In the first of a five-part series, here are what industry experts are predicting in technology for 2023, in alphabetical order:
$ is for (digital) money
Nigel Green, founder and CEO of the deVere Group, remains “utterly confident that digital is the
inevitable future of money.” He noted that more and
more institutional investors, household name investors, Wall Street
giants, and multinational corporations are all increasing their exposure
to crypto.
“They understand and value the key characteristics
of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are designed for this century and,
therefore, are growing in appeal. These include that they’re borderless,
making them perfectly suited to a globalised world of commerce, trade,
and people; that they are digital, making them an ideal match to the
increasing digitalisation of our world; and that demographics are on the
side of cryptocurrencies as younger people are more likely to embrace
them than older generations,” he said.
Green further said that Asia will continue to be at the heart of the fintech revolution. “We attribute this to several key factors. These include a proactive approach to innovation by regulators; the plethora of virtual banks; the development of the wider tech ecosystem, especially application programming interfaces (APIs); and the influx of Chinese financial and tech giants into the sector," he said.
“We expect fintech investment will continue to build momentum in 2023 because it improves customer experience and is increasingly demanded. It also helps corporates increase efficiency, increase productivity, lower operational costs, and improve competitive advantage.”
5 is for 5G
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| Source: CommScope. Aoude. |
"Since the introduction of 5G technology, there have been numerous interruptions of its deployment, including prolonged labour shortages and supply chain issues. As we enter 2023, the focus will be about making the existing networks stronger for both consumers and businesses," said Raed Aoude, Sales Director, Service Provider, MENA, FSA & SEA, CommScope.
"Previously, 5G’s key benefit has been on delivering faster wireless networks in a more flexible setting, but to showcase its full potential, such as supporting latency sensitive, high reliability, and extended Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, 5G will need to expand into a broader range of use cases and applications in order for the telecoms industry to truly leverage 5G as a standalone monetisable network."
"From enabling cashier less payment, real-time analytics, personalised promotions, asset tracking and supply chain optimisation, private wireless and edge will be key to unlocking the next generation of the shopping and CX experience."
CX stands for customer experience.
See also X is for eXperiences.
A is for adoption
“With increasing tech
adoption rates, now even your elderly aunt is chatting with friends on a
digital platform. But this widespread comfort with technology doesn’t
extend to emerging technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR). While
younger employees will seamlessly adopt AI and VR technologies in work
activities like coaching, older workers will remain wary,” said Dr Jonathan
Passmore, SVP of Coaching, CoachHub.
Another adoption trend involves fintech. According to deVere's Green, banks have long been playing ‘catch-up’ as customer expectations evolve while regulatory requirements and tech advance. Banks will be forced to adopt fintech capabilities in 2023 because Millennials have become the fastest-growing cohort of clients, Green said.
“Millennials have grown up on technology. They are digital natives. They’ve been influenced by the enormous surge in tech as they came into adulthood – which came around the same time as the global financial crash that hit in 2008. Against this backdrop, they seemingly became comfortable using fintech to help them access, manage and use their money rather than using a traditional bank,” he elaborated.
According to Green, mobile-first Millennials expect easy, immediate access and control of their finances in the palm of their hand, from transferring money and paying bills in a tap or swipe to real-time access and data about their spending habits.
“Banks, finally, are becoming aware of this,” Green said.
A is also for attention
"The greatest challenge brands and advertisers will face in 2023 is capturing consumers' attention. Standing out amidst a sea of advertisements and a variety of content types - across a dizzying array of digital delivery platforms - is becoming increasingly complex. In a 2022 study conducted by Sapio and DoubleVerify, Four Fundamental Shifts in Advertising and Media, survey respondents reported that they believe they see between one and 50 ads per day; other estimates suggest the true average figure is around 4,000," said Conrad Tallariti, RVP for Sales, Asia, DoubleVerify.
"Where ads appear determines their impact, according to consumers. The battle for consumer attention is heating up, with brands facing hurdles in engaging consumers. But for savvy marketers, emerging platforms offer new opportunities in their fight for consumer attention. YouTube dominates as the No. 1 proprietary platform for securing the attention of respondents in 15 out of 18 countries surveyed — followed by Facebook (39%) and Instagram (28%). Newer platforms continue to attract consumer time and engagement; one example in the APAC region would be TikTok with 43% of 18 to 24-year-olds reporting they plan on spending more time in the app over the next 12 months."
Tallariti added: "Timing is also essential for APAC audiences, with two-thirds stating that they are more likely to pay attention if a video ad isn’t too long (71%) and if an ad catches their interest in the first five seconds (72%). Among all regions, APAC also stood out with 50% of respondents stating that ads with celebrities and influencers would capture their attention. This part of the world was also among the top markets that would pay attention to ads that play audio automatically.
