Don’t expect consumers to be the driving force behind most major tech trends in 2015.
That’s the main message Duncan Stewart wants businesses to take into the new year.
Speaking at a conference in Vancouver on January 27, Deloitte Canada’s director of tech, media and telecom research pointed to a consistent theme he’s come across when researching wearable devices, drones, 3D printers and the Internet of Things (IoT).
“Zero interest in the consumer level, enormous interest from the enterprise,” Stewart said to a crowd of about 500 people at the Deloitte 360 conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre, where he spent more than an hour making technology predictions for 2015.
He pointed to one of Deloitte’s missteps last year, when it estimated four million wearables would be sold. The company now puts the tally closer to 100,000.
Stewart said commercial interest in wearable tech is “off the charts” for security, medical, and oil and gas companies, but most fashion-conscious consumers “don’t want to wear something on their face.”
While Vancouver-based Recon Instruments is developing wearables for niche consumer markets – snowboarders and cyclists who wish to view real-time performance metrics through goggles – other B.C. companies such as Vandrico and CommandWear Systems have focused on enterprise applications.
CommandWear CEO Mike Morrow, whose company has developed smartwatch software providing real-time GPS tracking for emergency responders, said he also believes 2015 will be the year for wearables in the enterprise market.
“The main players are still focused on the consumer market,” he told Business in Vancouver. “As soon as they start to see groups like ourselves bring [wearables] into the enterprise … and they see the very large market potential and the fact that they can get a leg up and differentiate from the consumer devices, I think that’s when you’ll see some new models coming out there that are tailor-made to specific vertical markets.”
Other technologies such as drones, 3D printing and IoT, which are often trumpeted for their consumer appeal, likely face similar market forces, according to Stewart.
But he singled out near field communication (NFC) as one technology likely to break through to consumers in a big way by fall 2015.
NFC-enabled smartphones use radio communication to allow consumers to tap their devices against a point-of-sale terminal and subtract payments from their accounts.
A January study from Deloitte and Ipsos Reid forecast 5% of the world’s 600 million NFC-equipped phones would be used to make an in-store payment in 2015 compared with the 0.5% of 450 million NFC-equipped phones that did so in 2014.
“After nearly a decade of false starts on mobile payments, this year is the first year it starts growing to the tens of millions,” Stewart said.
“In Canada, in the U.K., in the U.S., people who’ve gotten used to tapping with their credit card will tap with their phone.”
Speaking at another panel tackling upcoming trends in cloud computing, Deloitte Canada’s technology industry leader for B.C., Kari Lockhart, said adoption of cloud computing would make a major leap this year.
Instead of maintaining a computer system on-site, the cloud allows for third parties to host computer services externally, and companies can in turn access the system securely over the Internet.
That makes the cloud a faster, cheaper and more scalable option for businesses, according to Lockhart. A growing perception that it can be just as secure as an on-site system is also ramping up interest in the cloud.
“Vancouver’s a little bit of a hotbed across Canada for moving to the cloud,” she said. “We are a very strong mid-market economy. We don’t have huge, billion-dollar headquarters … and the solutions that are coming out and that we’re hearing about, really in the last three years, are … aimed at that market.”
Deloitte Canada advisory partner Mike Goodfellow, who presented with Lockhart, noted cloud providers are also engaged in a price war, which is sure to boost adoption rates among companies.
