Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018

The continued innovation and technology evolution has resulted in seemingly endless options and technologies available for companies. Current trend will be here to stay, and technology leaders need to adjust their digital strategies to develop a reasonable pace for adoption and continuous development.

Following technologies will be in focus during 2018.

1. Artificial Intelligence & machine learning

During 2017 it was hard to escape predictions that artificial intelligence is about to change the world. In 2018, this is unlikely to change. However, an increased focus on repeatable and quantifiable results is likely to ground some of the “big picture” thinking in reality. With Google, Apple, and Facebook investing in this arena, This domain is ready to take off. I expect 2018 to provide a continuous stream of small but sure steps forward, as machine learning and neural network technology takes on more routine tasks.

2. IoT & Security

While it’s been trending for a few years now, Internet of Things (IOT) security will rise to the top of the security trend list in 2018. IoT security is a complex and multifaceted problem, and one that affects all organizations. Organizations need to be proactive with the security of their IoT devices, whether it’s those they produce or those they consume. By 2022, IoT technology will be in 90% of electronics for all designs.

 3. Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality

Augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality are changing the way that people perceive and interact with the digital world. Combined with conversational platforms, a fundamental shift in the user experience to an invisible and immersive experience will emerge. Application vendors, system software vendors and development platform vendors will all compete to deliver this model

4. Blockchain
 Technology

Blockchain is a digital ledger in which transactions made in bitcoin or other cryptocurrency are recorded in date order and publicly. The benefit is that this removes business friction by being independent of individual applications or participants, and can potentially allow untrusted parties to exchange commercial transactions, but caution is still advised when dealing with blockchain and the regulations behind it (or the lack thereof). This technology holds the promise to change industries, and although the conversation often surrounds financial opportunities, blockchain has many potential applications in government, healthcare, content distribution, supply chain and more.

5. Visual and VOICE activated search

Looking at current trend by 2020 visual and voice search will increase digital commerce revenue by 28%. With visual and voice search gaining lot of momentum and on the way to being dominant touch screen device search modes, enterprises should experiment to identify the best ways to capitalize on this consumer shift. Given search methods also enables companies to gather more useful information about consumer habits, and early responders will see an increase in conversion rates, revenue, new customers and customer satisfaction.

 6.    Re-platforming the enterprise

In 2018, we’ll see an aggressive move to consolidate IT platforms so companies can respond to market changes faster, be more productive and make better-informed decisions. These common platforms are rich in analytics, follow the information flow of the business and are simple enough that users can constantly change the business without writing (much) code. Moreover, they bring an operational and evergreen scale to traditionally bespoke enterprise IT. These common platforms — from Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others — provide very suitable if not substantially improved replacements for what used to be custom builds. Common platform will provide not only a foundation to improve processes, but also telemetry and insights. For smart adopters, we may see twofold to fivefold business acceleration.

7. Intelligent Apps and Big Data Analytics

AI is already integrated into the technologies we use every day, and will continue to do so. Intelligent apps will change the whole market phenomenon of 2018. Big Data Analytics will drive the next big paradigm shift in the IT industry in the year 2018. The exponential growth in the organizational data and increase in the number of connected devices fuels the demand for faster handling of these large volumes of mission-critical structured & unstructured data. Big Data analytics will shape the future by instantly mining the data stores for machine learning and other real-time applications. Data is the future! Enterprises would need to reckon best strategies to collect, manage as well as process large volumes of important data from a variety of sources to gain the competitive edge.

8.   Software-defined Storage

One of the biggest revolutions in the storage technology has been brought in by Software-defined storage technology which is effectively a storage hypervisor turning legacy storage systems. Promising scalability and high-level of performance to big data, SDS enhances storage system intelligence out of hardware into a layer of software that manages the entire storage infrastructure as a single entity. Software-defined storage data centers are the next step for virtualization and cloud computing as they provide a solution to support both legacy enterprise applications as well as cloud computing solutions.

9.   Cloud technology……. Out on the edge

Edge Computing, in the context of IoT, is the idea that you can actually do some of the computational work required by a system close to the endpoints instead of in a cloud or a data center. The intent is to minimize latency, which, according to Renaud, means that it’s going to be a hot trend in certain kinds of industrial IoT application. The hottest trend is the use of dedicated edge boxes to connect brownfield devices or to do some form of low-latency analytics or control-plane applications.

10.   Wi-Fi 2018

The world of enterprise Wi-Fi moves fast, but 2018 is going to see gear based on 802.11ac Wave 2 remain the state of the art – its successor, 802.11ax, is still one for the future.

