With health care expenditures in the United States totaling $3.5 trillion, or nearly $11,000 per person, telemedicine continues to be a source of hope for the industry. By enabling physicians to examine patients remotely, virtual medicine platforms are increasingly viewed by practitioners and insurers as a way to bend the cost curve, and according to Global Market Insights, the telemedicine market isn’t going anywhere. Rather, it’s expected to reach $130.5 billion by 2025.

Some are currently seeing the same potential when it comes to remote clinical trials. A 2018 study by Johns Hopkins University found the average cost of a new drug trial was $19 million but could be many times higher for certain medicines. Lessening the need for in-person follow-ups could help reduce those outlays.

Electronically assisted trials have another potential upside too. They make it more likely for patients to stay in the program, thus reducing the time needed to evaluate new drugs. Additionally, participants don’t have to travel as often, they can receive reminders about when to take medications, and they can get instant support if they suffer adverse effects.

One of the companies betting on this new approach is Scottsdale, Arizona, United States–based VirTrial. In 2018, the firm introduced a platform that allows for audio and video calls between the research team—comprised of clinical research coordinators (CRCs), principal investigators (PIs), and physicians—and the trial participants. The program also supports e-mail and text messaging, enabling the CRCs to send reminders about drug usage, as well as supporting materials.

The idea came to VirTrial CEO Mark Hanley when he was serving on the board of a telehealth company and realized the same technology could be tweaked to support the clinical trial process. 

“The clinical research industry is in a state of growth and evolution,” says Hanley. “Most research professionals agree the recruitment and engagement process needs to change in order to increase the percentage of successful trial outcomes and to speed the introduction of new medications to market.”

The pioneering patient management program of VirTrial is already garnering a lot of attention, both inside and outside the pharmaceutical industry. It recently snagged three Gold Stevie® Awards in the Health & Pharmaceuticals category (Service, Cloud Application/Service, and Healthcare Technology Solution). In what turned out to be a busy night at the 17th Annual American Business Awards®, the company also took home the People’s Choice Stevie® Award for Health & Pharmaceuticals.

The End of Inpatient Visits?

For Hanley, virtual platforms allow research sites to offer better patient engagement and higher retention rates throughout the clinical trial.

“Continual in-person visits to a research site can be difficult for patients, and those patients often can’t continue through the course of an entire trial because of the commitment required,” he says. “By offering virtual trials and enabling patients to comply with the required schedule via video from their homes or workplaces, it makes it much easier for them to complete the trial, thus reducing delays in the study.”

Unlike some remote medicine platforms that have entered the market, however, VirTrial doesn’t see remote capabilities as completely replacing in-person visits. Hanley says his company’s goal is to handle about 25 percent to 40 percent of visits, with the rest being performed face to face at clinical research sites.

“Having firsthand experience with more than ten thousand trials, the management team at VirTrial strongly believes in the intrinsic value of direct human interaction and advocates that in-person visits are necessary in certain cases,” says Hanley.

The company asserts that, practically speaking, less than 1 percent of trials could be done exclusively through virtual follow-ups. Therefore, VirTrial is positioning itself as a more realistic solution when it comes to operating a large-scale clinical trial.

Whether the pharmaceutical industry embraces this hybrid model is only one of the company’s hurdles going forward, though. VirTrial is also trying to stay ahead of the curve from a technological standpoint so research organizations can see the value of its solution over that of competitors.

VirTrial is currently working to develop functionality into its platform that allows for integration with Fitbit bands, Apple Watches, and other smart devices that can track health-related information, such as sleep patterns and cardiac function. No matter how much data those wearables can capture, though, Hanley sees them as supporting, rather than replacing, in-person visits.

“The evolution of clinical trials must incorporate technology to reduce patient burden and to increase site efficiencies, and it must also continue to leverage the value of direct human-to-human connections,” he says.

VirTrial recently won three Gold Stevie Awards in the New Product & Service Categories—one for Health & Pharmaceuticals - Service; one for Cloud Application/Service - Business Technology; and one for Healthcare Technology Solution - Business Technology—in The 17th annual American Business Awards®. They also won a People's Choice Stevie Award for Favorite New Products for Healthcare or Pharmaceutical Product or Service.

Interested in winning a Stevie Award in 2020?

Steady job gains and a slowly declining unemployment rate are good news for American workers across a range of industries. However, for employers—especially those trying to fill positions in high-demand fields—the shrinking labor pool is making it tougher than ever to find qualified candidates.

