According to the latest research from the Strategy Analytics Connected Home service, technology providers are now overcoming many of the hurdles in the race to develop tomorrow's digital home, where consumers will be able to easily transfer their digital music and video files between the home PC, the home theater and portable media devices. Their report identifies one significant remaining obstacle: major content owners such as Disney, Fox and Warner are still not convinced that digital rights management (DRM) solutions are meeting their needs. Connected home proponents such as Intel, Sony and Philips must give high priority to solving DRM interoperability challenges if they are to maximize the revenue potential from this 144 million connected device market opportunity. According to the report, wider adoption of media-sharing devices will be delayed as long as content owners disagree between themselves on how they wish to benefit from DRM technologies. Technology providers, in turn, cannot develop a horizontal market for connected devices until major content providers have agreed on a common framework of DRM interoperability.
Even the savviest CEO's desire for a digital transformation advantage has to face the global market reality -- there simply isn't enough skilled and experienced talent available to meet demand. According to the latest market study by IDC, around 60-80 percent of Asia-Pacific (AP) organizations find it "difficult" or "extremely difficult" to fill many IT roles -- including cybersecurity, software development, and data insight professionals. Major consequences of the skills shortage are increased workload on remaining digital business and IT employees, increased security risks, and loss of "hard-to-replace" critical transformation knowledge. Digital Business Talent Market Development Although big tech companies' layoffs are making headlines, they are not representative of the overall global marketplace. Ongoing difficulty to fill key practitioner vacancies is still among the top issues faced by leaders across industries. "Skills are difficul