2018 Will Bring New Technology Trends That Will Change the Way Industry Works

The year 2017 undoubtedly was a banner year for AI and IoT, there was a massive boost in the number of connected devices which is likely to grow even more in the upcoming year. We are already witnessing how the use of such technological solutions has made organizations dependent on them for their everyday operational processes. In the last few years, the importance given to technological innovation has rapidly grown.

In almost every industry, technology will be disrupted in the ways one has never seen before- it will irrevocably change the world of work in future.

“Technologies such as blockchain, IoT, artificial intelligence, cloud etc will transpire to be the game changers for the year 2018. These disparate technologies will integrate in the year ahead to create extremely practical business solutions.

Also, various facets of AI such as Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation are expected to evolve in 2018. AI will help organizations to achieve higher customer satisfaction levels - with chatbots likely to emerge as the key differentiating factor for enterprises to keep that crucial connect with their customers and remain engaged. With the innovations of today providing just a small glimpse into future advancements, the robotics industry will rise in 2018 – especially with increased adoption in military and healthcare space.

With all the above technologies taking centre-stage, Blockchain-enabled solutions have the potential to bridge the gaps of device data interoperability while ensuring security, privacy and reliability. This is majorly due to Blockchain’s ability to re-engineer transparency, trust and security in the wake of recent cyberattacks, an increased adoption of the technology has been noted in the Indian BFSI and many other sectors,” said Ritesh Gandotra, Director, Global Document Outsourcing, Xerox India.

Narinder Kumar,EVP, Technology Services, TO THE NEW said "The nature of blockchain makes it perfect way to store the financial information in a secure way. Several companies in the BFSI sector have already started blockchain-based projects. As the technology is garnering significant interest across industries, in 2018 we will see many full- scale implementations in retail, healthcare, banking, insurance, government sector and many other industries are on their way to explore blockchain use."

According to Dr. Shane Archiquette, CTO-Global Telecom & Media, Hitachi Vantara, 2018 will bring new technology trends that will begin to change the entire experience of connecting and interacting with the internet.  Some of these technology advancements are in 5G networks, location based digital lifestyle spaces, VR/AR, NFV, IoT, IIoT, and IoE.  Consumers will be able to enjoy 1Gb speed to their phone, tablet, Smart Tv allowing 4K multi-channel streaming, immersive VR and AR, and new broadband services.  IoT services for consumer, enterprise, public, and first responder will dominate the coming years for advancement of dynamic location based experiences.

“We believe that next year enterprises will work towards harnessing opportunities created by integration of new technologies. We see a huge surge in the adoption and usage of digital workspace technologies, which will create ripples in the earlier established organizational structures. Therefore, workspace transformation is inevitable and benefits far outweigh the transitional hurdles that might come up,” said Makarand Joshi , Area Vice President & Country Head, India Subcontinent, Citrix.

According to Sanjai Gangadharan, Regional Director SAARC, A10 Networks , AI will empower emerging security technologies in 2018. The rise of commoditized machine learning capabilities and chat bots being built into just about every new product will allow for human and electronic intelligence to be combined more effectively. Come next year, this will give security teams the ability to assess and prioritize security vulnerabilities based on more than just a single label, thus offering deeper protection.

Siddhartha Chatterjee, CTO,  Persistent Systems claims that the top five technology trends affecting enterprises in 2018 will be:

• Increased focus on enterprise security;
• The rise of automation and self-service;
• Across-the-board adoption of data science and machine learning;
• Richer human-machine interaction modalities (including voice, touch, gesture, and augmented reality); and
• Cloud platforms as delivery vehicles for software and services.

Today, digital transformation is the key to success for enterprises, SMBs and start-ups. At the centre of this transformation is data making data management the prime focus for a company’s IT strategy.

Aniketh Jain, CEO & Co-Founder of Solutions Infini Pvt. Ltd. said that although Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning sound to be promising technology trends; however the infrastructure and maintenance costs are going to be the key deciding factors for their implementation, especially in startups and SMEs. It’s also just the beginning for “FinTech” services, as more financial corporations are looking ahead for automated blockchain technologies in their industry processes.

“Recognizing the need to properly manage unprecedented data that’s being generated today, NetApp recently expanded its Data Fabric solutions and services portfolio in India. As data becomes self-aware and diverse than it is today, the metadata will make it possible for the data to proactively transport, categorize, analyze and protect itself in coming years. With data becoming incredibly dynamic and the ability to transport it is getting more and more challenging, the applications and resources needed to process it need to be equally efficient. This will have implications on new architectures like edge, core, and cloud. At NetApp, our aim is to enable every customer to unleash their data’s full potential,” said Anil Valluri, President, NetApp India & SAARC.

“Technology, in particular has seen a facelift year after year. In the e-governance space, the concept of ‘paper work’ will go down drastically. Even now, most of the work is done and stored online on cloud based services which eliminates the problem of limited storage. This wipes out the possibility of misplacing files and their retrieval becomes supremely easy.

Even linking one’s Aadhaar to the bank account would smoothen the process of making payments. This would mean making payments using just your fingerprints. The ‘ease’ of doing things, is what is taking the whole concept forward,” added Ankit Agarwal, MD, Alankit Ltd.

In this era of endless innovation, we have to wait and see what future has in store. The one thing we are sure of is that future will look different from today and  definitely more efficient.