Tech companies, in particular, are feeling the talent crunch. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for information-based jobs hit a paltry 2.7 percent in June, compared to 3.8 percent for the entire economy.

What happens when tech companies try to expand their workforces when most professionals are already employed? Often, recruiters turn to one of the newer tools in the field of talent acquisition: big data.

With most prospects already placed in jobs, headhunters are increasingly turning their attention to passive candidates—those who aren’t necessarily looking for new gigs. After a decade-long economic expansion, many job listings are no longer generating thick stacks of résumés.

For a lot of tech recruiters, the solution is to scour everything from social media platforms to software development sites looking for individuals with the right skill sets. According to one industry survey, more than 40 percent of companies are now using big data to identify candidates. Some are even going a step further, using the predictive capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) to screen for new prospects in far less time than a human could.

Are Human Recruiters Here to Stay?

That shift, however, begs a question. Will technology replace the human component when it comes to looking for talent in high-demand fields? While some recruiters see AI as a threat, the majority view big data and AI as tools that assist rather than replace recruiters. For example, a survey last year by the website Dice found 55 percent of recruiters believe automating more time-consuming tasks is to their benefit.

Among the firms espousing this hybrid approach is New York City, New York, U.S.–based Andiamo, which provides technology and sales staffing to companies in the United States and Canada. Alongside its recruitment team, the company employs a group of data analysts to mine vast amounts of data from sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, and Stack Overflow to understand the talent pool and to reach out to the professionals who represent the best fit for its clients.

With a staff of 70, Andiamo helps fill contract and permanent job openings for developers, engineers, designers, architects, and project managers with experience working on innovative technologies. Andiamo won a Gold StevieⓇ Award for Best House Organ (for a General Audience) at The 2019 American Business Awards®.

By using software to sort through vast amounts of data at the front end of the candidate search, Andiamo claims it’s able to provide clients—including big names like Amazon, Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs, TripAdvisor, and Mastercard—with the top 2 percent of the available candidates. By using research and analytics, it’s able to speed up the recruitment process as well; Andiamo notes its average submission-to-hire time frame is only 14 days.

Technology has its limitations, though. Steps like understanding the client’s needs and vetting candidates to see why they want a new job remain vital components in the process—and they're the ones that still require a human element. Andiamo believes its ability to use the best of both worlds will only help expand its market share as recruiters jostle for tech clients.

“As the tech market grows, recruiting agencies constantly battle for limited space and attention among top firms and start-ups,” says Brian Schuppel, the company’s head of marketing. “In order to stay ahead of the curve, it’s up to us to continue to deliver a rock-star product along with intellectual, statistical content that is relevant, useful, and digestible.”

With the economy continuing to add jobs, Schuppel sees the competition for talent getting even hotter in the near future.

“In the next few years, we expect the tech market to continue to be aggressively competitive,” he says. “We expect top tech firms and start-ups to keep trying to attract and retain the nation’s most elite technologists and the most sought-after tech stacks to overcome their rivals and to lead the market.”

Andiamo recently won two Gold Stevie Awards in the Publication awards category—one for the Best House Organ and one for Best White Paper or Research Report in the Business Services industry—in The 17th annual American Business Awards®.

Interested in winning a Stevie Award in 2020?

Walk through virtually any major city in the United States, and you’ll likely find coworking spaces. In these environments, budding entrepreneurs are not only able to work but to bounce their ideas off like-minded professionals.

When young business leaders enter any of eight U.S.-based OnePiece Work locations, however, they find more than just physical spaces for collaboration. They also get access to an array of resources that help them plug in to some of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies.

At OnePiece, members attend speaking events with global business leaders, as well as tap in to a network of partner companies in Asia and Europe, getting help with everything from business development and market research to recruiting and product localization.

“We’re a truly cross-border coworking platform, and we held over 100 events last year with lots of investors, Fortune 500 companies, academic leaders, and entrepreneurs from across the globe,” says Yue Xiong, the marketing director at OnePiece.

Launched in 2017, OnePiece has hosted more than 200 multicultural events with over 30,000 international visitors, including representatives from giants like Alibaba, Mitsubishi, Seiko, Cheetah Mobile, and Samsung. It has also brought in several high-profile leaders in the public sector, such as Hirofumi Yoshimura, the governor of Osaka, Japan, and representatives from the United Nations.

