According to Dimension Data parent company, NTT Ltd, the world-leading global technology services provider, has today announced its Future Disrupted: 2020 technology trends predictions.
They’re based on the most critical technology trends companies need to be aware of next year and the steps they need to take to address them.
Formed from key insights from its technology experts, the company outlines the trends that will shape the business technology landscape throughout 2020 across six key areas: Disruptive Technologies, Cybersecurity, Workplace, Infrastructure, Business, and Technology Services.
NTT Ltd, chief technology officer Ettienne Reinecke predicts mainstream adoption of disruptive technologies in 2020 will finally see data, automation and internet of things (IoT) technologies come together to create connected cities and societies.
The company predicts that 2020 will finally see all the hype words of the past decade come together to create completely connected environments that are capable of running themselves autonomously to build more intelligent cities, workplaces and businesses – and on a secure basis.
Data, AI and secure by design will be at the heart of this movement, empowering devices to talk to one another and act on that information without human intervention. Smart cities and IoT will become the norm as they improve productivity, growth and innovation across entire regions.
NTT Ltd is the newly-formed company bringing together 40,000 people from across 31 brands – including NTT Communications, Dimension Data and NTT Security – to serve 10,000 clients from around the world. Dimension Data started operating as part of the company on the 1 October 2019.
Using the insights gathered from its global client base, NTT Ltd says it is able to better understand the future and shape the most effective intelligent technology solutions for its customers.
The Future Disrupted: 2020 Technology Trends looks at the way businesses need to prepare for tomorrow, in the next year.
Jay Reddy, chief technology officer at Dimension Data, said: “Across Middle East and Africa, we’ve been talking about cloud, data, AI and security for a number of years. We often talk about these technologies as if they are operating differently, but 2020 will see that change. Over the next 12 months, Middle East and African businesses will be looking at complete end-to-end solutions, benefitting from solutions that make their environments fully connected and significantly impacting on the world we live in.”
“We have seen with Royal Swazi Sugar Corporation how digitalising an integrated agriculture and manufacturing business has improved every facet of the business. The company has used IoT to gather data and make better decisions in water management, remote crop monitoring, fleet utilisation, and on the factory floor. Technology has become an essential aspect of solving their end-to-end business challenges. This has been one of the successes we have seen with our diverse clients”
The predictions have been compiled by NTT experts, who have identified key trends for the next twelve months as well as the disruptive technologies we can expect in the future – and the steps businesses can take in 2020 to take full advantage of them.
“Technology is already changing quickly, but this is the slowest pace of change we’ll ever see. It’s clear too that we’ve never before had so much powerful technology at our disposal – technology we can use to answer questions and solve problems in our societies, businesses, and communities. There is a huge opportunity to use any and every tool out there to support innovation initiatives in every field and truly transform our future world for the better,” Reinecke said.
Some of the disruptive technologies from the predictions include:
- Digital twinning: With enough datapoints, you can model behaviour and understand patterns – for example, the diet of someone’s biometric twin – and come to more accurate conclusions (the time it would take before a health incident occurs), more quickly, and at a fraction of the cost of modern-day science.
- Building trust through digital interactions: Now that AI has evolved, we can move from being purely transactional to having a more relational engagement with customers, applying rules that bring empathy to the interaction and establish trust with the customer.
- Immersive, responsive ‘phygital’ spaces, where the physical world blends with the digital take any physical space – a meeting room, office, shop, VIP box in a stadium – and plug in a limited series of technologies to transform it into a virtual environment that can create any range of experiences.
- Smart buildings that will use IoT to make their inhabitants feel more comfortable – automatically adjusting temperatures to the number of people in them, or lighting to the time of day – while becoming more sustainable too.
- ‘Data wallets’, putting data in the hands of the person who owns it and making it completely secure for them. Nobody can access that data without certain permissions being in place and, if the user is under threat, can be locked down.
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