Commentary: IT concepts with staying power

   You might recall American Shipper put out a series of reports five or so years ago with transportation analyst Merge Global on the future of logistics and various transportation markets.
   As is the case with such consultancies, Merge Global has become Logistics Capital & Strategy, though stalwarts like Brian Clancy (a co-founder of Merge Global who often wrote in American Shipper) remain, as does industry vet Ted Prince, most recently with Kansas City Southern.
   Another co-founder of Merge Global is Dave Hoppin, who is now chief executive officer of Diio, a provider of business intelligence solutions and market data for the airline industry.
   I recently had an interesting chat with Hoppin, the type of discussion I feel privileged to engage in with those leading and driving the technology sector. Hoppin and I discussed a number of issues – primarily the IT buzzwords from five years ago that have faded into the mist, and which current buzz-worthy concepts are likely to stand the test of time.
   Among the things we discussed:

• How the demand for RFID has dissipated (most likely because it requires a lot of purpose-built hardware that’s not usable in other applications).
• What Hoppin referred to as “time to value,” which in technology terms means the time it takes between figuring out what systems or services a company requires and when that system or service is actually up and running. Whereas companies often look strictly at return on investment, it’s often this time to value that’s more critical.
• There’s hardly a technology discussion that doesn’t involve cloud, but Hoppin said he’s particularly interested in cloud storage. As companies transition to more cloud-based systems, that will shine a brighter light on where that information is stored, whether it’s hosted by the software provider or the user. Google and Amazon are currently engaged in a price war over cloud storage, selling storage at below cost. Amazon has shown a willingness to bleed money in the short term to win a market and profit in the long term. Who will win, and what will the end result be, especially for cloud-based transportation systems? Watch this space.
• Finally, something I wrote about in 2014, and something Hoppin brought up, is the idea of switching costs. I noted that lower switching costs might lure companies to cloud-based solutions more easily, but that it also meant companies could just as easily switch away from a cloud-based solutions to another easy-to-implement system. Hoppin noted that switching costs can be more problematic than they appear at first, and may be an actual deterrent to cloud-based solution migration.
• As for the topics that seem likely to have staying power, Hoppin is a believer that the Internet of Things is not overblown, but that most companies barely have a handle on what it means to their processes. I suggested that companies address their understanding of the concept through small, digestible projects where they could harness the strength of linking devices in a common network, and comprehend the results.

This commentary was published in the February 2015 issue of American Shipper.