“Our mission is to provide the best support to the next generation of start-ups with our cross-border advantages,” says Xiong.

“We Accept and Respect Differences”

In 2016, Vickey Li, a young commercial real estate developer, opened the first OnePiece Work location in San Jose, California, United States. The space was intended as a boutique coworking area, and the hope was to provide a friendly environment to business customers.

However, when Li met Wei Guo, a Forbes 30 under 30 investor who has supported more than 300 companies to date, the venture took a sharper focus on the technology industry. The partners soon moved OnePiece headquarters to the heart of the tech world, San Francisco, California, United States.

In just three years, OnePiece, the 2019 Gold StevieⓇ Award winner for “Entrepreneur of the Year” in the real estate category, expanded into seven more tech markets on the U.S. Pacific Coast. It plans to open its first Chinese-based workspace in Shenzhen. Those locations house nearly 250 companies from over 30 industries, including artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, consumer goods, fintech, education, social networking, and gaming.

From the beginning, the OnePiece founders—each backed by significant international business experience—made international growth a key point of differentiation from other tech incubators.

“We trust our members’ crazy ideas and help them expand to broader markets,” Xiong says.

Given the potential sales opportunities in Asia, it’s not hard to see the appeal. Despite a slowdown in recent years, China’s economy, for example, continues to grow at a more than 6 percent clip. For a country with nearly 1.4 billion people, that means a lot more consumers will see their spending power grow in the decades ahead.

Xiong says the emphasis on global business opportunities also ensures there’s a lively exchange of viewpoints and experiences, which brings value to young companies.

“We accept and respect differences,” adds Xiong, “and because of these differences, we’ve built a cross-border community that helps us stand out.”

OnePiece Work recently won two Stevie Awards—a Gold Stevie in the Entrepreneur of the Year category in the Real Estate industry and a Bronze Stevie in the Startup of the Year in the Business Services industry—in the 17th annual American Business Awards®.

Interested in winning a Stevie Award in 2020?

World’s Top Honors for Women Professionals to Be Presented in New York on November 15, with Second Edition of Women|Future Conference

Finalists were announced today in the 16th annual Stevie Awards for Women in Business, the world’s top honors for women entrepreneurs, executives, employees and the organizations they run.

This year’s Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie Award placements from among the Finalists will be announced at an awards dinner at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City on Friday, November 15. More than 600 women and their guests from around the world are expected to attend the presentations, which will be broadcast live on Livestream.

The Stevie Awards for Women in Business event will be complemented by the two-day educational and networking event, the Women|Future Conference, also at the Marriott Marquis Hotel on November 14-15.  Tickets for both the conference and the awards dinner are now on sale.

More than 1,500 entries were submitted this year by organizations and individuals in 25 nations, for consideration in more than 90 categories including Executive of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year, Startup of the Year, Women Helping Women and Women-Run Workplace of the Year.  

Among the many extraordinary organizations and women who have been recognized as Finalists, the following organizations stand out as those with five or more Finalist nominations: 8X8 to Educate, Tallai, QLD, Australia; B Floral, New York, NY, USA; DHL Express, worldwide; Glass of Learning, Toronto, ON, Canada; Harman International, Stamford, CT, USA; Jeunesse Global, Lake Mary, FL, USA; Oceans 2 Earth Volunteers, Kenmore East, QLD, Australia; Sleepm Global, Inc., Markham, ON, Canada; Tavuun Welfare Association, Karachi, Pakistan; and Turkish Airlines, Istanbul, Turkey.

Nominations were submitted by organizations in Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Kuwait, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Visit http://www.StevieAwards.com/Women for a complete list of Finalists by category.

Finalists were determined by the average scores of more than 150 professionals around the world, organized in seven juries.

HCL America is a sponsor of the 2019 Stevie Awards for Women in Business

Interested in receiving a Stevie Award in 2020?

As the world becomes more reliant on real-time computing, businesses are realizing it’s more imperative than ever to have high-quality performance and near-zero latency. To that end, according to Gartner, Inc., by 2022, it’s projected about 50 percent of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside of traditional data centers or the cloud, which is up from less than 10 percent in 2018.

QOS Networks is one company actively working toward that projection. The company’s mission is to architect strategic network solutions that enable distributed enterprises to connect in an expanding world, allowing clients to achieve improved experiences.

