How did our 2017 predictions fare?

Like every analyst firm RSG makes annual predictions, but uniquely in the industry, we go back each year to evaluate our own prescience. See for example how we did with our 2016 predictions.

So let's review and assess RSG's 2017 predictions.

Digital Marketing 2017 Predictions:

1. MarTech vendors will begin to die off as marketers demand quality over quantity
Nope, never happened.  Jeez, every time we predict industry consolidation it never happens...what does that tell you?

2. On-premise-only installations become nearly obsolete
Totally true.  We've seen no new net on-prem deployments on the MarTech side among our customer base.  Single-tenant deployments of traditional software in the cloud?  Sure.  But in your own datacenter...nope.

3. Enterprises move to de-couple valuable assets from experience silos
This is totally happening and if you're late to this party you're going to experience some real pain in 2019.

4. AI continues to be hyped by vendors, but few buyers have capacity to succeed
Yep.  Few buyers also have the data volumes to achieve significant breakthroughs here, but we won't give up on it and neither should you.

5. Radical new architectures pit marketers against developers

Sort of.  Headless WCM is causing more kerfuffles than it should.  Likewise for cloud-native development models.  But we didn't see an epic MarTech split.

6. Demand for unified customer and prospect API
Totally true.  Rapid rise of packaged CDP platforms is just one manifestation.

Digital Workplace 2017 Predictions:

7. EmTech is a Thing
Oh yes.

Employee Digital Experience Supergraphic
The EmpEx 200 (click to enlarge). Source: RSG

8. O365 App Churn: Microsoft's addition and subtraction causes customer pain
For sure!  But this was an easy one...

9. Haphazard transition to O365 / SP Online leaves SharePoint customers stranded
Mostly true.  Redmond gives lip-service to migration, but it's still mostly greenfield cut-overs.

10. Bots gain wider acceptance in Digital Workplace use cases
Mostly true, but this one was tough to fail..."wider" than what?  Bots are still new and awaiting broader deployment patterns, but hold situational promise.

11. Cloud file sharing becomes a feature rather than a marketplace
Nope.  Box et. al. survive as persistently popular, stand-alone applications with decent reach across major enterprises. 

12. Big vendors deploy Slack look-alikes
Yes, not the least IBM and Microsoft.  Teams in particular is going to become a tough competitor — not because it's better than Slack (it's not!) — but because it's perceived as free. 

Assessment

So by my count we were 8.5 out of 12, or about 71%...a little lower than previous years, but hey, the digital world is moving fast!  You should apply the same co-efficient to RSG's 2018 predictions.

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