Technology
Technology is a dynamic, broad-based industry that’s driving many of the changes we see in the world today. It’s distinguished by its rapid pace and potential for radical new departures. It’s one of the few sectors where international borders have limited impact; allowing a company to go from start-up to global giant in rapid-scale time.
No doubt, electronics and semiconductors are at the heart of the modern economy. Every 18 months, microprocessors double in speed. As a result, several converging forces — social, mobile, cloud, and information — is building on and transforming user behavior while creating new business investment opportunities.
Sectors include:
Digitization: The pervasive adoption of connected, cloud, and mobile technologies across industries — is transforming every company’s interactions with its customers, its suppliers, and its global talent.
Mobile Computing: No doubt ‘anytime, anywhere’ mobile is forcing the biggest change to the way people live since the automobile. Mass adoption forces new infrastructure, it spawns new businesses, and it threatens the status quo. And, that is exactly what is happening.
Social Media: Over 60% of Internet-connected individuals in the US now engage on social media platforms every day. The speed and access to data that they’ve come to appreciate has created more demanding customers – forcing business to embrace broader customer engagement strategies.
Big Data: The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, multimedia, social media, and the Internet will fuel exponential growth in data, and will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, and innovation.
Cloud Computing: At its core, cloud is a delivery mechanism for an on-demand infrastructure; flexibility, speed, scalability, collaboration and remote user support represents a fundamental shift in value from providers back to customers. The spread of “cloud computing” will spur investments in flexible, mobile services that are delivered online and charged according to usage.
Software & App’s: Coders will crank out software for mobile devices. Smartphones alone, open opportunities for new businesses, in any domain or category, which in turn, opens up huge expansive markets, anywhere in the world. No industry is safe from software.
CyberSecurity: Cybercriminals go where users go and hackers are magnetically drawn to the platforms with the most users; this will be to mobile devices and the cloud. Investment too, will be magnetically drawn to those who are able to deliver "holistic" solutions to phone and cloud security.
Computing: Tablets, Smartphones and Notebooks have significantly affected the personal computer market while simultaneously creating a market we didn’t even know we needed. This “carryalong” market is disruptive in that they will be the biggest category of computing devices in the future.
Each year, another 50 billion microprocessors are activated; driving most of the products used by industry today. Multi-core processors have become the primary way to enable higher performance and to support multiple applications to run in parallel. The real winners are consumers.
In the modern IT economy, new developments in technology such as cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service are changing the landscape of technology in areas like CRM, pricing management, supply chain and e-commerce. For business, the opportunities - and the stakes - are high.
To a retailer, the same device that navigates a customer into a store can redirect the final sale to the competition. To a bank, the mobile phone is a new wallet that could make the credit card obsolete. To a sales organization, mobile computing keeps salespeople in the field talking to customers.
To a medical caregiver, a patients vitals and behaviors may be constantly monitored, which increases the effectiveness and efficiency of treatment. Every industry is affected. The technology sector has never been better diversified, leading to a huge vertical updraft of acquisition capital.
Cloud computing represents the glue. It is the model for delivery. Without cloud computing, social interactions would have no place to happen at scale, mobile access would fail to be able to connect to a wide variety of data and functions, and information still would be stuck inside internal systems.
Organizations that ignore the combination of pervasive mobility, near-ubiquitous connectivity, industrial compute services, and information access will be displaced by those that can move into the opportunity space as the concept of "big data" forever alters the relationship of technology to information consumption.
The IT industry as a whole is moving toward the mobile/social/cloud/big data world platform much more quickly than many realize: from 2013 through 2020, these technologies will drive around 90% of all the growth in the IT market. This shifting role of IT will affect all economies, governments, businesses and individuals.
In the IT services sector, outsourced services and offshoring has blossomed. Despite well-publicized issues, the business and financial logic of offshoring to Asia, India and other regions remains strong and is here to stay. As a result, IT services companies that can deliver client satisfaction as cost benefits will reap high returns.
The software sector continues to expand as the US market alone accounts for about half of global software sales and the range of applications is broad - from security to mobile to Internet. As a result, online advertising and mobile app revenues will continue to surge.
At Lexington, we look for sponsoring opportunities where these technologies are being used to enhance a consumer experience or value chain. In a market where size is king, there is an inescapable logic for mergers and acquisitions that deliver economies of scale.
We embrace focused business models; with depth in management teams that can play to certain trends, and which demonstrate the potential to become a leader in a growth niche; IT mobility, on-demand computing, intelligent devices, profitable outsourced services, convergent technologies, security-related app’s; technologies that expand IT requirements outside of established domains.