How did RSG's 2016 predictions pan out?

As our regular readers know, RSG doesn’t usually indulge in futuristic crystal ball gazing, except as a fun exercise at the end of each year. Tomorrow (Wednesday 04 January), my colleague Jarrod will unveil our 2017 predictions.

Each year, we go back and review how our predictions fared, i.e., how many of those predictions turned out right and how many didn’t? Here are assessments of our previous years’ predictions (2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011).

And now here is my review of our 2016 technology predictions...

RSG's 2016 Predictions

  1. Creative Operations Management Breaks Through
    Yes, definitely. We see more and more vendors integrating with or incorporating tools for creative workflow processes and for streamlining the way creative work is done.
     
  2. Cloud WCM: from PaaS to IaaS
    Yes, again. A majority of tools that we cover in our Web Content & Experience Management report can run readily in traditional IaaS environments (Google, Rackspace, Azure, and Amazon) — the big question for you is what the "P" part of PaaS actually looks like...
     
  3. Wearables Gain Traction
    Yes, but this was easy. Many CIOs and CMOs are giving attention to wearables, especially the mobile oriented ones like Apple Watch. Many vendors, across different marketplaces, offer some support for this category of devices.
     
  4. Mobile-First Finally Arrives
    Yes. Pundits have been talking of this for ages but now there is an increasing appreciation of Mobile-First use cases and vendors are creating solutions for those scenarios.
     
  5. Content Marketing Becomes a Standard Feature
    Another Yes. Many digital marketing platforms integrate with content marketing services (mostly smallish, SaaS based) for adding weight to your content marketing initiatives.
     
  6. Social Monitoring Goes Vertical
    Not really. We do see products with different sweet spots (e.g., monitoring consumer sentiment) but most vendors remain pre-dominantly horizontal in approach.
     
  7. Major DAM Players Flail
    Yet another Yes. (Is this going to be our best year in terms of Yeses?) As we predicted, many traditional, established DAM players continue to lag newer, more nimble players with modern cloud-based architectures. Smaller SaaS vendors on the other hand continue to struggle to meet demands of their bigger customers.  Lots to watch here in 2017.
     
  8. Moment of Truth for Box
    One more Yes. We asked "What does the company want to be when it grows up?”. Box has chosen and it is quite clear it no longer wants to remain a file-sharing and sync service.
     
  9. SharePoint 2016 On-Premise Adoption Lag
    As we said, this was easy to predict too.  With Redmond still deconstructing SharePoint within the Office 365 environment, SharePoint 2016 on-premise adoption has been very slow.
     
  10. Say Hello to the “Chief Digital Workplace Officer”
    Not really. We have seen some enterprises giving credence to the “Chief Digital Workplace Officer” role,  but this is really not that common, yet.
     
  11. SaaS Becomes the Default Model for Social-Collaboration Tech
    Yes again. To be honest, this will play out over multiple years but we find even our larger enterprise subscribers defaulting to cloud-first here.
     
  12. Office 365 User Shock
    Yes and No. Harried administrators struggle to keep up with a rapidly changing roadmap, but most employees still use the platform mostly for creating and sharing office files.

Tallying the Score

Okay, so what’s the final score? It’s 9.5 out of 12 (Yes - 9 times, No - 2, Partial - 1). That’s almost 80%, or slightly better than last year’s 70% accuracy.

If you're an RSG subscriber, let us know if you'd like to understand any of these trends in greater detail or if you'd like some private counsel about any of the marketplaces RSG covers.


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Gil, Partner, Cancentric Solutions Inc.
iStudio Canada Inc.

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