Newcomers do not often break into these lists, but in order to stay on them, technologies need to be significantly added over the year. News Analytics studied the first predictions for 2020 and identified the ten most frequently mentioned technologies and methodologies, which are expected to play an important role in business transformation next year.
1. Artificial intelligence. AI is in first place in almost all forecasts. Despite fears that machines will take away jobs from people, so far, thanks to him, computers began to perform a wide range of jobs for people. AI solutions can both automatically create searchable metadata for sound recordings and provide cybersecurity by analyzing real-time datasets about the behavior of corporate network components and issuing recommendations for solving emerging problems.
2. In addition, AI is the basis of text and voice chatbots that use natural language processing and sentiment analysis technologies, which, according to experts, will be implemented by 40% of companies in the service industry this year. The high pace of development of speech synthesis and understanding technologies was recently demonstrated by the Google Duplex voice assistant, whose interlocutors did not understand that they were dealing with a machine.
3. In the same row are the means of robotization of business processes (Robotic Process Automation, RPA), which allow you to automate repetitive user actions. Moreover, if initially it was assumed that they would do exclusively “mechanical” work – say.
transfer data from one table to another – then recently they have become very “smarter” very quickly and are ready to perform control functions and even distribute simple, repetitive tasks. Not surprisingly, according to Gartner, the corresponding segment of the enterprise software market is growing very fast – last year it increased by 63% to $846 million, and this year is expected to reach $1.3 billion.
Some experts believe that the introduction of software robots is only the first stage of a broader “strategic automation” trend: the use of AI to automate end-to-end “manual” business processes in an enterprise.
4. Agile methodology, originally used by software developers, is being adopted by business structures. Collaboration across geographically dispersed teams is supported by conferencing, which is experiencing a new rise. Not long ago, MIT conducted a survey of nearly 300 companies about what technologies help create the best work experience for employees, and suddenly video came out on top: investing in video technology drives innovation, collaboration, and increased productivity.
In the future, the effect of presence in the interaction via video will become even deeper thanks to augmented and virtual reality technologies, MIT predicts. Accordingly, a resurgence in the popularity of unified communications, which used to suffer from reliability problems, is also very likely. The new solutions no longer have the same shortcomings, new convenient interaction options have appeared, including in the content exchange mode.
5. Also among the influential technological trends, experts mention Dato’s. The term itself was first coined just five years ago on an IBM blog, and today it is understood as a process-oriented methodology for organizing the work of teams of analysts and data scientists, aimed at improving the quality of insights and accelerating their receipt.
In addition to the principles of organizing activities that draw ideas from Agile development, Dato’s relies on data management using machine learning and artificial intelligence. Today, according to Gartner, less than 1% of participants in the addressable market have implemented Dato’s, but analysts are convinced that these organizations are guaranteed a large competitive advantage.
6. There is a lot of hype and high hopes for 5G networks, although the work on standards is not yet complete, and it may still be years before networks are rolled out nationwide. However, some organizations are already planning strategies for implementing 5G communication systems that promise transmission speeds to and from the subscriber at speeds up to 20 Gb / s and up to 10 Gb / s, respectively, as well as the ability to maintain a connection while moving at speeds up to 500 km/h
7. Standardization of 5G promises an increase in the use of IoT systems and edge computing and a corresponding explosion in the data streams available for analysis, for which enterprises will have to prepare by deploying robust streaming architectures. According to CompTIA, about a third of companies believe that IoT strategies can generate revenue growth through increased production, monetization of data and the sale of products as services.
8. There is a growing interest in containers and microservices as technologies that allow the rapid development of highly scalable software systems, especially cloud and IoT-based solutions. In particular, Kubernetes, an open source system that automates the deployment and management of containers, is being widely implemented.
9. Surveys conducted by Gartner this year indicate the beginning of widespread use of “digital twins” – products, processes and systems that allow you to monitor the state of the “source” physical objects and predict possible problems before they arise. It is generally agreed that in the coming years, digital twins of organizations will begin to appear, which will allow monitoring companies as a whole, and not their individual systems.
Opportunities to cash in on Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are dwindling, but distributed ledger adoption is on the rise in the supply chain, finance, and beyond, including on open source platforms such as Hyperedge Fabric.
