Top 5 technologies that will scale through beyond 2025

They will eventually have a significant impact on businesses and impact topline growth

Kewyn George
Updated: May 3, 2017 09:56:21 AM UTC
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The talk of the day ranges from automation to device mesh to IoT across organisations big and small alike. This article will bring some great insights on five top technologies that will be relevant in 2025 and beyond. Most of the existing technologies would have become obsolete by then.

(Virtual, Augmented) Mixed Reality
In Virtual reality (VR), the whole real world is replaced by a simulated one giving you a near to life experience of the environment, be it a virtual tour of a dense forest, a political rally or a bike ride through rough terrains/ mountains. Samsung Gear is one of the commonly used VR. Facebook Oculus is a clear indication that FB usage of today with mobile/ laptop will transition to VR mode soon.

Augmented reality (AR) is where elements of the real world are supplemented by computer simulations in real time. Various fields like archaeology, visual arts and education use AR. Even though AR is arguably less exciting than VR, experts claim that it might be more useful than the later. After 2017, AR revenues will improve and hit critical mass in health care distribution and product design and management-related use cases.
Microsoft HoloLens and Magic leap are in the phase of bringing in a mixed reality – A Holographic experience to customers. Think of a situation where you can see a dinosaur or an airplane landing from the comforts of your office. A recent video release of Magic leap shows a solar system around an office desk and a steam-punk robot hiding under the computer table. Realistically we could witness the transition of AR/VR into a Mixed reality bringing in a cohesive nature of user experience to the customers

Connected Intelligent Systems –  Firstly, the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) - automating rule-based process will get into a matured phase by 2020. Secondly, mobility applications which have taken the mainstream for last few years will see a sizeable decline in downloads - By 2019, 20 percent of brands will abandon their mobile apps [Gartner, Newsroom]. Thirdly, data science-driven Big data systems will look for much more intelligent systems to compute the data. Lastly, the IoT device usages will see rapid rise and the questions around sizing and dicing the data for useful information will again become difficult. These technology platforms will tend to leverage the Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence systems and will converge onto a unified platform to provide a cohesive ecosystem to sense, simplify, predict, improve user experience as well as scale your business model.

By 2019, 40 percent of all digital transformation initiatives – and 100 percent of all effective IoT efforts – will be supported by cognitive/AI capabilities [ IDC, 2016]

Cyber Security
The change in the cyberspace is happening at the blink of an eye, with penetration of social media and mass usage of mobile applications to social platforms. The threat for personal data as well as corporate data is always on the edge. DDoS (Distributed denial of Service) is one of the growing forms of attack. The recent DDoS attack of Dyn, which were infected with notorious malware that took over cameras and DVRs, has made every organisation tighten their buckles to strengthen their cyber security standards – the attack primarily came through Mirai botnet, which infected 100,000 end points. This has brought down a sizeable portion of America’s internet and is considered as one-of-a-kind in the history of cyber breaches. Cyber security intelligence will be one of the top focuses in the board rooms and aligned security solutions will take centre stage beginning 2017 and will scale to a sharper focus in the next five years.

Globally, cost of data breach can reach up to $2.5 trillion by 2020 [ Juniper Research, 2016]. The cyber security spend is expected to reach $1 trillion over the next five years. This mandates the rise of cyber security infrastructure and application solutions. The services aligned to advanced threat protection, email security, cloud, mobility and IoT security solutions, datacenter and network security solutions will take a mainstream of business for some of the leading cyber security service providers like Symantec, Force point and the major consulting firms will take the lead in this space. By 2018, 90 percent of organisations will implement at least one form of integrated DLP, up from 50 percent today [Newsroom, Gartner]

Digital Twins
In simple terms, Digital Twin is pairing technology that links the physical and digital society, and brings a digitalised view of your product. The digital twin is an integration of your technical evangelist, tied with intelligent monitoring capabilities enabled through advance predictive analytics. This has been used to monitor, analyse and make the recommended changes to physical assets, at the same time predicting the future performance of your assets through various simulating scenarios. The advancement of Digital Twin enablement can help a surgeon during exploratory surgery thus increasing the probability of the successful outcome. Similarly, this could be used across various industrial sectors to improve safety, performance, customer experience and enabling digitalisation.

Digital Twin is a key technology to fully digitise the physical world [Dimitri Volkmann, GE Digital]. Today GE has more than 551,000 Digital twins and this count will continue to be on the rise. Digital Twin will be the core technology focus area for all industrial services organisations. Gartner 2017 predictions also featured Digital Twin as one of the Top 10 technology trends for 2017 and beyond.

Industrial Internet - The term was coined by General Electric (GE), a US corporation, means the convergence of the global industrial system with the power of advanced computing, analytics, low-cost sensing and new levels of connectivity permitted by the internet.

By 2019, 45 percent of IoT-created data will be stored, processed, analysed, and acted upon close to, or at the edge of the network [ IDC, 2016].

Industrial Internet enables companies to use sensors, software, machine-to-machine learning and other technologies to gather and analyse data from physical objects or other large data streams—and then use these analysed results to manage operations or to offer new, value-added services using predictive algorithms, automations, physics-based analytics and deep domain expertise.

One example is, using LIDAR (“Light Detection and Ranging”), a laser sensing system, mounted on the roof, the driver-less Google car can collect various data, including road geometry, obstacles and other environmental data, thereby facilitating a better control of the car through its throttle, brakes and steering mechanism in real-time.

These top 5 technologies are industry agnostic and will certainly take a leap in the coming years. This will certainly be among the Top 3 agenda items inside the board room discussion. We are in the era where technology leads the business and delivers the topline growth for the organisation.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.

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