By Virender Jeet – Sr. VP Technology at Newgen Software
Did you follow the technology trends that had a significant impact on organizations in the year 2015? These were precisely the technologies that organisations could not afford to ignore.
Among a plethora of those, here are the picks that made it to the top.
- Mobility
As mobile devices continued to proliferate, an increased emphasis on serving the needs of the mobile user in diverse contexts and environments was seen, as opposed to focusing on devices alone.
- Internet of Things (IoT)
Adoption of IoT was witnessed across industries in the form of the pay-per-use model, applied to assets (such as industrial equipment), services (such as pay-as-you-drive insurance), people (such as movers), places (such as parking spots) and systems (such as cloud services).
- Analytics
Analytics took a centre stage as the volume of data generated by automation systems increased and vast pools of structured and unstructured data inside and outside the enterprise were analyzed.
- Context-rich systems
Ubiquitous automation intelligence combined with pervasive analytics drove the development of systems that are alert to their surroundings. By understanding the context of a user request, applications would not only adjust their security response but also adjust how information was delivered to the user.
- Cloud Computing
The convergence of cloud and mobile computing continued to promote the growth of centrally coordinated applications that could be delivered to any device.
- Software-defined applications and infrastructure
Software-defined networking, storage, data centres and security matured further. Cloud services became software-configurable through API calls, and applications too had rich APIs to access their function and content programmatically.
2016 – The year that will be
To deal with the rapidly changing demands of digital business and scale systems up or down rapidly, computing has to move away from static to dynamic models.
Consumers believe artificial intelligence (AI) will soon enable interaction with objects without the need for even a smart phone screen. And eight out of 10 consumers would like to use technology to enhance their vision, memory and hearing.
Without assigning a specific time-frame to the advent of AI, here’s a peek into the near future, including the existing trends that would continue to proliferate.
- Social Media
A social media strategy has become a must for all enterprises, be it banks, retailers or the government. With over one billion individuals logged on to various social networks, people are now using social media for advice on what products to buy, where to shop and even regarding what firms they want to work with. While most enterprises use social media for their customer service function only, many firms have now started using social media in tandem with their sales and marketing functions. This in turn is enabling firms to use data generated by the customers effectively to service their larger pools of customers.
- Advanced, pervasive and invisible analytics
Companies and individuals are generating billions of gigabytes of data annually. Data as well as content, properly analyzed and used in time, would emerge as an unbeatable competitive advantage. Enterprises would actively recognize the prospect big data and content management represents and adapt their IT strategy to capture such opportunities. Big data and content analytics would help retailers predict buying decisions of shoppers; it would help banks weed out fraudulent transactions; while governments would use big data to provide services directly to their citizens.
- Cloud computing
The undeniable power of cloud computing to foster innovations and improve productivity is now being accepted by both IT vendors and their customers. While the financial services and government sectors are mostly moving to a private cloud model due to information security concerns, other industries like healthcare and retail are adopting public cloud. Moreover, their existing infrastructure is helping telecom players to emerge as providers of cloud computing, leading to erosion in boundaries between IT and telecom vendors.
- Augmented Reality
Augmented reality is rapidly moving from the world of science fiction to our everyday lives. The spread of smart-phones and tablets is giving rise to the spread of location-based augmented reality applications, and now everyone from retailers to healthcare providers have embraced augmented reality. Augmented reality enhances the customer experience, and enables enterprises to add a fourth dimension to their products.
- Mobility
Mobile devices are rapidly changing the way people access digital content. Smart-phones and tablets have brought rich, digital content to the fingertips of consumers. Mobile banking has emerged as one of the most innovative products in the financial services industry. Shoppers are increasingly using their mobile devices for everything from browsing to comparing to buying products. Governments are also reaching out to their citizens, using mobile devices as an efficient channel. Enterprises would continue to jump on to the mobility bandwagon, and ensure that their applications are mobile ready.
Concluding words
The journey so far has been marked by rapid technological ‘transitions’ and ‘adoptions’. As far as technology is concerned, add ‘innovations’ to complete the trio and therefore, 2016 can only become bigger and better from here on.
