Welcome everybody to my latest blog post! Today, I will be looking at the recently formed partnership between IBM and Apple.
My high level view of this partnership from the start was that it made the world of sense. On one side, you've got a marketing juggernaut with a reputation for innovation and a firm grasp on the consumer market. On the other, you've got arguably the most notable IT vendor in the world with a solid reputation for its work on an enterprise level. Together, their strategy for producing applications for enterprises is perfect and if they can overcome previous personality clashes, they will compliment each other very well indeed.
At the end of last year, IBM and Apple announced that they plan to launch 100 enterprise apps on IBM's 'Mobile First' cloud platform by the end of 2015. So far, 22 apps have been released and healthcare is definitely a key target vertical. Four apps related to healthcare are as follows:
- Hospital RN: Enables nurses to tap into record keeping systems, organization tools and iBeacon technology for streamlined management tasks.
- Hospital Tech: Lets nursing assistants organize and prioritize tasks, freeing up time for patient care.
- Hospital Lead: Helps care managers and charge nurses better manage workloads, staff assignments and patient discharge tasks.
- Home RN: Provides tools to gain greater efficiency in managing caseloads and reporting needs to specialists during home care interaction. [1]
So why are these apps receiving such a warm welcome? They are not aimed at management, they are aimed at those on the front line. Nurses and doctors have been crying out for help for years and will embrace any technology which makes carrying out their jobs easier, quicker, more efficient and less stressful. These apps put more power into the practitioners' hands and with a wider range of operational roles influencing IT purchasing decisions, this is a positive step forward.
What will be interesting to see down the road is how IBM is going to incorporate Watson into these apps. As the apps are managed centrally and used globally, the amount of incoming data will be considerable and given IBM's background and expertise in analytics, it's only a matter of time before they will be able to use this data and incorporate it into other apps or best practice consulting engagements. Currently, as the apps focus on workloads rather than clinical data, analysis would be limited to finding the most efficient way of managing a daily routine. This could be useful for training purposes and for setting goals.
If any future applications incorporate clinical data then the possibilities will sky rocket as it would enable practitioners from all over the world feed into a central data repository, compare notes in forums and chat rooms and use a critical mass of clinical data to analyze best possible treatments. In fact, it would not surprise me at all if this was the ultimate end game for this partnership, to centralize and collect masses of data from a popular technology vendor such as Apple, apply world class analytics from IBM's Watson and then build up a large global knowledge base which can be utilized and offered to enterprise clients.
That's all for today folks! I'd love to hear what you think about the IBM and Apple alliance so please leave a comment below and if you enjoyed this post, please share it on social media and spread the word.
Best Regards,
Jonathan Cordwell
Research Analyst, Healthcare Strategy
ResearchNetwork, CSC
- Fierce Mobile Healthcare, Apple-IBM mobile health apps: Just what the nurse ordered, 6 April 2015, http://www.fiercemobilehealthcare.com/story/apple-ibm-mobile-health-apps-just-what-nurse-ordered/2015-04-06
Hej, Hallå, Hallo and Namaste! Welcome to a new blog post from the Health Care Bear! After potentially destroying several languages in the first sentence, I'd like to introduce today's topic: The rise of India-led pureplay vendors in the Nordics. Although this can be classed as a cross-industry topic, it has significant relevance to the Healthcare vertical as well so stay with me.
India-led pure plays have been making inroads into the Nordic private sector over the past few years and so I wanted to write a blog post pointing at a few drivers for their success. Enjoy...
Cost reduction is a top priority in the Nordics: CIO surveys from the likes of Gartner and IDC all highlight the fact that organizations in the Nordics are looking to reduce costs. It is also clear that they are looking to achieve these cost savings through making business processes more efficient. It goes without saying that India-led IT vendors thrive in low cost engagements and so this trend plays to their strengths. Other vendors however can capitalize on other priorities such as a need for agility on a smaller scale due to numerous large scale IT deployments being unsuccessful in the private sector.
Organizations generally indifferent to cloud: Cloud has taken the world by storm. Despite security concerns still present in the market, it is quickly becoming the norm (that rhymes by the way.) I'm sure this is not an isolated case in the Nordics but a lot of organizations are of the opinion that they are being evermore forcefully nudged into deploying cloud solutions. With IT providers looking to capitalize on this global trend as well as smaller niche providers offering only SaaS solutions, it seems to them that they don't really have much choice. Nordic CIOs are indifferent as to which solution to choose as long as it reaps the results they are looking for. Cloud is no longer a differentiator and so if IT infrastructure is disappearing, what's stopping clients from choosing an India-led vendor? Other aspects such as onshore presence, local knowledge and scalability are important but cloud is levelling the playing field.
High percentage of CIOs reporting into CFOs: There is a higher percentage, compared to other regions, of CIOs in the Nordics reporting into CFOs. It may seem as though I'm repeating myself here but this plays well into the hands of India-led vendors as CIOs will take a much more black & white approach to selecting a vendor based on financial viability and efficiency. Public sector CIOs in the Nordics hold substantial IT budgets and so if the likes of Infosys, TCS, Wipro etc are able to break into the Public sector based on their success in the Private sector, they would be able to use this mentality to their advantage and the competitive landscape could drastically change.
That's all for today, I hope you enjoyed this latest blog post. If you did, then please share on social media with your colleagues. Many thanks for your time, look forward to posting again shortly.
Best Regards,
Jonathan Cordwell
Research Analyst, Healthcare Strategy
ResearchNetwork, CSC
