Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations are Changing the Rules of Business

Chapter FiveThe SMAC Stack: The New Technology of Code

We’ve mentioned how the consumer technology revolution of the past decade has been enabled by four key technologies that work in combination: social, mobile, analytics, and cloud, or “SMAC” for short. In this chapter, we will explore in more detail how and why the SMAC Stack is so key in the development of the Code Halo phenomenon.

Components of the SMAC Stack are the raw materials of Code Halos. They include:

• Social technologies: Blogs, wikis, email, instant messaging, social network services, and software applications that foster and facilitate interpersonal communications, both personal and business.
• Mobile technologies: From portable hardware devices—such as smartphones, tablets, wearables, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and global positioning systems (GPS)—to the software, applications, and networks that support and enable robust anywhere/anytime connectivity.
• Analytics technologies: These provide new levels of empiricism and insight by establishing a software supply chain of collecting, organizing, managing, measuring, analyzing, and reporting large amounts of disparate data on an ongoing basis.
• Cloud computing: This allows remotely based computing resources—such as servers, databases, and applications—to be delivered via the Internet (instead of being owned and hosted internally), allowing for flexibility of resources and, in many cases, much lower cost.

In the coming five years, organizations of all sizes ...