The A-Z of tech predictions 2020: J to R

This is part two of a three-part series on the technology outlook for 2020.

J is for jobs, the lack of

Ryu Takehiko, MD of Panasonic Asia Pacific, acknowledged the concerns about robots replacing humans, but said that there is “more to look forward to than to fear with robotic technologies going mainstream.”

“At the rate at which technology is advancing, robots will be pervasive in our society in the near future. According to IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Robots and Drones Spending Guide, spending on robotics, drones and associated services in Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) is expected to reach US$120.4 billion by 2022, tripling the total spending in 2018.

“Heading into 2020, we encourage governments and businesses to put a greater focus on harnessing robotic technologies to solve some of the most pressing societal issues. When combined with the power of 5G, which is scheduled for rollout (in 2020), we believe that robotic technologies have the potential to unlock value not just for businesses, consumers, but also for society as a whole,” he said.

K is for knowing you better

“The future of personalisation is heavily dependent on leveraging technology to create scalable customer-first solutions. Particularly for companies operating in traditionally mass-market industries, high accuracy in customer-product fit is critical. Taking skincare for example, skin needs go beyond just skin type to include lifestyle and environment, all equally important factors that should be accounted for when it comes to creating the right skincare routine,” said Navneet Kaur, CEO and Founder of Yours.

Yours leverages machine learning and computer vision and a proprietary personalisation model to create personalised skincare regimens.

L is for location

“In 2020, location services will continue to advance and serve up more meaningful, personalised experiences to users, inviting them to engage with their environment like never before. No longer just about wayfinding, location services will enable a new host of services based on proximity and preferences, delivering value to both the provider and the user in the form of customised offers for the user and consumer insights for the provider,” said Larry Lunetta, VP of Security and Wireless LAN Marketing at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

M is for medicine

Source: Hitachi Vantara.
Ma.

Johnny Ma, CTO (Health & Life Sciences), Hitachi Vantara, noted that modern healthcare systems are undergoing a paradigm shift in the delivery of care. “Traditional centralised and procedure-based operations are now shifting to patient-centric, personalised medicine, from one-way patient information flow and invasive care to two-way communication and image-based treatment.

“This paradigm shift is further accelerating the challenges of managing, protecting, sharing, applying and analysing health and medical data, which continue to grow rapidly in volume, variety, velocity and mobility,” he said.

“The key for us is to create a vibrant, intelligent and agile data platform that can manage, protect and mobilise an ever-increasing health and medical data load. When implemented correctly, a data platform of this kind can enable health and life sciences organisations to easily access, collaborate and share data, converting that data into meaningful insights for applications such as analytics or innovation.”

Holger Reisinger, SVP Large Enterprise at Jabra, noted that companies are trying to integrate empathy with machine interaction. “Perhaps it will then go so far as to play into healthcare. People are more isolated by technology, but it can also help people emotionally with issues like stress and anxiety,” he said.

“There will be a lot of stories around health, but not in all the ways most people think. People think of health as a chip detecting an illness ahead of a doctor, or measuring your heartrate, but I think the first step is using tech to help people where mobility or cognitive skills are diminishing. AI will help people with things like memory, medication reminders, accessibility or even anxiety,” added Hartmann of Jabra.

Jeff Hurmuses, Area VP and MD, Asia Pacific at Malwarebytes, says healthcare organisations need to watch out as the sensitive data they hold will continue to make them hot targets for threat actors.

He said, “As Singapore continues on the journey of digitalising the healthcare sector, there will be more threat actors attempting to find loopholes in the system in order to steal data. Earlier cases of data leaks such as the records of HIV patients as well as the mishandled personal data of blood donors by the Health Sciences Authority (HSA) did not result in data landing in the hands of hackers. However, we may not be as lucky next time. Healthcare is currently the seventh-most targeted industry by cybercriminals according to data from Malwarebytes, and this highlights the growing threat and reason for increased concern about healthcare security as we move into 2020.”

O is for omnichannel marketing

Source: Mobvista.
Wang.

Vivi Wang, Business Development Director (SEA and TW) at Mobvista said, “The massive number of mobile advertisements has since given rise to programmatic, which makes it possible for mobile advertisers to deliver personalised content to individuals.

“The increasing connectivity of the Internet of Things (IoT), facilitated by improved 5G networks, would mean that mobile advertisers will be able to seek new ways to reach potential customers through smart technologies.

