Transforming trends: providing the infrastructure for an evolving IT environment.

• Author: Cross, Michael
• Position: Business Guide 2014

There is no doubt that articles on industry trends are popular right now. You cannot pick up a magazine or visit a news website without seeing a "trend" article.

As a global leader in providing connectivity and essential infrastructure solutions for wireless, business enterprise and residential broadband networks, CommScope is no stranger to writing about trends. With demand for wireless and wired bandwidth at an all-time high, CommScope continues to be a fundamental driver of growth in IT networks. As chief information officer, I'm noticing three trends that have to do with the markets we serve --the digitalization of the customer experience, mobility and machine-to-machine communications.

The digitization of the customer experience

The relationship between customers and companies has fundamentally changed from a personal and brick-and-mortar relationship to one that is increasingly digital. This is certainly true in the consumer world and is quickly migrating to the business-to-business world. Customers want to be able to research, configure, order, track and get support for business solutions digitally with consumer-like ease of use.

Mobility

Everyone expects to be able to access the tools and data they need at anytime, anywhere. Whether on the road or at their office, connectivity is transitioning from a luxury to a business necessity. This trend is the cause for more organizations looking into installing a distributed antenna solution (DAS) along with an advanced cabling infrastructure to support wireless access points for WiFi.

Machine-to-machine communications

In addition to improving person-to-person communications, businesses are moving toward making their networks more intelligent. That means we will see increased investments in data centers and intelligent buildings. I believe that companies that take advantage of these trends will be able to differentiate themselves from the competition.

Conclusion

These trends demonstrate the need for increased bandwidth. As the demand increases, CommScope will continue to enable communications for the benefit of businesses and people around in the world.

As you ponder these trends, you must also consider additional issues faced by IT every day. Integrating applications from a single vendor can be challenging and integration between different vendors or between an on-premise application and a cloud application can be even more complicated...