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In today’s marketplace, companies need to start treating M&As as a strategic tool that gives them an edge over its peers. Successful M&As typically help in seizing growth opportunities, improving capabilities, diversifying services/product portfolios, replacing leaders and/or strengthening its own position in the market, cutting costs along the value chain and, most importantly, assist in sustaining a dynamic environment.

The world of creative agencies is changing. It’s no longer just the artistic freedom of imagining the most creative ideas and transforming them into relevant and strong brand messages. Today we’re seeing the introduction of more formal and logical consultancies into the world of creative, and what better example than that of Accenture Interactive, a subsidiary of Accenture?

The problem of lack of transparency has been plaguing the digital advertising industry since the advent of digital marketing. This has given rise to offenders who exploit this lack of transparency to defraud the advertising industry. It has been estimated that as of 2016, fraudulent practices such as impression fraud, click fraud, attribution fraud and malvertising (malicious advertising) has cost advertisers and publishers close to USD 8 billion and, if left unchecked, could rise to USD 20 billion by 2020. Apart from the obvious loss of ROI, these fraudulent practices could create a rift between advertisers and media agencies, impacting advertiser-agency relationships, as well as budget allocations toward digital media.

Lately, communication service providers (CSPs) have been continuously battling around costs related to equipment, associated assets, labor and power. In coming years, however, CSPs are expected to begin focusing on reducing CAPEX and OPEX by transforming their infrastructure. They plan to achieve this via investments in IT systems, cloud migration/adoption, operating support system (OSS)/business support system (BSS) and network function virtualization (NFV), which will help CSPs achieve efficiency, reduce costs and improve service offerings. Among these investments, NFVs are expected to play a major role in shaping the CSPs infrastructure.

The outbreak of the “WannaCry” malware attack on May 12, 2017 was an eye-opener for governments, public sector institutions, businesses and individuals around the globe. The scale, reach, pace of spread and impact of the attack was unlike any other cyber-attack before. This may only be the beginning and possibly a wakeup call for organizations and netizens across the globe.