In the news this week, Amazon Drive ends their unlimited free cloud storage plan. Opting to give customers a smaller amount of free capacity data and charging for additional data. It appears that disruption has knocked on the door of the disruptor as Sia provides distributed enterprise storage at 10% the cost of AWS. The more traditional players like AWS, HP, and EMC are either in talks or working with now partnering with Sia.

Technology-led innovation and disruption are paving the way to better problem solving (business) while also eroding traditional revenue streams. At the CIO Summit (New Zealand), IDC's Frank Gens spoke about Digital Transformation in 2017, is about the creation of new value for the business. As with the example of the Amazon Drive, old revenue streams may no longer deliver the value they once did.

While technology is moving quickly, businesses are creating services right behind it. Cloud providers are managing to help organisations keep pace because they provide the ability to trial ideas and then scale the heck out of them. Is there any wonder that the likes of Lemonade can approve an insurance claim in just 3 seconds through the use of an AI bot? It took you longer to read that sentence. Lemonade may not be running on AWS, but you get the idea.

As we live in an ever more connected world, we need to create platforms within our business so that people can connect to us for things that are relevant to our industry. By allowing other organsiations and customers to interface with our business will provide a new wave of innovation. Aren't you thankful for API's?

As businesses are transforming, they are looking for new ways to engage the digital customer. An excellent example of this is Campbell's Soup. Campbells have created an ecosystem of innovative partners to find the means to add value, both to the consumer and to the business. One solution has been to provide a method whereby a customer can send a DNA sample (through a swab) for analysis so that Campbell's can provide a nutritional plan for the consumer! Who would have thought that a company selling traditional canned soup would be offering nutritional advice based on DNA samples?