“We strive to deliver best-in-breed solutions mixed with fanatical customer support,” says Stefanie Whittington, the vice president of marketing.

Pairing Talent with Technology

QOS has a team of passionate individuals who always aim to innovate and to identify the best fit for each customer in order to create pathways and products that revolutionize the way people do business.

“We do what we do because, at the end of the day, when a customer sees answers to problems, it's a gratifying experience,” says Whittington.

According to Whittington, even though the company deals in a cutting-edge industry, traditional values are still key, and it’s the people of the QOS team that comprise the heart of the business.

“Culture and people definitely top the list. Without spending time and effort to drive the company culture toward something inclusive, inspiring, and satisfying, our customers would never feel the reciprocal dedication. Our team is the core of the business, and when it comes to people, it's immeasurably important to strive for the best.”

The company ensures these cultural values are ingrained from the day a new employee steps foot in the office.

New Possibilities, New Challenges

According to many industry experts, 5G connectivity is going to significantly change the way business is done, and some service providers are already beginning to implement the technology, even though it’s still only trickling into the market. These new advances in enterprise and customer technologies require careful implementation into a constantly evolving world, which requires a team that has its eye on the bigger picture.

“The advancement of 5G in the market is a fun development to watch,” says Whittington. “As this new wave of connectivity comes into the marketplace, it has reaching implications for both consumers and businesses.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) is another potential game changer—and not only for problem management or tactical edge management. Whittington believes AI is going to become an increasingly significant force as technology in this field advances.

QOS aims to analyze the data from these new advances, pare it down, and use it to deliver a better client experience. How long until this process is completely viable, though? While an educated guess can be made, one thing remains clear: QOS wants to get more practical use out of emerging technologies so they can truly benefit the user, but this can only happen when the right team approaches the problem with the right values.

Prioritizing everything from weekly all-hands meetings in order to share successes and goals to company inclusion events, such as lunch clubs and news briefs, it’s clear the entire business operates with a deliberate focus on its people.

QOS Networks recently won a Bronze Stevie Award in the Fastest Growing Company of the Year category in the industry of Telecommunications at the 17th annual American Business Awards®.

Interested in winning a Stevie Award in 2020?

Anyone who has attended a corporate function can probably relate to this situation: It’s time to sit down to the food portion, and it’s an array of dry sandwiches, lifeless sausage rolls, and gritty instant coffee. Everyone accepts this fate, though, because that’s what a meal is at a business event.

In recent years, however, those within the food industry looked at that model and saw a better way to approach office catering. That included Order-In, which is based in North Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Namely, this company and others like it strove to offer a blend of traditional customer service and an innovative integration of forward-thinking technology.

“Order-In takes care of all office catering, kitchen supplies, and corporate event needs for offices across Australia,” says Joo Dean, head of marketing at Order-In, “but we make office catering easier through an online ordering platform.”

Riding the Success of the Food Delivery Model

When Jonathan Rowley launched Order-In in 2000, ordering food online was still in its early days. However, with the growing popularity of personal food-delivery services, such as Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats in the United States and Menulog and Foodora in Australia, people became increasingly comfortable with the business model and began seeking that convenience and flexibility in the corporate world as well.

“At Order-In, it’s our aim to continually improve Australia’s corporate catering industry by better utilizing technology,” says Dean. “Using these technical innovations, we want to make the catering process easier, more reliable, and more flexible in order to meet the changing needs of modern businesses.”

For their work in the food-technology industry, the company recently earned two Silver Stevie® Awards: one in the category of Excellence in Innovation in Business Product & Service Industries and another in the Innovation in Corporate Websites category in the 2019 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards.

Tapping Technology to Encourage Diversity and Sustainability

By making technology an integral part of the online business catering model, companies can offer greater ease and flexibility to their corporate clients, but the people behind these companies are also better positioned to operate in ways that align with contemporary professional ideologies.

“By putting everything in an online platform, which inherently removes many barriers, it allows us to build long-term relationships with our suppliers and to support local businesses, including Australian farmers,” says Dean. “We make a conscious effort to actively encourage and to include diverse, multicultural Aboriginal and not-for-profit catering suppliers into our platform, and those suppliers benefit because we offer a way to reach more customers.

“We can even work with charities and create partnerships that are in tune with our business values,” Dean continues.

In addition to promoting diversity, the online platform also allows customers and partners to make eco-conscious food choices.