Wave 2 is the latest Wi-Fi standard to be certified by the IEEE. Its main technological innovation is MU-MIMO, or multi-user multiple-input, multiple-output. In practice, this means that manufacturers can create access points that talk to multiple devices at the same instant. Earlier APs had to handle multiple streams sequentially. The Wave 2 standard could open the door for gigabit Wi-Fi, though. The PHY (physical) rate, which in turn affects the throughput rate of data transfer, is much higher in Wave 2. Wave 1 PHY rate maxes out at 1.3 Gbps, while Wave 2 can be 2.34 Gbps. Even if the throughput was 50% lower than the theoretical PHY rate for Wave 2, in theory it would still be above 1 Gbps.

Few other trends those will be part of the discussion are:

1.    Quality of Experience & Customer Experience Becomes Immersive

2.    Tri-Band WIFI technology

3.    5G rollout

4.    Home Automation

5.    Mesh Networks

6.   Chatbots

Android O feature spotlight:

Android O feature spotlight:

1. Connectivity enhancements : 

Automatically enable WiFi when you're near a saved network, There's a toggle for this feature in the O preview WiFi settings, but it's grayed out along with the open network notification. Although, it's off whereas the network notification is stuck on. Presumably this will be accessible in a future version of Android O. We've still got three more builds before the final one.

2. Picture-in-Picture mode

Picture-in-picture, which is already available on Android TV, is coming to Android O. This is mostly used for video playback. Android O won't be restricted to phones, so there will be improved arrow and tab key navigation for when used with a physical keyboard.

3. Multi-display support

Interestingly, Android O will be able to support multiple displays, allowing a user to move an activity to one screen to the next.

4. Notifications in Android O

Many of the new features regard notifications, and in Android O we will see user-customisable notification channels whereby alerts are grouped by type. Users will be able to snooze notifications, and devs can set time limits for notifications to time out. Also adjustable will be the background colours of notifications, and the messaging style.

5. Background limits

In Android Nougat Google introduced the ability to restrict certain app activities in the background, and in Android O it improves on this by placing the priority on extending battery life without user-input.

6. Better management of cached data

Every app will have a storage space quota for cached data, and when the system needs to free up disk space it will delete data from apps using more than their allocated quota first.

7. New enterprise features

Google says it has made the profile owner and device owner management modes more powerful, productive and easier to provision than ever, with highlights including the ability to use a managed profile on a corporate-owned device and enterprise management for file-based encryption.

You can read about the new updates coming to Android O in more detail over on the Android Developer's site.

8. Copy Less

This feature is expected to ease copying text from one app and pasting it within another by giving suggestions in the second app as to what you might be about to type based on what you were doing in the previous app.

9. Improved gestures

Today you can quickly call up your contacts using Ok Google, but in Android O you will be able to draw onscreen the letter C to open your contacts menu. This is similar to what we've seen in many Chinese phones - the ability to in standby mode draw onscreen a letter and open an app of your choice - though here it should work when the screen is switched on and in any app. This feature may not be ready in time for Android O, however, the source warned.

Why Bluetooth required for IOT success?

Bluetooth technology is already embedded in current day to day lives, and it will continue to have an impact to make “Things” smarter. Instrumentation can become smarter with wireless data capture. Wireless data reporting, or capturing, offers convenience and efficiency to many different industries. Spectrum and reliability of Bluetooth would be a good differentiator.

In the Education field, Teachers can quickly monitor student’s reports/status from a mobile device instead of walking from room to room and paying attention to everyone. Consumers can enjoy music from their wireless Bluetooth headphones and track their heartbeat and progress from a wearable, Bluetooth-connected device while running. House doors can be unlocked and lights can be turned on or off by simply touching your smartphone. Even industrial machines can be monitored and controlled by a Bluetooth-connected device to determine their status or predictive maintenance needs. Bluetooth beacons would be available with different options.

Bluetooth, which operates in the 2.4 GHz band using frequency hopping spread spectrum on 79 1-megahertz channels, has kept pace with technological evolution and found a place in both consumer-facing “Internet of Things” uses – smart homes and wearables, for instance – as well as in the industrial “Internet of Things” where adaptability and reliability are requisites.

Expectations for more immediate control of network-connected IoT devices through smartphone apps translates into a growing need for simultaneous connectivity to Bluetooth mobile devices and 802.15.4 networks. For example, users will expect to interact through their smartphones directly with an IoT device in an appliance even while that same device communicates with the cloud for overall home management services or if the device temporarily loses its cloud connection.



To make this point, let’s take a look at a new Bluetooth module from Silicon Labs. The Blue Gecko BGM113 module has a 3-decibel mill watt power output optimized for applications with a 150-foot range; the company says this is a good fit for “smartphone accessories, wearable sports and fitness products, wireless locks and point-of-sale devices.”




In keeping with IoT product trends in both the industrial and consumer space, unit price and battery life are huge considerations. These items are most important factors for Industrial IOT.


Bluetooth low energy also provides much lower power consumption than Classic, which is useful in battery operated systems such as wireless sensors.”

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