Analyst firm Gartner monitors the changing trends impacting the ICT industry and recently published its ideas surrounding the “nexus of four forces”. The research company, along with its rival IDC, agree that the areas of mobile computing, cloud, social networking, and big data / analytics technologies are coming together to create this unstoppable force. And, CEOs must be aware because when the four forces combine, they will either be a powerful force of change or offer a wealth of opportunity.

The “nexus” is not just a passing fad. It is the researched and accepted framework for a new way of doing business over the next 5-10 years. Choose to ignore or resist the power of the four forces and you risk destroying existing market share and customer loyalty.

Gartner describes the four forces as “the convergence and mutual reinforcement of four interdependent trends”. It goes on to state that the forces combine to empower individuals as they interact with each other and their information, through well-designed ubiquitous technology.

Innovators and the companies who really “get it” are “aggressively driving the convergence of these forces to create new opportunities and new paradigms”, according to Gartner. And as a consequence, there is “a shift of control into the hands of the users more than we’ve ever seen before”.

What do we conclude from this? Firstly, it is becoming increasingly evident that we are truly in the "Age of the Customer".  And secondly, the customer is definitively in the driving seat. As a business, you had better raise your game or risk losing opportunities.

Of course, none of the four individual forces are particularly new, but Gartner is quick to emphasize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The impact on everyday business will be swift and powerful.

What interests us here at Push is that our technology touches all four corners of the nexus. And what is potentially challenging for businesses, is that as the nexus takes hold, they will need to start handling huge volumes of data very quickly – if they’re not already.

Whether from analytics databases, to social networks, the cloud or via mobile devices, one thing is for sure…there is a lot of data. More worrying still, is that as this data bounces between you and your customers and users in real-time, expectations of service are high. They won’t care about your network bandwidth, infrastructure costs or technical complexities. All they are concerned with is being able to do what they want-  quickly, effectively and affordably. And, if you’re not in a position to provide that product or service, then you –aren’t in the game.