With a new year and a new decade, we’re taking a look at opportunities for our clients and the state of the technology market. As we’ve talked with our clients and studied the industry, we see two themes emerge.
- Expansion of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
- A Full Transformation to Cloud Technologies
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
We’ve heard a lot about AI over the past few years, but for most enterprise companies this narrative has been about a leading-edge technology in search of good use cases. All that is set to change. AI is going from an R&D or pilot programs to the mainstream. That will have a massive impact on businesses of all types.
We’re seeing a massive investment in AI. According to Gartner, 37 percent of organization have implemented AI in some form. That’s a 270 percent increase over the last four years.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise, since spending on AI systems has increased drastically as well. The IDC reports a 44 percent increase from the prior year to more than $35 billion in 2019 and that number is expected to grow another 30 percent in 2020 according to Axios.
There are opportunities to utilize AI through almost any technology or industry. Marketing and sales have been early adopters and believers in machine learning, but the use of AI will become ubiquitous in business operations as the decade progresses. Through AI, leaders and CIO’s can make better decisions by removing unconscious biases, allowing them to potentially find hidden truths, spot patterns and predict the future with more accuracy.
Cloud Transformation
Cloud Transformation has also been a hot topic for a number of years in tech. In 2020, it will take a leap further.
Initially, companies pursued the Cloud for server capabilities and infrastructure improvements, ie. getting rid of their own servers and data centers. In 2018, Gartner reported that the worldwide public cloud services market was $182.4 billion. In 2019, that number was up 17.5 percent.
In mid-2019, Gartner had this to say:
“Cloud services are definitely shaking up the industry,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “At Gartner, we know of no vendor or service provider today whose business model offerings and revenue growth are not influenced by the increasing adoption of cloud-first strategies in organizations. What we see now is only the beginning, though. Through 2022, Gartner projects the market size and growth of the cloud services industry at nearly three time the growth of overall IT services.”
That puts things into perspective and shows the scope of what is to come.
We are seeing our clients utilize the Cloud to replatform and modernize their business applications to take advantage of the advanced technical development capabilities of the cloud platforms. Through the cloud, clients are embracing containerization, microservices, machine learning and natural language processing skills.
2020 will continue to move the Cloud Transformation forward. We will see innovation and increased adoption as CIOs position their companies to succeed today and in the future.
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