Forget about the convergence of telecommunications, enterprise communications and information technology. We are entering the era of multi-industry convergence according to Fernando Belfort, team leader for IT at Frost & Sullivan. “Seventy-five percent of disruptive innovation is generated in the white spaces between industries,” Belfort said.
Still, the question remains: how to monetize emerging opportunities? Discussing this scenario, Belfort named three mega trends for the ICT industry in Latin America: Smart as the new green; the connected Latam; and new business models.
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“Bottom line is that companies want to be smarter,” he said, noting smart cities and smart cloud as highlights. The Frost team leader said that companies’ strategies must be city-focused. In 2025, the analyst firm estimates that 69 cities in Latin America will have more than one million inhabitants.
As a consequence, the big data trend will become even bigger.  In Brazil alone, big data is expected to grow at CARG rate of 25% between 2012 and 2016. During last year’s Futurecom event, Belfort presented a survey showing that in Brazil, the big data market is expected to reach around U.S.$500 million (R$1.04 billion) by 2016, a jump from the current level of U.S.$168 million (R$336 million). Major opportunities are in the segments of telecommunications; banking and insurance; oil and gas; and retail.
Globally, the opportunity for big data is also huge. Only 0.5 % of data is currently analyzed by companies to help them make decisions, as  IDC’s Digital Universe Study sponsored by EMC pointed out.
As for the “connected Latin America,” the expansion of Internet broadband access, including mobile, as well as unified communications (UC) is key. “Satellite is a very exciting market in terms of opportunities,” Belfort said. In addition, in the UC field, Â an increased adoption of collaboration tools is expected. Belfort noted that the corporate market is becoming more mobile, more social and more visual.
The last trend Belfort mentioned was the need for new business models—for example, ones take advantage of the rise in mobile solutions, such as mobile health, as well as ones that establish affordable products.
As key takeaways, Belfort noted the opportunities in the creation of a greater ecosystem based on partnerships and the need to verticalize or clusterize to survive.
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