The evolution of the internet of things, and further evolution around things like the wireless registry (#8 here) and bitcoin / namecoin could lead to significant email delivery changes.
It could lead to a place where people are sending email from one recipient straight to another recipient, no longer needing to be organised under a domain's sending and receiving mail servers, therefore the message would travel from sender to recipient directly.
Encryption and security could be more easily implemented on a per message basis. This would have a lot of downstream effects around privacy, spam and marketing in general.
TRP: When IT decision makers look at Internet performance to evaluate their customer loyalty strategy, what should they be paying close attention to?
PH: A great experience is only great as long as it's always available and always fast. A sixty milisecond decrease in speed = 1% drop in sales, according to an Amazon study. Internet performance is about leveraging Internet enabled technologies to enhance end-user experience.
It is important to identify the interaction points within any technology stack whilst considering 4 main areas:
- Understand your customer demographics
- Achieve greater commercial leverage
- Generate operational efficiency
- Guarantee security
TRP: Outsource and gain time or outsource and lose control, there surely needs to be a balance?
PH: Every successful business needs to choose what they are going to focus on being better at than anyone else in the world, and that's where they need to focus their internal time and attention to build as a competency.
Trying to build a competency in everything will result in a competency in nothing. Every business will need to individually decide what it needs to focus on to compete effectively.
TRP: What are the four macro trends driving change on the internet?
PH: The internet of everything – a future that is not only about what and where people connect, but most importantly how.
The shift in expectations of the consumer (private or business), from control and access to automation, from people to 'everything', has experts focussing on how we'll be able to get the right data to the right device at the right time to the right person or machine to be able to make the right decision.
The 24/7 economy – how businesses can overcome the complexity of latency issues. A small delay in Internet performance, makes a huge difference – to businesses and consumers alike. From a business perspective, organisations leverage Internet performance to (1) effectively access and enter new markets and demographics and (2) manage brand protection and governance.
User experience and loyalty – for business, it is all about the customer's online experience, avoiding downtime and creating a faster, more targeted experience than ever before.
The importance of geolocation – there is nothing that ensures speed and reliability like geolocation, guaranteeing optimum performance no matter where in the world the users are currently located. This provides invaluable credibility to your reputation.
