Thursday, February 9, 2017

Technology Trends for 2017 and Beyond from IEEE and Gartner

Back in October 2016, Gartner published its list of top 10 strategic technology trends for 2017 [1]. In December 2016, IEEE Computer Society followed suit by announcing nine technology trends for 2017 [2].

Off the top of my head, I would include at least AI, AR/VR, IoT, blockchain, cloud-native/microservices, web-scale/Software-Defined Everything (SDx), mobile edge computing (MEC), 5G, tactile Internet, and self-driving cars on a technology trends list for 2017. But let’s see what Gartner and IEEE came up with.

Gartner’s trends are grouped into three themes: intelligent, digital, and mesh. “Intelligent” refers to intelligent systems enabled by AI and machine learning. “Digital” is about the border between the digital and physical world starting to blur. Finally, “Mesh” is the dynamic connection of people, processes, things and services that support intelligent digital ecosystems.

 Intelligent

  • AI and advanced machine learning – technologies such as deep learning, neural networks and natural-language processing (NLP)
  • Intelligent apps, including virtual personal assistants but also all other possible intelligent apps ranging from security tooling to enterprise applications such as marketing or ERP infused with AI. Technology providers will initially focus on three areas: advanced analytics, AI-powered and autonomous business processes, and AI-powered conversational interfaces
  • Intelligent things – robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles

Digital

  • VR and AR – immersive experiences with AR and VR are reaching tipping points in terms of price and capability
  • Digital twin – within 3-5 years, billions of things will be represented by digital twins. Digital twins [8] are software models of physical assets that use data from sensors installed on the physical object to represent its real-time status, working condition or position
  • Blockchain, that is, the distributed ledger, can transform industry operating models in industries such as music distribution, identity verification and title registry. It could disrupt the way processes like voting, financial transactions and digital rights management are implemented.

Mesh

  • Conversational systems, which include for example Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, Alexa, etc. Conversational systems of the future will be able to adapt to a multitude of forms of requests, and hear and understand complex sentences [9]. They enable people and machines to use multiple modalities (e.g., sight, sound tactile) to communicate across the digital device mesh (i.e., sensors, appliances, IoT systems)
  • Mesh app and service architecture – Gartner believes that the “intelligent digital mesh” will require changes to the architecture, technology and tools used to develop solutions. Gartner refers to a Mesh App and Service Architecture (MASA). MASA leverages cloud and serverless computing, containers and microservices as well as APIs and events to deliver modular, flexible, and dynamic solutions.
  • Digital technology platforms – Gartner lists five digital technology platforms: information systems, customer experience, analytics and intelligence, IoT and business ecosystems
  • Adaptive security architecture – fluid and adaptive security. An adaptive security architecture means having flexible security measures in place to be able to protect an organization’s information [10]. This goes beyond traditional perimeter defense.

Having gone through Gartner’s technology trends, let’s turn to IEEE Computer Society. They predict that the following technology trends will reach adoption in 2017 [2]:

  1. Industrial IoT, which will be one of the largest and most impactful arenas for big data analytics in 2017
  2. Self-driving cars – broader adoption is likely to first occur in constrained environments such as airports and factories
  3. AI, machine learning, and cognitive computing
  4. 5G – no wide-scale adoption yet in 2017 as the standards are still work-in-progress, but operators like AT&T will be doing some fixed wireless tests during 2017 [4]. 5G modem chips we will have to wait until 2018 [3].
  5. Accelerators – for example heterogeneous computing (i.e., systems that use more than one kind of processor or cores [5]) founded on accelerators (e.g., GPUs) enables the stretching of Moore’s law
  6. Disaggregated memory – Fabric-attached nonvolatile memory (NVM) – a disaggregated memory design encapsulates an array of commodity memory modules in a shared memory rack that can be accessed by multiple compute nodes via a shared interconnect [6]. NVM is a type of memory that can retrieve stored information after having been turned off and back on. Fast nonvolatile storage bridges the gap between RAM and SSDs with a performance-cost ratio lying somewhere in between. The technology will enable new applications that are not currently available.
  7. Sensors everywhere and edge compute – we will start seeing intelligence and compute being aggressively deployed at the edge
  8. Blockchain (see above)
  9. Hyper-converged systems (a.k.a., software-defined everything , SDx) are bundles of hardware and software that contain elements of compute, storage and networking together with an orchestration system that lets IT administrators manage them using cloud tools and DevOps practices

Sources

[1] Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017, http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartners-top-10-technology-trends-2017/ 

[2] IEEE Computer Society Predicts the Future of Tech for 2017 and Next Five Years, https://www.computer.org/web/pressroom/future-of-tech-2017 




[6] Disaggregated Memory for Expansion and Sharing in Blade Servers, http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~twenisch/papers/isca09-disaggregate.pdf 



[9] Conversational Systems Will Enable Businesses of the Future to Be ‘Invisibly Present’ Through Time and Space, https://letstalkpayments.com/conversational-systems-will-enable-businesses-of-the-future-to-be-invisibly-present-through-time-and-space/ 


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