“We recently implemented a sustainability rating system in October 2018 for all our caterers, which means our customers can make more informed choices about ordering sustainable catering.”

The synergy technology doesn’t just benefit the end user, though. It also improves the supplier experience, with many companies encouraging their suppliers to order biodegradable catering boxes, napkins, and cutlery.

Order-In and a myriad of other online food platforms demonstrate that technology can truly do more within the culinary industry than increase convenience for the customer; it’s also a means to help people make healthier, more sustainable food choices.

Order-In received two Silver Stevie Awards: one in the category of Excellence in Innovation in Business Product & Service Industries and another in the Innovation in Corporate Websites category in the 2019 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards.

Interested in winning a Stevie Award in 2020?

RAK Chamber-sponsored Program to Recognize Innovation in the Workplace in 17 MENA Nations

The Stevie Awards, organizer of the world’s premier business awards programs, has opened entries for the 2020 (first annual) Middle East Stevie Awards, the first business awards program to recognize innovation in the workplace throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

The awards are produced by the creators of the prestigious American Business Awards® and International Business Awards®, which receive more than 12,000 nominations each year between all Stevie Awards programs.

The Middle East Stevie Awards are open to all organizations in 17 nations in the Middle East and North Africa: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

All individuals and organizations — public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small — may submit any number of nominations to any number of the categories, free of charge. Complete nomination details are available at http://MENA.StevieAwards.com.

Nominations that are awarded a Gold, Silver, or Bronze Stevie Award by the jury will be assessed a winners fee, the payment will unlock a number of benefits for the winner, including the right to claim the win, a Stevie Awards trophy, the right to use winners’ marks in promotions, and the right to receive the trophy on stage during a gala awards event in Ras Al Khaimah.

Nominations may be submitted online through two entry deadlines: November 6 and December 4, 2019. Any winners’ fees that might be payable for nominations submitted through the November 6 deadline will be discounted by $30.

Judging for the competition will be conducted by more than 100 professionals around the world. Those interested in participating on a jury may apply at http://MENA.StevieAwards.com. Stevie Awards competitions are esteemed for the rigor of their judging process and the experience and diversity of the jurors. More than 1,000 professionals around the world participate on Stevie Awards juries each year.

Winners of the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Awards in the competition will be announced on January 8, 2020 and celebrated during a gala event in RAK on February 8, 2020.

The Stevie Awards trophies, designed by the company that makes the Oscar and other major international awards, are among the world's most coveted prizes.

Nominations will be accepted and judged in Arabic and English, in more than 100 categories across the following category groups:

• Web Site, App, Annual Report & Other Publications, & Live Event Awards Categories
• Management Awards Categories
• Company / Organization Awards Categories
• Corporate Communications & Public Relations Awards Categories
• Customer Service Awards Categories
• Human Resources Awards Categories
• Marketing Awards Categories
• New Product & Product Management Awards Categories
• Technology Awards Categories

Interested in receiving a 2020 Middle East Stevie Award?

In August of 2019, the CEOs of America’s largest companies gathered for the “Business Roundtable”, an association whose elite membership is comprised of the CEOs of the largest corporations in the U.S. This year, the all-powerful and influential group issued a pronouncement that the New York Times, on its front page, described as a major “philosophical shift.” Our largest companies would no longer focus exclusively on pleasing their shareholders; instead they would move to include caring about their people: employees, customers and “society” itself. 

While this may have been news to many of us, it was another day at the office for Jeffrey Deckman, founder of Capability Accelerators, a New England-based leadership consultancy, who has been at the forefront of the movement to redefine how leaders lead for 15 years. Jeffrey Deckman pulled from more than 40 years of leadership experience and put it all down in a groundbreaking book, “Developing the Conscious Leadership Mindset for the 21st Century,” published in March of 2019. The book was honored with Gold in the 2019 American Business Awards® and Silver in the 2019 International Business Awards® for Best Business E-Book and Best Business Book, respectively. 

A successful serial entrepreneur who launched two multi-million-dollar companies, Deckman exited that line of work in 2005 with a mission to change the way companies treat their employees and those with whom they do business. “I went from the front lines to the front office,” says Deckman. “I have done everything from customer service calls to eventually running board meetings. As a result, I saw the powerful relationship between leaders, employee engagement and ROI at every level of organizations. Engagement plunges when ‘power and control’ is in play in the C-suite; replace it with ‘authenticity, integrity and respect,’ and engagement skyrockets with profits following suit.”

