SMAC written entirely to support cloud!

CHENNAI, INDIA: There were some interesting sessions at the recently held Confederation of Indian Industry Connect 2013, a two-day conference and exhibition on 'Towards Scaling New Frontiers in ICT". One of the sessions was on 'Emerging & Showcasing Technologies: SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics & Cloud Technology)'.

Amazon Web services was started seven years ago. It is a platform that serves IT as a service. It started with basic services, and then moved on to content delivery and bulk e-mail. Now, it has over 8,000 customers. Bikram Singh Bedi, head of Amazon Services India, believes that "SMAC has been written entirely to support cloud."

Inmobi is an advertising business, which connects publishers with advertisors. The company's global footprint is over 100 billion and it has over 600 million users. Sharad Agarwal, Head - Technology Platforms for Inmobi, states that "each component of SMAC re-inforces one another and works effectively due to each other."

Unmetric is a company that figures out different modes of communication in the B2B world. Unmetric starts out by identifying a particular company's social status in the market and then uses cloud to reach deeply into the market. After this, they also assist in providing analytics and uses mobility to reach customers. Lakshmanan Narayan mentions that Red Bull, which used Unmetric as a platform, has over 400 billion customers.

Alibaba Group is a privately owned Hangzhou-based family of Internet-based e-commerce businesses that cover business-to-business online marketplaces, retail and payment platforms, shopping search engine and data-centric cloud computing services. It acts as a business-to-business portal to connect Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers.

Its consumer-to-consumer portal Taobao, similar to American eBay, features nearly a billion products and is one of the 20 most-visited websites globally. Khalid Isar, country GM, said that "Alibaba can be defined as a company, which supports SMBs to grow globally."

All of the speakers agreed that SMAC is designed for four purposes: Engaging, delivery, managing and analysis. The ability to innovate is very high with the help of SMAC.

The biggest problem faced while using SMAC is that most people mistake social networks as social media. They also believe that the cost of failure has reduced after using cloud as it gives you a wider range of options for marketing and innovating.

When asked "Which industry segment is best at adopting SMAC?", the speakers replied saying that the brands that rely on customer services or any transactions that can happen on the go can use SMAC to evolve.

The other options can be the banking and airlines sectors (especially, in the US) and also the automobiles industry. SMAC also helps small time businesses to adapt to grow in the marketplaces.