5G Fixed to 5G Mobile
We are finally in a spot where we will start seeing 5G everywhere. If you have been following the tech community, you will have seen that there are a wide number of fixed and test deployments with companies like Qualcomm, Intel, Nokia, Ericcson, Samsung and Huawei all getting into the action. We are also seeing new companies like Mimosa Networks making it possible to roll 5G out to both rural and urban locations, paving the way for bullish 5G mobile providers—i.e. ATT and Verizon—to start offering new, cooler, faster, more innovative services for mobile users. It’s an exciting time for 5G and mobile alike. While 2018 was the year that fixed 5G applications found their legs, in 2019 we are going to see 5G finding its way into the upper corner of our Mobile devices, albeit for you iPhone users it is more likely going to be 2020 or later.
Chatbots Good to Great
Huge steps are being made in the way of natural language processing and sentiment analytics—so many, in fact, that some believe NLP will shake up the entire service industry in ways we’ve never imagined. Think about all the services that could be provided without humans—fast food lines, loan processors, job recruiters! What’s more, NLP allows companies to gather insights and improve their service based on them. Some 40% of large businesses have or will adopt it by the end of 2019—which makes it one of our top 2019 digital transformation trends.
Connected Clouds (Public, Private, Hybrid)
Honestly, we can just file this as “the continued evolution and growing pains of cloud adoption.” Basically, what’s happening is that companies are realizing that going all public cloud, private cloud, or data center isn’t the best option. Sometimes, they need a mix of all or both. Thus, connected clouds are continuing to develop to meet companies’ changing needs—whether they want to cloud-source storage, networking, security, or app deployment. Major public cloud providers like Amazon and Alibaba are answering the call, offering private cloud (or in Google’s case, container-based) options. We are also seeing Microsoft via Azure, HPE with their 2017 acquisition of Cloud Technology Partners and their consumable IT services as well as VMware with their recent acquisition of CloudHealth Technologies all show increased commitment to connecting clouds. The term, Multicloud will be the new buzzword for the cloud conversation and what I believe this movement means more than anything else is that no matter which workloads are being run in which cloud, the experience for IT and those that are utilizing the applications needs to be seamless, secure and streamlined. For most businesses this means a mix of workloads running in public, private and hybrid environments and this will be a big topic in 2019.
Blockchain Finally Understood, (kind of)
As we continue to explore this technological miracle worker, we’ve come to realize that blockchain is kind of a mess. It’s too complicated for lay people to use right now, and there’s no standard way to use it because we all want to use it differently. The only way to get mass blockchain adoption is to create a plug-and-play version that all of us can use and understand. 2019 is the year to watch closely as leading technology firms like IBM continue to make massive commitments to the potential of Blockchain for applications beyond cryptocurrency.
source: Forbes
