Big business bets on real-time data and event-streaming tech

An overwhelming majority of the world’s most successful companies will use real-time intelligence and event-streaming technologies by 2025, according to new research.

The prediction features in International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Future of Intelligence predictions for 2023 and beyond. The report is part of IDC’s FutureScape research and presents information about technologies, markets, and ecosystems that help CIOs better understand future trends and their impacts on the enterprise.

IDC says the research shows that maturity in enterprise intelligence makes a material difference in business outcomes. Top-quartile enterprise intelligence performers are 2.7 times more likely to have experienced strong revenue growth over 2020–2022 and 3.6 times more likely to have accelerated their time to market for new products, services, experiences, and other initiatives.

Improving enterprise intelligence performance will often require concerted investment and action at multiple levels, including data platforms and pipelines, processes and tools to build and deliver analytics and insights, decision-making culture.

Organisations that invest in enterprise intelligence will find that they are more digitally resilient, agile, innovative, and dynamic than their peers, say researchers.

IDC detailed 10 events they predict to occur across areas of enterprise intelligence, including data culture, information synthesis, information delivery and collective learning:

• By 2024, organisations with greater enterprise intelligence will have 5x institutional reaction time, resulting in a persistent first-mover advantage in capitalising on new opportunities.

• By the end of 2025, vigilant C-suite leaders of G2000 will invest 40 per cent more on enterprise and market intelligence, helping them counter the recession and slice through the storms of disruption.

• By the end of 2024, 30 per cent of enterprises using video surveillance technologies will also be using video data analytics to support operational decision making requiring more oversight.

• By 2024, 80 per cent of G2000 companies will increase investment in intelligence about threats/opportunities to local operations posed by external threats such as supply chain disruptions.

• Thirty per cent of G2000 organisations will fail to deliver on their enterprise intelligence goals by 2026 because they have not centred trusted capabilities in their efforts to develop data culture.

• By 2025, real-time intelligence will be leveraged by 90 per cent of G1000 to improve outcomes such as customer experience by using event-streaming technologies.

• By 2027, 66 per cent of large enterprises will make major investments in data control plane technologies that can measure the risk inherent in data and reduce risk through security and screening.

• By the end of 2025, more than 50 per cent of G2000 organisations will face penalties if they do not use AI for the detection and automatic remediation of data due to growing complexity, volatility, and resource scarcity.

• Facing increased demand for enterprise intelligence skills and to meet employee expectations, 70 per cent of G1000 will have formal programs fostering data literacy and upskilling by 2028.

• By 2026, 30 per cent of G1000 companies will extend investments in AI infrastructure to performance-intensive computing to solve the most complex problems using HPC-driven simulations to improve outcomes.

"Enterprise intelligence allows organisations to thrive in all macroeconomic conditions. Predictions in this IDC FutureScape detail key trends that are going to occur in the next one to five years that executives should be aware of as they strive to increase their enterprise intelligence," says Chandana Gopal, Research Director, Future of Intelligence at IDC.