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Digital Marketplace Creates Huge Opportunity for IT Vendors

By Sophia Mayengbam

A new digital market has emerged that both expands upon and threatens traditional market, finds a new study by information technology firm IDC. The study reveals that this marketplace, composed of gateways, nodes, and hubs, is growing rapidly due to a confluence of demand, technologies, customers, and changes in how people live their lives.

This new economy threatens the business models for advertising, technology use, and distribution, but at the same time creates significant opportunities for software, services, and hardware vendors.

The advent and the advancement has changed the way businesses are done. The technology has given way to development for other technologies and at the same time ended several traditional businesses.

"The digital marketplace presents a series of paradoxes," said Susan Feldman, a research vice president at IDC and lead author of the study. "It expands our reach from local to global, and yet shrinks the world so that it is more tightly knit. Our old familiar world of places, stores, and neighborhoods is now paralleled by a robust cyber-world that offers similar goods and services. Neither has replaced the other, nor are they likely to. The fact is, we live in both worlds, and the tools and services that make sense of, and connect these two worlds – helping users navigate both their local and their cyber-realities – represent opportunities for those who can identify the gaps and fill them."

The study reports that on a typical day 19 million people go online to find products, and 83 million people report that they have purchased products online at some point.

IDC said Google has an important hand in acting as the catalyst for this new online economy. Like a pebble dropped into a pond, IDC refers to the 'Google Effect' to denote Google's pattern of taking seemingly small steps that create very large reactions. The study claims that Google's ‘genius’ has been for combining existing elements successfully, and then presenting them in a compelling fashion.

Digital marketplace is increasingly being adopted as an integral part for conducting businesses. Feldman said businesses of all sizes now realize that they must understand the digital marketplace, even if their business is only local.

Feldman adds, "They will need the technical infrastructure to support the commerce, communities, networks and supply chains that this marketplace requires."

The growing importance of digital space presents an opportunity for IT vendors of software, hardware, and services need to seize these new opportunities, as well as understand the threats that lurk if they are not prepared for the profound changes that are taking place.

The study, "The Google Effect: How Web 2.0, Long Tail Marketing, Buzz and eCommerce Accelerate the Digital Marketplace" list out the Key opportunities for services vendors:

Running the data centers
Developing network management protocols and tools
Creating services and tools that answer the question, "Is this data fit for this particular purpose, now?"


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