By Kim Yoo-chul
How to harness social networking services (SNS) for business purposes will be every marketing person's concern next year, a senior executive of Samsung SDS, the system integration subsidiary, said Wednesday.
It is not that there have been no attempts toward this end but they have not blossomed yet.
Obviously, at an age where Facebook and My Space, together with Twitter, have firmly consolidated their integral places in daily life, Park Seung-an, executive vice president of Samsung SDS says they are here to stay so businesses need to take advantage of them or place last in the race.
At the same time, Park also noted that smartphones are continuing their evolution that needs to be monitored or else businesses will end up losing a great opportunity.
``Social networks themselves will become new money-making tools away from their initial roles as communication devices. SNS will have greater impacts on businesses,’’ Park said.
Citing faster technology advancements amid blurring lines between software and hardware, he said he was quite upbeat for an early proliferation by social networks in business management.
``Social commerce, social gaming and social learning are some of the plausible examples of new businesses,’’ he told reporters.
He also saw Korea, one of the world’s most wired countries, as apt grounds for the flowering of SNS for business purposes.
Park mentioned other less known phenomena that will prevail next year ― immersive interface, hybrid Web, connected devices, mobile cloud service, continuous intelligence, open collaboration and service-driven networks ― items on a key watch-list that may sweep the technology sector next year.
As more hardware devices such as televisions and cameras become part of Internet-enabled networks, more customized services to fit users’ personal appetites, will be realized, he foresaw.
With ``immersive interface,’’ Park said the growing applications amid the development of ``smart’’ digital devices are helping different platforms have greater integrity or connectivity.
``That’s what we call the `hybrid Web.’ Also, increased mobility between applications and digital content for consumer products is fueling high growth of `connected devices,’’’ he added.
A big shift in the way companies acquire software and computing capacity has been under way as an increased number of companies tap into Web-based applications. Samsung is positive about the big growth of cloud computing.
Cloud computing commonly refers to both the applications transmitted as services over the Web and the hardware system software in the data centers that offer those services.
Simply, cloud computing is allowing greater accessibility to computer resources offered through networks rather than operating software or storing data on a local PC.
``More companies will develop cloud-based platforms in accordance with the converged era, lifting the growth of the market,’’ Park said.
In terms of organizational change, Samsung said a key change in corporate culture is ``Open Collaboration.’’
``This is an era when people can get the information on how to design an atomic bomb from the Internet. In such an era, there is no room for the word `closed,’’’ Park said.
In other words, the collaboration will gather ideas of a large number of ordinary people, rather than ideas of a small number of elites, and by doing so, will unleash a greater impetus of creativity.
``Traditionally, information technology has enabled users to use hardware. Undoubtedly, the traditional IT era has just ended,” he said.