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| Source: Dailymotion. Bastha. |
"Attention measurement should be at the core of (advertisers') creative process. Building advertising experiences rather than advertising formats will help brands create better engagement with their audiences. Attention metrics will soon become standard media KPIs, especially for video advertising," said Bichoi Bastha, Chief Business and Revenue Officer, Dailymotion.
A is for automation, too
"The ability to streamline processes and drive efficiency can be huge for the bottom line, which is why I think automation and intelligent automation will be key in 2023," said Daniel Newman, Principal Analyst of Futurum Research in a blog post.
"Get employees working on tasks that will advance business instead of time-consuming and repetitive tasks that are a drain on resources and your bottom line is bound to improve."
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| Source: Entrust. Cook. |
experience a skills and resources gap, this cloud reality has become difficult — and costly — to manage," he noted.
"Compliance becomes a challenge for businesses especially as enterprises continue to add more cloud environments. In 2023, enterprises will increase the adoption of management tools and automated processes to bring order, security and cost control, to their multicloud infrastructures. Enterprises will also look to vendor consolidation to simplify management and mitigate costs and risk."
B is for backup
"The 3-2-1-0 rule is well-known by all. Focusing on backup availability, it requires businesses to:
3: Create one primary backup and two copies.
2: Save your backups to two different types of media.
1: Keep at least one backup file offsite.
0 : Be sure to have verified backups without errors," said Sunny Chua, Singapore GM, Wasabi Technologies.
"However, with nearly all cloud vendors today offering 11 nines of durability, having three copies means a lot less in preventing data loss than it did in the days before cloud storage became mainstream. After all, gone are the days when tapes broke and files were corrupted while being transferred. To put things in perspective, 11 nines of durability offers so much redundancy that even if a business had one million 1 MB files to store, the business would risk losing just one file every 659,000 years."
He added: "Rather, the focus from backup strategies will move from availability of copies to speed of access to those backup copies. Especially in today’s digital age, businesses are more susceptible than ever to attacks on their data - particularly in the Asia Pacific region (APAC), which remains the most targeted region by cyberattackers. With that, a backup strategy that ensures the seamless, error-free, and speedy restoration of services is critical."
C is for cyber resilience
Righard Zwienenberg, Senior Research Fellow at ESET, drew a distinction between cybersecurity and cyber resilience, as cybersecurity refers to defending the systems in a business, whereas resilience would mean that the business must know what to do if something has happened."With the current solutions that we have, can we be cyber resilient? My answer is no, because you have to start with the operating system," he said.
"You have to to redesign the operating system from scratch."
"In 2023, 'cyber resilience' will overtake cybersecurity as the top security priority. Companies will begin to see Cyber Resilience Officers enter the picture," predicted Gina Wong, MD – Singapore, Kyndryl.
"While most C-suites in the region (69%, according to IDC) have prioritised cybersecurity in the boardroom, complexities, legacy practices, and ill-defined roles and responsibilities still hamper efforts in addressing these challenges.
"Cyber resilience will no longer be just a CISO or IT problem in 2023. Companies must understand that they are more likely to endure a cyber event in 2023 than a physical disaster, and they must protect all areas of their business. Every level of an organisation’s executive suite is going to be part of the cyber resilience conversation and equation."
"CISOs will move beyond just insurance and checkbox compliance to opt for more proactive cybersecurity measures in order to maximise ROI in the face of budget cuts, shifting investment into tools and capabilities that continuously improve their cyber resilience," agreed Tony Jarvis, Director of Enterprise Security, Darktrace, Asia Pacific & Japan.
D is for data
Analytics
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| Source: Amplitude. Velthuis. |
"At a recent event in Singapore, I asked a group of 25 leaders what their biggest pain point was, and their answers all centered around data. Every business is sitting on a mountain of data they’ve collected over the years, but most of them have no idea what to do with it. This means companies are spending a lot of time and money collecting and storing data without getting a return on that investment," shared Mark Velthuis, VP, Sales, Asia Pacific and Japan, Amplitude.
"The expected recession in 2023 will put pressure on business leaders to see a return on every dollar spent, and that will accelerate the shift from data collection to data analysis. The companies that leverage their existing data to better understand their customers, improve their product experience, and boost retention will come out on top."
Paul Flannery, VP, International Channel Sales at Epicor said a consolidated source of truth is critical for analytics. " Although there is a lot of hype about the potential of predictive analytics, machine learning (ML) and AI, these solutions can’t offer full value to customers if that one source of truth isn’t already in place," he said.
"Customers need one source of truth for all their data points, with a digital core that runs through their businesses. Other apps which monitor disparate parts of the businesses should be able to integrate with this digital core... For example, if unpredictable energy prices, stock costings or the wage bill data is in silos, any financial and business planning tools will be of limited use this winter," he elaborated.
