The analyst said that Australian retailers and shopping centre owners have been quick to adopt such technologies and will continue to do so.
“Indoor technology is helping to redefine the shopper experience to find goods, remove the need for a check-out, improve real-time logistics, and receive broadcast messages as they walk past shops,” said Johnston.
“Given their ready adoption, the use of beacons in Australian retail stores might be a useful counter to the technology-enabled shopping experiences provided by retailers such as Amazon in their Amazon GO stores.”
Deloitte consulting and TMT partner, Stuart Scotis, added that IT-as-a-service is also set to explode in 2017.
By the end of 2018, the analyst firm predicts that spending on IT flexible consumption models for data centres, software, and services will be just under $US550 billion worldwide. This represents a rise of more than 50 per cent from a forecast 2016 level of $US361 billion.
Scotis said the Australian experience is consistent with the global trend, whereby Asia Pacific IT consumption models are also growing, but appear to lag United States-based models by around 12 months.
“Technology as a whole is increasing its spend across industries in Australia, and further growth is expected,” Scotis added.
“2017 will see the continued movement to the consumption based models as CIOs continue to see the speed and flexibility together with the potential cost savings become increasingly attractive to a widening technology landscape.”
“We expect a hybrid model to remain for some time both in Australia and globally, but the trend will be towards flexible consumption.
“This will be driven by growth in consumer and small business adoption of flexible models increasing pressure on large enterprise to use or offer it as part of their product set,” he said.
The analyst's latest predictions follow on from a slew of predictions by other analysts and technology companies alike about what 2017 will hold in terms of breakthrough and influential enterprise tech.
Deloitte is not alone in holding machine learning up as a major trend for this year, with Gartner also placing the technology, along with artificial intelligence on its top trends to watch for 2017.
Other technologies that should be on IT channel partners' radars this year, according to a variety of analysts, are adaptive security architecture, virtual reality and augmented reality, and open source software.