This revolutionary book changes the paradigm for modern leadership as Deckman leads those who occupy C-suites and other senior positions on a subtle and highly effective journey of personal and professional transformation; it also gives leaders the tools they need to lead their teams in a similar transformation.

Deckman’s book breaks with the norm of business books in other ways as well. The book is intentionally an easy-to-read and follow – and even fun - workbook, all the better to engage an audience known to resist training. As Deckman explains: “Many leaders don’t want to admit, publicly at least, that they need training even though the truth is that most business leaders have not been trained in how to manage the complex tribal dynamics, psychological drivers and cultural influences that are the engines that drive profits in the Knowledge Economy. We – unfairly – expect them to learn all of this on their own, which few, in my experience, can.”

Deckman’s book transforms leaders as they absorb – contemplate, really – each of its powerful 52 “sections”. “Talking and telling” is replaced by “connecting and listening” (the average leader listens for seven seconds before interrupting; listening significantly improves employee engagement);“managing org charts” is replaced by “engaging and empowering tribes”; “command and control” is replaced by “communication, collaboration and facilitation"; and “getting others to do more” is replaced by “creating a supportive environment in which employees learn how to do more.”

The physical design of the book also stands out. It is a beautiful book to both look at and to hold, all the better for this discriminating audience. It also gives leaders the option of a shorter 26-week program as many leaders are busy as well as to turn either length program into a training program for their teams in order to maximize the book’s impact. As one Stevie judge aptly commented: “What a clever book. The 26-week or 52-week plan encourages the reader to incorporate and apply the ‘work’ set out in the readings.”

Since publication, top leadership consultants have posted five-star Amazon reviews pushing the book to #1 in Occupational/Organizational Psychology. Fast Company and CEO Blog Nation featured Deckman as have many leadership podcasts. Deckman’s fourth Conscious Leadership Conference is nearly sold out. Since publication, the author has also become a popular lecturer on leadership at the University of Rhode Island.

A stage 4 cancer survivor given a clean bill of health in 2019, Deckman knows that “the need for change is urgent and the time for change is now.”

As the Stevie judges recognized, this book is an agent for that change.

For more information, please visit www.jeffreydeckman.com. To receive a chapter of this book as special gift to Stevie blog readers, please email Jeffrey@JeffreyDeckman.com.

Interested in winning a Stevie Award in 2020?

Composable/disaggregated infrastructure, or CDI, is a relatively new topic in the tech world, but you may start hearing about it a lot more in the near future. Several market forecasts and industry trends seem to suggest this new approach to the cloud will soon be readily adopted and employed across businesses, whether they’re small, midmarket, or enterprise.

What Is CDI?

CDI is an emerging technology that essentially shifts the mind-set about physical technological infrastructure. Rather than treating tangible devices (servers, storage, and networking) as items that can only be configured and controlled manually, CDI allows you to abstract these entities and to treat them as services that can be controlled by code. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), CDI uses “high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects to aggregate compute, storage, and networking fabric resources into shared resource pools that can be available for on-demand allocation.” The system employs “rack-scale architecture” to penetrate physical barriers in the server, which subsequently allows storage, memory, and computing resources to be allocated in real time as needed.

The Forecasted Future of CDI

IDC, which was founded in 1964, provides market intelligence and advisory services in the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology sectors. The corporation is largely considered one of the world’s most established, respected, and premier voices in market forecasting. The company recently released a report entitled “Worldwide Composable/Disaggregated Infrastructure Forecast, 2018–2023,” which details the predicted revenue growth of that industry. The findings are substantial.

The IDC calculated CDI revenue for 2017 at $300.2 million—a relatively modest but not surprising number for a still-nascent technology. That number, however, is projected to jump to just shy of $3.4 billion by 2022. That’s an aggressive 58.2 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over a five-year period.

For their report, the IDC considers the CDI industry to be composed of three major elements: appliances and platforms, software, and associated hardware drag. While all three of these elements are projected to see higher-than-average growth over the coming years, the IDC predicts the pace will vary from segment to segment. Disaggregated hardware is projected to reach a six-year CAGR of 58.5 percent and earnings of $4.4 billion, and composable software is predicted to see a six-year CAGR of 53.8 percent and $325.6 million in revenue.

