In this year's A-Z, we have everything – incremental improvements, quantum leaps, and lots of food for thought. In part one of a three-part series on the technology outlook for 2020:
8 is for 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6)
“This marks an exciting year for businesses as smartphone manufacturers begin releasing their flagship models with support for 802.11ax support (Wi-Fi 6). While 5G gets the bulk of the attention, Wi-Fi 6 will be the complementary connectivity solution to propel organisations forward across all segments as the industry continues to undergo digitalisation,” said Steve Wood, VP, Asia Pacific Japan, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company.
A is for analytics
Increasing adoption
Tero Tolonen, VP Global Product Management, Jabra, said video analytics is becoming popular. “There is a lot of interest in the intelligence features that can be leveraged to make companies and buildings smarter, with things like people counting and occupancy for next-level business intelligence. People will begin to think differently of how their companies operate,” he said.
“From a technology perspective we’re seeing strong growth in the use of AI through video analytics or 3D lidar to provide granular operational and safety insights about flows of people, vehicles, or objects, while having the ability to protect people’s privacy,” said Justin Bean, Director of Smart Spaces and Video Intelligence Marketing, Hitachi Vantara.
“What we are seeing as a trend is a lot of data which is being stored either by entities or external parties will need a lot of analytics and some intelligent learnings by the systems themselves to be made use of in a better way, which will help (organisations) transform processes,” said Praveen Kumar, GM for Asia Pacific at ASG Technologies.
“Whether data is either structured or unstructured, you would build some level of automation and intelligence on that data that you already possess, to add more value, increase speed to market, so reduce time to market and at the same time, try and optimise costs and increase revenue. We believe there will be significant investments around how you can automate this content and make that a lot more agile and nimble.”
 |
| Source: SAP. Eberhard. |
Adjust's mobile marketing predictions for 2020 also refer touch on analytics.
Show me, and I'll name it
“The concept of Shazam – the service of identifying songs that are being played, has expanded across various industries. You can shop by analysing a photo or identifying plants or animals with a click. In 2020 'shazaming' data will serve as a metaphor for more enterprise use-cases where enterprises get insights before creating a dashboard. We could potentially point to a data source and get telemetry like where the data comes from, who uses it, what the data quality is, and how much of the data has changed today. Algorithms will help analytic systems fingerprint the data, find anomalies and insights, and suggest new data. This will enable micro-insights, and more collaboration on data before creating a full-fledged visualisation or dashboard,” said Dan Sommer, Qlik Senior Director, Global Market Intelligence Lead.
Analytics in finance
“When dealing with savvier customers, and higher capital benchmarks, financial analysts need deeper operational insights, and a clear understanding of their customers to rebuild trust, and to ensure continued profitability. To gain deeper insights, financial institutions need to empower their analysts with self-service data analytics platforms to facilitate fast data preparation, easy-to-use analytics for a unified picture of the customer and simple ways to share analytics with decision makers. Delivering all these in a seamless workflow will be key to help maintaining transparency and consistency required for regulatory compliance,” said Celine Siow, Regional VP, Asia and Japan, Alteryx.
 |
| Source: Oracle. Srinivasan. |
SME stands for small and medium-sized enterprise.
B is for business cases
“Business leaders today get bombarded with the flimsy notion that ‘blockchain is everywhere’ or that ‘AI trends disrupting the way you do business’. While such hype may seem inevitable especially when exciting technologies are involved, executives must be clearly aware that technologies are getting a bit long in the tooth before the real transformation has to happen. In order to not get carried away in the hype, it will be useful for companies to look at technologies through the lens of business capabilities: understand the business case and keep it in the loop when investigating and experimenting with technologies,” said Dr Jialu Shan, Research Fellow, IMD Global Digital Transformation Center, IMD Business School.
C is for containers and new questions
 |
| Source: Veritas. Rajendran. |
“This evolution is emphasising the need for mature backup and recovery processes that protect containerized data and applications wherever they reside.
“Currently, container technology allows for rapid and portable deployment of environments that furthers the abstraction started with virtualisation and enables additional abstraction of the hardware. As organisations continue to shift workloads and transition to hyperconverged infrastructure, they will need simplicity, ease of use, faster infrastructure deployment and the ability to easily scale.”
D is for DataOps
“DataOps will take centrestage in 2020. It is a methodology that encompasses the adoption of modern technologies, the processes that bring data from its raw to ready state, and the teams that work with data. Using DataOps, 80% of core data can be systematically delivered to business users, with self-service data preparation as a standalone area needed in fewer situations. With DataOps on the operational side, and analytic self-service on the business user side, fluidity across the whole information value chain is achieved, connecting synthesis with analysis,” said Sommer.
