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