Solace Technology Predictions for 2021

Solace

2020 will go down in history as a pivotal year for digital transformation, thanks in part to how COVID-19 has drastically accelerated digitisation initiatives and the mass shift to remote work. While there is no doubt that the impact of the pandemic will still be felt in years to come, the difficulties faced in the past year will serve as valuable guidance for enterprises on how to future proof their business moving forward.

Prediction 1: Real-time customer experience will become the default expectation from consumers

With the continual uberisation of the service economy—accelerated by COVID-19 and the remote nature of service delivery—delivering quality customer experience will be the core foundation of any future ready business. With growing consumer expectations for real-time responsiveness, organisations will need to reevaluate their digital strategies to ensure that they are able to leverage real-time data to transform customer engagement and create new revenue streams.

The key is to create a strong digital backbone and different tools that can connect all customer events through choreography, eliminating any siloes between each touchpoint along the customer journey.

It is important to recognise that the value of data diminishes exponentially over time. Future-ready businesses thus need to adopt an event-driven approach that allows large volumes of data to move between people, apps, sensors and systems, and is available for processing and analytics in real time to maximise the value of their data.

Prediction 2: 5G technology will push the envelope in IoT innovation

2021 will see the highly anticipated widespread rollout of 5G across and region, which is set to enable lots of innovation in the IoT space. A distributed event mesh can power end to end streaming in a publish subscribe, lossless manner. Combined with the continued evolution and adoption of Kubernetes, edge computing will also see significant improvements.

With further IT/OT integration with systems such as ERP, AI/ML, CRM, we will be witnessing an increasing number of rich sensors that can stream data bidirectionally. These sensors will move further towards streaming events, which will be processed in pipelines, and lead to efficiencies, innovations and insights. IoT will also grow from the current ‘capture and analyse later’ via big data lakes towards real-time bidirectional command and control. With innovation in mobile-access edge computing, low latency use cases will start to get solved at the edge as well.

In our everyday lives, this will translate into digital factory advancements; supply chain end to end visibility; developments in autonomous vehicles; connected airports, cities, homes and more.

Prediction 3: Enterprises will move towards data distribution infrastructure to handle ‘event bursts’

COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation across all industries. As businesses move operations, physical events and customer interactions online, they often find themselves having to handle the transmission of an unprecedented volume of information at breakneck speeds. This can happen in short bursts when consumer demand is peaking during periods like 11:11 or around Christmas. The increasing adoption of microservices and apps will also need to rely on an underlying event mesh for responsive, parallel communication, especially for bursty scenarios.

These developments drive the demand for a powerful data distribution infrastructure. After all, the efficient collection and distribution of real-time data is the mission-critical foundation for businesses that have gone digital.

Sumeet Puri, Chief Technology Solutions Officer