Top 2015 technology trends focused on the impact of the digital business shift

BANGALORE, INDIA: With the amalgamation of the real and virtual worlds, connectivity everywhere, the inundation of intelligence everywhere, and the accumulative technological impact of the digital business shift, businesses are asking – if not demanding – their technology partners to run faster with a disruptive frame of mind. These technology partners need to focus on finding new ways to participate, harness, and advance early adoption and innovation at the edge. Following are the 2015 technology trends identified by Brillio.

The Digital Data Supply Chain

2015 will be a year of increased fragmentation as reliance on analytics spreads across organizations. More cloud-based and mobile analytics, more demand for interactive and responsive analytics, and more use of specialist and niche BI are monopolizing the trends.

Digital data chain gets stronger: While big data and analytics persisted as buzzwords over the last few years, actual adoption by enterprises has been limited. In 2015, more enterprises will switch focus to big data. The quantum of data analyzed for actionable insights will increase dramatically over the next five years and this will be reflected in 2015 with the ‘context’ dimension becoming even more important in the big data stack.

The rise of Cognitive Intelligence: Capable of understanding the subtleties, idiosyncrasies, idioms and nuance of human language, cognitive analytics mimic how humans reason and process information. With the advancement of data science, future systems will have a ‘built-in’ cognitive ability to decipher the meaning from large data and answer queries based on hypothesis and confidence from data. IBM Watson is one such example.

Mainstreaming of analytics: Predictive Analytics will head towards mainstream adoption, particularly in areas like retail banking, CPG and the weather industry.

Infrastructure and Analytics: The analytic infrastructure - the applications, services, utilities and systems that are used for either preparing data for modeling, estimating models, validating models, scoring, or related activities – will become critically important in 2015.

The Maturity of Cloud Computing and the new role of DevOps 

Cloud computing made significant strides in 2014 and has become an integral, perhaps even the most vital part of an enterprise’s IT Strategy.

Hybrid Computing: As cloud services continue to expand in number and sophistication, gaps in managing cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-core portfolios are beginning to appear, leading to new and smarter ways to operate in this hyper-hybrid IT environment.

Containerization of Cloud: Containers are a bit like virtual machines in that they make it possible to bundle up several different pieces of software and run them on a single server without interference. Yet, unlike a traditional virtual machine created with tools from companies like VMware, a Docker container doesn’t require its own operating system. All cloud majors (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) are heavily investing in Docker and Open Source Container tools as containerization has the potential to finally bring interoperability between cloud platforms.

DevOps and Cloud: For organizations adopting agile development methodologies and cloud computing, DevOps and continuous delivery practices enable agility for infrastructure, providing organizations with the rapid deployment of new functions and features. Cloud-based DevOps is paving the way to leverage the full potential of cloud application development and the closer integration of various process areas quickly and cost effectively.

The Internet of Things – The Connected World

IoT’s phase two: The IoT trend is about to enter its second stage in development, focused on software application platforms that provide prebuilt connectivity, security, management, and analytics capabilities. As the IoT focus shifts away from devices and networks - toward platforms and applications - CIOs and CTOs will play a key role in facilitating their business units to better understand how to incorporate the IoT into business technology agendas.

IoT gets real: There will be a focus on actual customer success stories about improved machine uptime, better customer experience, and new as-a-service business models. IoT's impact on the supply chain is beginning to demonstrate sustainable business practices and business intelligence (BI) will also have a greater play, as we finally extract meaningful results out of the data collected and not the data itself.

It’s all about software: IoT software platforms will become the rage, displacing the hardware. Much of the early hype has been about cool new sensors, high-tech wearables, and new wireless technologies. In 2015, focus will be on the software and especially the cloud services, to make all these sensors connect, upload data, and drive analytics that generate insights and enable business improvements.

The Year of Bolt-On/ Wearables: Lot of action will happen in the region on extracting data from everything (humans, machines, utility devices) and in making bolt-ons or Standalone intelligent wearables. This forms the base for the IoT to become a real-world actionable item in a humongous way.