“To keep up with the audience and consistently reach them, companies will need to diversify advertising channels and platforms – and that means that future marketers will need to possess the necessary skills to select and analyse relevant methods of advertising their brands.”

P is for policy vs execution

While BlackBerry predicts convergence for resources overseeing endpoint protection and endpoint management, Nigel Thompson, VP, Product Marketing, BlackBerry said the analyst position is that the CISO is responsible for policy while IT operations is responsible for IT implementation and execution. "That's the way they see it and I think that's probably where it's going to go. So eventually the decision-making process will come from both groups for the toolsets... I would predict that it's probably going to take two to four years depending on the organisation and where they're at, to start to bring that convergence together."

Blxckberry has recognised this split with technology that can do both endpoint management and endpoint protection, but which is positioned as beng able to do just one thing to the CISO and IT operations respectively, Thompson said.

"We're going to build essentially one agent that could be deployed in both of those scenarios because we recognise that in the near term they're still going to be run by two organisations," he shared.

Q is for quantum computing

Tim Hollebeek, Industry and Standards Technical Strategist at DigiCert, shared that the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is working towards a standardised PQC algorithm by 2022-2024, which will kick off a global effort to deploy it.

“Companies that have inventoried their cryptographic systems and emphasised cryptographic agility will have a relatively easy time deploying it; others, not so much,” he said.

Hollebeek also believes that a quantum computer will solve an economically-important problem in 2020. “This will kick off a new era of investment in accelerating quantum computing development based on the demonstration of practical benefits. Adoption of post-quantum cryptography will need to keep up,” he said.

Rana Gupta, APAC VP for Cloud Protection and Licensing activity at Thales said, “2020 will see more data breaches in anticipation of cracking the data when quantum computing becomes cheap and more affordable down the road. With potential breakthroughs like Google’s this year, it’s only a matter of time before more quantum computing power is achieved.

"When this happens, the encryption techniques used to sign messages and protect encryption keys will be rendered obsolete. In anticipation of that, (2020) will see an increase in the encrypted communications and encrypted data stolen by hackers as they stockpile information waiting for the tools to unlock it. So, in effect, quantum breaches will have already happened, long before the computing power comes to fruition.”

R is for robotic process automation (RPA)

"In 2020, robotics process automation (RPA) will continue its disruptive rise and become even more ingrained in our everyday lives. By the end of 2019, Gartner predicts that RPA revenue will reach US$1.3 billion and forecasts even more growth in the new year. However, there is one big issue when it comes to this integration of RPA - security," Darrell Long, VP of Product Marketing at One Identity said.

"With the rapid adoption of RPA, security has become an afterthought, leaving major vulnerabilities. Like we’ve seen with other innovations, there will be a significant breach to RPA technology in 2020, as this technology will draw attention from cybercriminals who are after the privileged data RPA technologies hold. Unfortunately, security will be applied once it's too late and regulations are forced on the use of RPA technology."

“While many RPA platforms now offer AI capabilities, they currently are used as two separate entities – one, rules-based, and the other, adaptive and predictive. In (2020), RPA and process analytics will become entirely infused with AI and machine learning, accelerating process mining and discovery, and dramatically simplifying human effort in these areas. Moving forward, bots will be able to automatically identify the best processes to automate, act upon this insight, and optimise deployments throughout to guarantee the best possible results,” said Adrian Jones, Executive VP, Automation Anywhere.

Jones also said that RPA skills will be in high demand in Asia. “Individuals with the requisite skills in RPA will see their starting salaries rise, and this will prompt more professionals to upskill to ride on the waves of demand,” he said.

Kumar of ASG Technologies said that companies are moving from RPA and silo-ed systems for building mobile versus web apps to a single user interface with integrated automation that can also help them build processes and create ready-to-use mobile apps. “And that saves 40% to 50% of costs 60% of the time, so you're able to have faster speed to market, you're able to respond to business earlier,” he said.

Self-service coding will be the order of the day, Kumar said. “It'd be drag-and-drop, which means you could build apps in five minutes, in an hour. We've showed demos of building apps in five minutes (that have) simple processes. Complicated ones may take a little longer. And that's where we see the general IT moving towards,” he said.

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The A-Z of tech predictions 2020: A to I

The A-Z of tech predictions 2020: S to Z