As we begin a new year, BBC Future has compiled 40 intriguing predictions made by scientists, politicians, journalists, bloggers and other assorted pundits in recent years about the shape of the world from 2013 to 2150. Explore our graphical guide to the advances of the future, from 2013 to 2150.

This article shows how to use an enterprise architecture to specify requirements for public cloud service, using a hybrid software as a service (SaaS) example.

You have a secret that can ruin your life. It’s not a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of characters—maybe six of them if you’re careless, 16 if you’re cautious—that can reveal everything about you.