Outlook 2019: Trends that will drive the IT Industry

Open source plays a crucial role in all the top strategic technology trends that are reshaping the IT world. Rajarshi Bhattacharyya highlighted the key trends for 2019 that organizations need to explore.

Digital Business to accelerate interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI)

"AI-derived business value is forecast to reach $3.9 trillion in 2022", says Gartner, Inc. It's expected to have an impact everywhere from customer support, chatbots to finance, research, machine learning, automating data center operations and security.

Like every other country, Indian IT industry has also started making convincing strides to new digital businesses. In the coming years, we will see that CIOs will be more focused on building AI strategy and investment plan for their enterprises, if they want to be digitally strong.

Like Open Source, Open Data for Business Intelligence (BI)

As mentioned earlier, AI has already paved its way across the industry. AI, Machine Learning (ML), deep learning, predictive analytics, virtual assistants and chatbots and neural networks are among the most discussed topics in 2018. And there is no doubt that it will be the same in 2019 as well.

ML runs on data, which makes it crucial for enterprises to opt for huge diverse datasets. Open source code has long been freely shared to collaborate and fuel industry innovation, but the data haven't shared the same benefit. The community has recognized this as an area for improvement, and in 2019, we will witness 'open data' emerge as a way to share and aggregate data.

We're already seeing this happen with some companies irrespective of their size. They are utilizing open data resources for various purposes. The main reason backing up usage of open data is limitations that come with big data - it's time consuming. Besides, open data can be reused, redistributed, and can provide immediate information and insights and its free! Open data is comparatively cost-effective than private data sources and is a secure platform for data analytics.

Projects such as the Community Data License Agreement (CDLA) - a development announced by The Linux Foundation - are currently underway and encourage organizations to share data openly and transparently. CDLA will be a key enabler of data sharing that can be used to accelerate the accuracy and use of machine learning. These types of initiatives will only continue to grow in 2019.

Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing will turn towards a real-time OS

There are various reports backing up the fact that IoT devices and spending will be higher in the coming years. Gartner predicted that there'll be 26 billion IoT devices by 2020. Also, IDC stated that IoT spending reaching nearly $1.4 trillion by 2021, which sounds incredible!

IoT is moving us towards a smarter, more connected world. IoT solutions have already made its position cemented in almost every sector from manufacturing, freight and transport, farming, asset management, smart infrastructure (homes, buildings, and cities), smart utilities (electricity, gas, and water) and even contextual marketing and the list goes on.

When it comes to the moving process and computes to the edge of the IoT network, OpenStack is proving popular for a distributed cloud model. Enterprises across the globe have realised that OpenStack is a real-world enterprise-class framework for Cloud.

Blockchain to go beyond Finance

Blockchain, a revolutionary technology, is still the hot topic of discussions in boardrooms and is almost inseparably linked with the Bitcoin Cryptocurrency. Both have them together has been getting a massive amount of attention, especially from government, financial, commercial and healthcare circles. But what will see in 2019 is Blockchain will be the driver for new use cases in many industries beyond Finance. A 451 Research report says that 28% of enterprises are already experimenting with Blockchain.

Consider retail industry. Blockchain can be utilized in tracking the delivery of food from source to consumer across the supply chain. Besides, it has the potential to improve the speed in identifying the source and distribution points in a recall process.

Additionally, developments are taking place to bridge containers and blockchain through CaaS platforms, which will create new opportunities for developers in 2019.

Software Approach to Enterprise Storage

Enterprises are focused on how to provide the best experience for their customers in the most cost-efficient, functionally complete way. In order to compete in the long term, enterprises need to begin embracing software-defined "everything" as a part of their strategy. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook are now known as hyper-scale providers demonstrating economies of scale and economies of compute that are needed within the enterprise data center.

The freedom of enterprise businesses to utilize storage software logic that historically only existed in a proprietary storage solution opens a whole new world of flexibility. The same storage software functionality can now be used on a multitude of different hardware platforms including commercial off-the-shelf hardware. This freedom enables enterprise businesses to deploy lower-cost storage architectures. These new storage architectures can scale without the requirement to refresh the entire platform or disrupt the current functioning environment. This freedom also includes reduced dependency upon proprietary "locked in" storage hardware platforms.

There have been a lot of reports on how software defined everything will be gaining momentum in the coming years. During the forecast period, 2017 - 2021, the SDS market is predicted to enjoy a compound annual growth rate of 13.5 percent, with revenues of nearly $16.2 billion in 2021.

Prepping Security with DevSecOps

Most of the organizations have some idea of making their software more secure, but the strategies are often at odds with the goals of DevOps culture. We've realized that security should lie at the heart of any digital transformation initiative. It shouldn't be an afterthought, but built-in by design.

Corporate and enterprises have begun adopting DevOps practices and are experiencing numerous benefits. However, DevOps has generally not lived up to expectations when it comes to security. In 2019, we strongly believe that the relationship between Development and Operations will be expanded to include Security. And hence: DevSecOps. It will bring security back into the service delivery equation.

Rajarshi Bhattacharyya
Country Head, SUSE