"Business planning technology solutions have never been more vital. Channel partners that can offer solutions that include forward planning, financial planning and simulations that give buyers the data to make the right decisions in a volatile environment should be well placed in the next 12 months," he predicted, adding that the interoperability of all of the solutions is a must to arrive at that single source of truth.
Architectures
2023 will see accelerated adoption of two data architectural approaches – data fabric and data mesh, said Ravi Shankar, Senior VP and CMO, Denodo.
"Data fabric is a composable stack of data management technologies and data mesh is a process orientation for distributed groups of teams, and both are critical to enterprises that want to manage their data better. Easy access to data, and ensuring it is governed and secure, is important to every data stakeholder as it is critical for dashboarding and reporting, advanced analytics, ML, and AI projects," he said.
"So, in 2023, we should expect a rapid increase in the adoption of both architectural approaches within mid-to-large size enterprises."
"Speaking with other CIOs, I've noticed that companies are growing exponentially without a plan to organise their data. When a company considers scaling at all costs but doesn’t invest in the right technology to support that growth, there will be issues," shared Naveen, CIO, Databricks.
"Part of the problem is that CIOs today have to manage too many systems. Too many disjointed data pools lead to duplicated, siloed, and locked-up data, which is not only timely and costly to manage and analyse, but also leads to security issues. For a company to truly move forward with digital transformation, they need to combine data science and data analytics and draw from a single source of truth.
"We’ll see more CIOs cutting back on vendor spending to simplify their data architecture. Companies that implement an architecture that combines hindsight and predictive analytics to deliver efficient and intelligent solutions will win in the end."
Fermin Serna, Chief Security Officer, Databricks, suggested that enterprises will increasingly migrate to the data lakehouse, a unified data platform for previously=siloed workloads such as data engineering, warehousing, streaming, data science and machine learning. "Unifying these silos unlocks tremendous business value for businesses, but also requires the organisation to evolve to realise the full potential of the platform. Understanding that data remains one of the most valued assets within a business, forward-thinking enterprises will also be looking for simplicity by consolidating on a single vendor lakehouse architecture," Serna said.
"Enterprises will evolve their teams and processes to adopt a secure, centralised management and governance model with the associated tooling for the data assets that span multiple workloads."
"Whether happenstance or intentional, most enterprises are multicloud today. As enterprises consolidate all of their data-oriented use cases on a data lakehouse, they will prioritise their cloud vendor decisions based on data workload needs including ease of use, performance, regulatory compliance, and unified management across clouds," added David Meyer, SVP of Product Management, Databricks.
Augmentation
"In 2023, the use of augmented data management will accelerate, helping data management professionals focus on delivering data-driven insights rather than being held back by routine administrative tasks," added Shankar from Denodo.
"This is why augmented data management has recently been embraced by various data management vendors where, with the application of AI, organisations are able to automate many data management tasks. Each layer of a data fabric - namely data ingestion, data processing, data orchestration, data governance, etc. should have AI/ML baked into it."
Complexity
"With data being the crux of most business decisions, C-level decision makers are constantly finding more ways to better utilise and monetise their data. The pandemic created a test bed for effective data sharing between entities as well as across borders. For instance, we have seen the Singapore government share and use data across its various ministries to track the impact of COVID-19 and linking it to timely local data sources to support medical responses," said Chua Chee Pin, Area VP of ASEAN, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Taiwan, Commvault.
"Data-savvy organisations will gain from data that is better leveraged and managed. Data and workloads have evolved over time, leading to a multigenerational data sprawl that introduces multiple risks to businesses. In 2023, businesses will look to a simplified and unified solution to manage the complexities of enterprise data while ensuring data security at the same time."
Costs
.png "Source: Databricks. Andrew Martin. Look to AI to enhance data management.") |
| Source: Databricks. Martin. |
"AI will also raise capabilities to deliver anticipatory and personalised services, and is set to be a strong driver of growth to offset economic volatilities," said Andrew Martin, Head of Databricks South Asia about circumstances in Singapore.
Governance
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| Source: Talend. Pierson. |
"For example, include a steady cadence of meetings focused on maintaining compliance and aligning with legal to create an actionable roadmap for potential rising regulations. These collaborative efforts will ensure companies keep compliance on top of mind, even as more regulations crop up."
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| Source: Talend. Vigier. |
"The last few years have been focused on infrastructure velocity with
the cloud, infrastructure as code, and the shift left mantra. Tooling
has been introduced to provide cloud posture management and attack
surface
monitoring in these high-velocity contexts. In 2023, leaders will turn a
strengthened focus up the stack into data movement, provenance, health,
and governance driven by an increasing focus on data sovereignty and
upcoming data regulations and frameworks such as the European Health Data Space," added Nick Vigier, CISO, Talend.
