IDC Manufacturing Insights has published its "IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Supply Chain 2017 Predictions," report to offer the 10 predictions that provide the framework for IT and line-of-business (LOB) decision makers' and influencers' planning and execution of technology-related initiatives in the year ahead.

European manufacturers are failing to make the most of data and analytics tools to plan and segment their supply chains, according to a new report.

Online retail continues to grow at a rapid rate, with a 14.6-percent increase in the category in 2015, totaling $341.7bn. That has major implications for warehouse optimization.

Wu Haishan was at Princeton studying how schools of fish swim together when the crowd behavior of a much bigger group grabbed his attention: his 1.35 billion fellow Chinese. It was Lunar New Year back home in 2014, and Baidu, operator of the country's biggest search engine, had created an animation showing all the trips the Chinese had made during the holiday, which demographers say is the largest annual human migration anywhere. Wu, who'd seen the animation, soon joined Baidu as a data scientist in Beijing. With the company's vast amounts of user location information, he's come up with ingenious ways to measure economic activity.

Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy predicts that as more workloads move to the public IaaS cloud, companies will reduce the number of servers they will manage and the new definition of on-premises infrastructure will increasingly be Internet of Things (IoT) devices.