Introduction

Bruce Milne

Welcome and thank you for joining us. This is Forecast 2015, our global tech M&A report. I’m Bruce Milne, CEO of the Corum Group, your conference sponsor.

We have a jam-packed agenda with over two dozen speakers, so let’s get right to it. Today we’re going to cover our predictions for the coming year. Then we’ll have a tech M&A events report. We have a record market with record valuations. How can you take advantage of that? Tune into one of our special reports or attend them locally. Then, Top Ten Tech Trends, the disruptive trends of 2015 that will shape your business that you need to know about. Then we’ll have a special research report on 29 sectors, deals and valuations. We’ll close with a luminary panel, led by Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft and Futurist Reese Jones. Finally, we’ll have some closing thoughts and your questions.

Let’s start with Timothy Goddard, our VP of marketing.

2015 Tech M&A Predictions

Tim Goddard

Thank you, Bruce. We really do have a great event planned for you today. To start, we’re going to look through some predictions. Every year we poll the staff and gather some ideas of what we think might happen in the coming year, so let’s go through those.

1. IT services firms shift significant resources to focus on the Internet of Things. You’ll hear more about that coming up.
2. On a related note, wearable fitness tech will become more integrated with healthcare overall, not just fitness as a recreation activity.
3. We will see Chinese web companies move into the US, slowly at first and then Alibaba will buy Yahoo and more things will happen.
4. Security breaches, the ones we’ve seen won’t slow down, and we’ll also see the first major breach in the Internet of Things.
5. We’ll see a major fashion designer or retailer make a big move into wearable technology.
6. Ad technology companies will continue to be in demand both out of their sector and even outside of media and technology.
7. Finally, we think Google will finally wake the white flag on Glass hardware, sell their assets to Lenovo as we’ve seen them do before, and then wait for acceptance of the tech, then jump back in with software.

We’ve looked at the year ahead, so now let’s talk a bit about the year behind us. We’re going to talk about some of the events we did in the last year, and I’m going to turn this over to Amanda Tallman, senior marketing coordinator at HQ to talk about our past events.