Privacy
"Digital
privacy has been a hot topic for years, but until recently, it’s been
all talk and no action...as tech giants phase out third-party cookies
and government privacy regulations evolve, I expect companies to invest
more in first-party data collection and tools," said Velthuis. First-party data is collected and owned by the company, as opposed to third-party data collected an owned by someone else.
"First-party data
might seem limiting at first glance, but it actually provides a much
deeper understanding of the customer journey. You can see what product
features are working, where users are getting stuck, and which actions
lead to the desired outcome. And the good news is that most people are
happy to share their behavioural data with a company if it will enhance
their product experience. In fact, they expect it. The faster companies
embrace first-party data strategies, the faster digital products will
improve."
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| Source: TrafficGuard. Taylor. |
"From the deprecation of cookies to new privacy features in Android and iOS, it's evident that data in digital advertising is being decimated. In the coming year, advertisers will have to keep updated on the evolution of data and privacy regulations while tracking the trends of how it’s impacting customer behaviour towards ad clicks," said TrafficGuard's Founder Luke Taylor.
Taylor said marketers and advertisers have to prepare themselves for the 'third-party cookie apocalypse', or Google's move to discontinue the use of third-party cookies in Chrome, currently slated for 2024. The cookies are essential to determining user behaviour and what advertisements that user will see.
"This is also accompanied by challenges such as decreasing targeting options and transparency, which will give rise to challenges in placing ads relative to customers.
"Contextual targeting will be an important challenge that marketers and advertisers will have to prioritise in the coming year. Brands can revisit and experiment with alternative targeting solutions to continue developing highly personalised content and ads. Therefore, learning how to obtain
and analyse post-cookie data will be key for many in 2023."
"The reality for many marketers is that people now want to be able to control their privacy. The collection of data is no longer the same as it was 5 years ago – the recent moves from Safari and Firefox mean that consumers now have the choice to allow or restrict advertisers to have access to their data. With even more limitations imposed on marketers, this means that marketers now have less to
work with and are able to less accurately measure the customer’s journey over time," added Taylor.
"However, in light of these restrictions, we’re seeing a resurgence of interest in incrementality and market mix modelling (MMM). As we move into 2023, we can see that marketers are trying to understand its implementation and how it will be able to benefit their businesses – a very different model from the deterministic data that marketers are accustomed to and reliant on."
With contextual targeting, website advertisements appear only if they are related to the website's content. Market mix modelling is a statistical way to determine the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, while incrementality refers to the marketing efforts that result in business growth beyond existing brand equity.
Security
"As executive conversations around data literacy skyrocket, those conversations must include the entire
organisation, especially security. A widespread understanding of data will have a tangible impact on your organisation’s culture for the better – but only if it’s safeguarded. Looking ahead to 2023, those in
leadership and in security departments should encourage employees to treat data like a currency, as it
comprises key business information. To maintain the security of this valuable resource, creating a data
culture, including controlled access, education programmes to foster a greater sense of data responsibility will be imperative," said Vigier of Talend.
Sovereignty
"With increasingly turbulent waters to tread in the form of both natural disasters and geopolitical tensions, ensuring data sovereignty will become a non-negotiable step for businesses. We are already witnessing that in effect today. In Japan, we decided to build one data centre in Tokyo and another in Osaka 500 km away because of considerations around floods, tsunamis, and earthquakes. This is unsurprising given that economic losses from such incidents cost the APAC region US$72 billion in 2021," said Chua of Wasabi Technologies.
"Similarly, there is very little latency between cities in neighbouring countries - such as Singapore and nearby Johor Bahru in Malaysia - and yet data sovereignty concerns are driving demand for separate data centres to be built in-country itself. Especially as the digital economy of the region continues to grow and data continues to drive value, storage needs will become increasingly local.
"In 2023, we will then see growing threats such as severe natural disasters and geopolitical conflicts become key players in organisations’ data backup and archiving strategies. Next year and beyond, it will be more critical than ever for organisations to think carefully about the location of their data backups to help avoid catastrophic data loss."
Value
"According to Gartner, through 2022, only 20% of analytic insights will deliver business outcomes.
Planning, processes and KPIs are the most frequent sources of data projects failures. For data leaders to
succeed,
they have to drive optimum efficiency and put in place the right
measurement frameworks," said Pierson of Talend.
E is for ethics
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| Source: Workday. Leach. |
"The compliance and open book analysis of how AI and ML is being applied will allow organisations to establish greater trust, thus allowing the advancement of enterprise AI adoption on a wider scale.
More providers will begin disclosing how their ML models lead to their outputs (e.g.,
recommendations) and predictions, possibly even at an individual level."
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