During the dot-com era, analysts and executives worried constantly about being “Amazoned”: the swift and effective way incumbents were being eliminated by Amazon.com's massive inventory, low pricing, and great service every time the e-commerce pioneer entered a new market.

Fifteen years later: No industry is safe. Every sector has comfortable market leaders that have been attacked by a new tech-driven competitor. Witness Tesla in the auto space, Salesforce.com in the software world, and even Amazon's own Redshift in data storage.

Indeed, today's business world is a jungle. Incumbents must adapt to survive in this ecosystem. Only the smartest, most nimble players will stay alive.

We are entering yet another new paradigm for business computing. The challenge is to embrace and leverage the massive technological convergence that is taking place right now. Consider the combined impact of these developments:

1. Cloud computing: In November 2013, more than 100,000 people attended Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference. That's equivalent to the attendance of enterprise software's two established shows: Oracle's Open World and SAP's Sapphire. Beyond being a testament to Salesforce's current popularity, Dreamforce attendance points to where businesses want to be in the future—and that's in the cloud.
2. Mobile: Be it a smart phone, tablet, or laptop, corporate citizens must be able to access all company information wherever they are, from whichever device they chose. This mobile power presents productivity opportunities—and security threats.
3. Social media: There's no doubt savvy companies know the power of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and the countless other social media platforms on which customers and competitors are active—but do they know what to do about it? The integration of social media into corporate computing is critical to reach consumers in the next era.
4. Video: The preference of video content has expanded far beyond the boundaries of YouTube. Where social media is responsible for the proliferation of video communication, businesses are now leveraging video in all types of corporate applications making it an increasingly important part of the enterprise IT landscape.
5. Big data: Enterprises now capture terabytes-worth of data about customers, prospects, products, vendors, and competitors. But today, most of this intelligence sits unused in silos. Very soon, all of the data from internal and external systems will combine to form a business intelligence engine that will deliver a competitive advantage to the companies who use it best.

These five technological developments are converging to change the engines of modern business. Consider the “Internet of Things” (IoT) taking shape now. Gartner predicts the IoT will connect 26 billion everyday objects by 2020. While manufacturing and healthcare are leading the way, all industries are working rapidly to deploy ways to communicate with their products in order to understand and optimize their usage.

To stay alive, companies must fundamentally change how they operate. It is critical that executives manage in a way that takes advantage of these amazing technological advances by changing business processes, offering new products and solutions—in essence, operating in a completely different way than ever before.

The bottom line? Surviving in today's business jungle takes agility.

In this book, Creating Business Agility, Rodney Heisterberg and Alakh Verma provide real-world cases that illustrate how today's companies can avoid getting Amazoned by incorporating next-generation technology in their strategic plans—and learn to thrive in the jungle.

—M.R. Rangaswami

Founder, Sand Hill Group

Publisher SandHill.com