Given all that, the CDI market segment is still only projected to comprise about 4.1 percent of the entire server market in 2023. For investment-minded individuals, this could mean massive potential. By investing heavily in these CDI technologies now, it offers the possibility of gathering a significant market share in years to come.

How Smaller Companies Are Changing the CDI Game

Major information technology players, such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell, have largely dominated the headlines surrounding CDI, but the IDC report suggests this could change over the coming years. This influence of smaller, emerging companies could be the key to the industry’s potentially meteoric success. Rather than relying on a handful of established companies to carry the burden of this technology, new vendors will enter the market, solving infrastructure-related IT challenges and improving the overall viability and adoption of CDI.

Cloudistics, which was founded in 2013 in Reston, Virginia, United States, and recently took home a Bronze Stevie® Award for Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year, is one such private cloud software solution. They work to streamline IT service delivery and to help organizations run their essential operational functions.

“Our aim is to offer organizations a new tool to accelerate digital transformation, making a private cloud infrastructure easy to implement, to deploy, to operate, and to maintain,” says Sarah Shkargi, the vice president of client relations at Cloudistics. “We’re looking to provide a premium experience paired with predictable performance and powerful operational efficiencies, including a 60 percent reduction in IT service deployment time and 40 percent savings in training and specialist costs.”

Cloudistics—and companies like it—exemplify the positive changes that have been taking place in the CDI sphere.

“Two years ago, if you wanted CDI, you were buying massive installations from a few major hardware vendors,” says Shkargi. “Now, start-ups can deliver smaller-scale, entirely software-defined CDI that isn’t wedded to legacy approaches and is suitable for organizations of all sizes. These examples offer real advantages over a do-it-yourself or hyperconverged infrastructure, and some even offer price points that are more attractive than the public cloud.”

As the infrastructure needs of companies continue to grow more complex and varied, companies are increasingly projected to realize that simply stacking management layers within on-premises infrastructure doesn’t suffice.

“The world is moving irrevocably toward a multi-cloud, multisite, geo-distributed model,” says Shkargi, “And CDI, with the innovations of industry giants and emerging vendors, can deliver the reliability, agility, and versatility companies need.”

Offerpad recently won a Bronze Stevie Award for Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year in the Technology Industries category at the 2019 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service in Las Vegas.

Interested in winning a Stevie Award in 2020?

Awards to be Presented at Gala Ceremony on 19 October in Vienna, Austria.

Winners were announced today in the 2019 People’s Choice Stevie Awards for Favorite Companies, a feature of The International Business Awards®, the world’s only international, all-encompassing business awards program, which is now in its 16th year.

The worldwide public vote was conducted this summer, with the highest number of votes deciding the winners in a variety of industries. More than 44,000 votes were cast. All Stevie Award winners in the Company of the Year categories of this year’s International Business Awards were eligible to be included in voting for the People’s Choice Stevie Awards.

The crystal People’s Choice Stevie Awards will be presented to winners at The International Business Awards banquet on Saturday, 19 October at the Andaz Vienna am Belvedere Hotel. Tickets for the event are now on sale. The winners of peer-adjudicated Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie Awards will be presented with their awards along with the People’s Choice Stevie Awards. Stevie winners were selected from more than 4,000 nominations received from organizations and individuals in 74 nations.

The winners of the 2019 People’s Choice Stevie Awards for Favorite Companies are:

• Advertising/Marketing/PR: Publicity Genie
• Automotive/Transport: Armormax
• Banking: Ziraat Participation Bank
• Business/Professional Services: Pontica Solutions
• Computer Services: Rimini Street
• Computer Software: XtremeLabs LLC
• Consumer Products: Georgio’s
• Consumer Services: Jasmine Norris Photography
• Financial/Insurance: Thai Life Insurance Plc.
• Food/Beverage: Rico’s Lechon
• Health/Pharma: NMC Healthcare
• Hospitality/Leisure: Kindersley Hospitality Endeavors
• Internet/New Media: SideChef
• Legal: Legally Shalini
• Manufacturing: Makers Nutrition
• Media/Entertainment: Link4Media UG
• Non-Profit/Government: Megaworld Foundation, Inc.
• Other: Zen Ecosystems
• Real Estate: Ashby & Graff Real Estate
• Retail: Migros Ticaret A.S.
• Transportation: Whale Logistics

Interested in winning a Stevie Award in 2020?