Accenture: Context-based services set to emerge in 2012

Report highlights that availability of contextual data from smartphone, cloud and social media usage will create revenue opportunities

Businesses are now able to derive new revenue streams from context-based services, in which real-world and digital data are reconciled in order to provide new services and value to existing or potential customers.

The trend is one of six highlighted in a new report, Accenture Technology Vision 2012.

Gavin Michael, Accenture's chief technology innovation officer, who spearheaded the report, explained that the trend is already seeing traction within some enterprises: "CIOs and other IT leaders who have started to leverage contextual data to build a deeper understanding of consumer preferences and habits are establishing themselves as strategic players within their companies.

"They are teaming up more effectively with functions such as sales and marketing, and leveraging contextual services to drive new revenue and deliver more value for their businesses."

One example given by Accenture of how context-based services might create new business opportunities is a travel company that scans Twitter accounts in search of mentions about upcoming trips.

It then informs hotels located in the communities where the traveller is headed. The hotel can contact the traveller with discounted rates.

Another trend highlighted in the report is converging data architectures in which the challenge of big data will be not only the rising volume but also the need to develop new data architectures for handling both structured and unstructured information effectively.

Other trends include industrialised data services, which sees data being decoupled from applications and no longer owned by a single business; and social-driven IT , where social media is no longer just a "bolt-on" marketing channel for organisations, but a catalyst that will change the ways customers, employees and partners use technology to interact.

This is in addition to the trends of PaaS-enabled agility, in which PaaS [Platform-as-a-Service] providers will increasingly offer the additional components of reusable business services, integration capabilities and extension capabilities; and orchestrated analytical security, in which companies are more connected than ever, through the web, mobile technologies and partnerships.