E is for email
“As more organisations focus on ensuring that business communication is seamless, it will become even more necessary to drive shifts in technology and approaches to bolster customer responsiveness. As email will continue to be a staple communication medium, being reachable and having backup systems in place in the face of hardware failure, cloud downtime, and security incidents will be even more crucial.
“Businesses will be drawn to new technology solutions that enable email continuity and which provide automatic rerouting to an active backup system in the event of email infrastructure downtime. By allowing businesses to switch to a backup system in flash, these innovative solutions allow organisations to prevent further commercial losses or damage to their business reputation,” said Dylan Castagne, MD, Retarus Asia.
F is for fintech
Getty Goh, CEO & Chairman, CoAssets, said that a positive outlook for the fintech sector has been fuelled by growth in digital payments and a widespread awareness that peer-to-peer financing is an effective way to support growth in personal and business financing. “In this rapidly evolving digital landscape, Singapore has positioned itself as a major industry player in the fintech space...The uptake of online alternative investment in Singapore has been supported by its highly educated workforce and favourable regulatory regime, and its alternative investment industry continues to evolve and grow amid ongoing regulatory change, constructive government support and increased allocations from sophisticated local and international investors. Furthermore, current macroeconomic headwinds and public market unpredictability are pushing project diversification right to the top of investors’ agendas,“ Goh said.
The next wave of innovation in financial services will be created on open platforms, using open APIs and open software solutions in what we see as a digital ‘marketplace’ of solutions connecting developers and financial services providers. This will give providers greater agility and help them to bring solutions to market faster. The future of finance is open and traditional financial institutions must embrace open banking and collaborative innovation in order to stay relevant," said Krzysztof Rojek, Senior Director, Global Solutions Consultant, APAC, Finastra.
"The acceleration of digital banking and super app models in Asia has seen the influx of more players than ever before into the financial services landscape. Traditional banks are losing market share to fintechs and non-bank players that are offering financial services in increasingly innovative ways. In this ultra-competitive environment, working in isolation with ‘closed’ systems is simply not an option any more.”
Read HSBC Hong Kong's explanation of open banking and how the bank uses APIs at present.
Super apps are also discussed in part three, under X is for eXperience.
G is for glass
“In the coming decade, as cities grapple with climate change, we believe that smart-tinting glass will become a given in new construction to improve building energy efficiency while letting in natural light,” said Wally Barnum, Senior Director of Software Engineering, Kinestral Technologies.
“Developers can more effectively meet energy-saving challenges by using smart building technologies such as electrochromic glass that mitigate the effects of climate change, increasing energy demands, and growing urbanisation.”
Electrochromic glass is also known as smart-tinting or dynamic glass.
H is for hyperconvergence
 |
| Source: NetApp. Gude. |
“And while there is potential, standardisation has been slow, and adoption even slower. Meanwhile, software-based virtualisation of storage, combined with software-based (but hardware-accelerated) compute and networking virtualisation solutions, offer much of the flexibility of hardware-based composable architectures today with lower cost and consistently increasing performance.
“Next year, attempts to build a true hardware-based rack-scale computing model will no doubt continue, and the space will continue to evolve quickly, but the majority of organisations that need to transform within 2020 will be best-served by the combination of modern HCI architectures (including disaggregated HCI) and software-based virtualisation and containerisation,” said Atish Gude, NetApp Chief Strategy Officer.
HCI stands for hyperconverged infrastructure.
I is for inventory innovation
 |
| Source: Zebra Technologies. Lim. |
“They are expecting more from data capture especially pertaining to 2D barcodes, vision-based recognition, and broader RFID adoption. RFID adoption is increasing at a rapid rate as customers look to improve asset visibility almost in real-time,” he said. “The adoption of UHF RAIN RFID EPC continues to expand, with the market growing by more than 30% in 2019 after a 15% growth in 2018.
“The need for inventory control will drive an uptick in RFID adoption in the retail vertical, especially as retailers work to build out a truly integrated retail experience. As EPC adoption grows, we can expect to see more and more products tagged by default – creating a ripple effect as it becomes even easier for more players in the integrated retail supply chain to adopt and benefit from the use of technology.”
EPC stands for electronic product code.
Explore:
The A-Z of tech predictions 2020: J to R
The A-Z of tech predictions 2020: S to Z
No comments:
Post a Comment