In January, we are used to seeing many press releases about technological trends for the coming year. Some of the most interesting ones come from the “cousins” of the IT and Telco sector, we have made a mix of them for you, trying to extrapolate the most useful information for professionals in the Integration sector.
Anything-as-a-service solutions
A visible trend in all fields, even in our daily lives: the preference to use a service instead of buying an object. From the subscriptions we all take out instead of buying CDs or similar, to the car and facility rental models, the trend is reaching industry and offices, leading suppliers to cut back on hardware offerings and focus on cloud computing, software, and infrastructure as a service, and network as a service (Naas). This model is not yet as popular in AVC, but we expect it to gain traction this year, especially with cost- and maintenance-intensive solutions.
Adoption of hybrid cloud/cybersecurity
With the consolidation of the hybrid working model, and companies now having countless micro-branches that correspond with the homes or very small offices of employees and collaborators, flexible, secure, and effective connectivity, sharing, and communication solutions are needed for IT teams (and others). Hybrid solutions are perfect for companies that already have large physical data centers (and also for sensitive data retention obligations), as they allow them to take advantage of the flexibility of the Cloud while retaining control and facilities. However, distributed data will require ad-hoc protection and security policies, especially with Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions, as threats are becoming more and more real even for small to medium-sized businesses. All of these considerations also have an impact on the installations of videoconferencing and multimedia systems in general for the corporate world.
Automation to AI
By offering services that are not available to companies (in terms of both skills and hardware), public cloud vendors are becoming leaders in the field of AI. While from a consumer perspective features such as facial recognition and virtual assistants will be integrated into an increasing number of products, from an enterprise perspective AI will enable increasing digitization by first and foremost facilitating virtualization and robotic process automation (RPA). For Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), this means automating every stage of operations, using AI to develop predictive and recovery models in multiple scenarios. Not to be underestimated is the fact that AI-enabled functionalities generate the need to collect a huge amount of data.
Concrete developments for 5G technology
Standalone 5G will go beyond the simple concept of ‘faster connectivity’ and bring new tangible use cases. On the one hand, service providers will be able to enrich their offerings at both the enterprise and consumer level, while enterprises will have access to new opportunities to monetize 5G, as they will be able to offer the best experiences through distributed clouds, as well as new capacities and latencies, and users will be able to enjoy more advanced entertainment, learning and work experiences enabled by Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence.
5G will be a differentiating factor for sectors where latency plays a key role, such as gaming (which has seen a strong increase in the pandemic period), but also robotics, telemedicine, or the connected home. Not only that: Artificial Intelligence in the future will protect the stability of the food chain and new sharing experiences with self-driving cars, while IoT will also improve the efficiency of supply chains.
We thank Amdocs, www.amdocs.com, and Juniper Networks, www.juniper.net, for these insights.
