Q&A – Part 2: Dr Kishore Swaminathan, Accenture chief scientist

Swaminathan: I think the next big step change will be platform-as-a-service

In the second part of Computing's interview with Accenture's chief scientist, Dr Kishore Swaminathan, he discusses his views on mobile devices, the problems facing CIOs and social media.

The mobile application and device arena has seen significant changes over the past 12-24 months. What is your view on how this arena will develop?

We still tend to think of the mobile phone as primarily a phone, but I use my phone as a phone less than 10 per cent of the time.

In the past two years these mobile devices and all the related applications have stabilised on a small number of platforms.

There are basically five: BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Mac OS and Android. Behind those platforms, there are lots of third parties developing software – these end up in app stores.

Developing applications for each of these platforms is currently a problem, but standards such as W3C’s HTML5, which should make those mobile applications device-agnostic, will resolve this.

You must talk to a lot of CIOs. What is their biggest bugbear?

About 12 months ago, enterprise concerns were all around reducing cost, but that has been turned on its head in the past three to four months.

Most of my conversations with CIOs now are around how best to innovate. A recession kills weaker players, or they're merged or bought out, and the survivors wonder what they can do to differentiate themselves from the competition.

Take cloud computing, for instance. A year ago the main reason CIOs were considering moving in-house services to the cloud was the cost – it was cheaper.

That's not what CIOs are saying now. The main drivers behind cloud adoption are that it allows them to get to market faster. It also offers more flexibility, and means CIOs can convert capital costs into operational expenditure. Being cheaper is now far less important.

What do you think the next big step change in cloud computing will be?

I think it will be platform-as-a-service (PaaS), such as Microsoft's Azure or Salesforce's customer relationship management (CRM) offerings.

People don't just use the Salesforce software for CRM, they use its whole ecology [PaaS].

Salesforce has a number of third-party applications that mean you can launch, for example, sales campaigns straight from its platform.

This will change the market because in the past companies have had to create software themselves, but now there are vendors that can provide it for multiple companies. There is a market emerging for software such as this.

So I think when Azure matures, there will be all sorts of third-party software for it – software that allows you to integrate your SharePoint portal into Azure services, for example.

That will be much more interesting than just moving data to Amazon's datacentres.

Business analytics systems can deal with firms' local data. What about dealing with datasets dispersed among cloud systems – could you see analytics-as-a-service being offered here?

That's an interesting question, since we recently announced what we call enterprise analytics, which is essentially cloud-based analytics.

Data analysis is a compute-intensive problem, so if you're just running fairly standard reports on your local data once a week, it makes sense to have it in the cloud.

Another type of cloud-based business analytics is sentiment monitoring, which could be beneficial for companies having large, commercially important brands.

Companies can use this type of service to look at all the blog postings, Facebook conversations and Twitter feeds around their products, on an hour-by-hour basis to gauge customer sentiment around a brand.

You could trend that sentiment over years and this would be very useful to those companies. You could think of it as a business radar which would allow companies a brand perception on a much quicker basis than, say, a market survey.

Have these new social media technologies changed the relationship between customer and retailer?

Social media has fundamentally introduced significant discontinuities in how we communicate.

Companies' well-known and important brands are now continually being redefined by consumers. Take customer complaints, for example. Those complaint lines are not ringing any more because customers don't complain to companies any more. They complain to a community – it means you have an army behind you.

So if you have a beef with somebody, post a blog, make a funny video and post it, and you’ll get immediate attention from the company, because they’ll be worried that you’re spoiling their name.