As
the new year begins, we eagerly look forward to new inventions, innovations,
roll-outs, and improvements with racing hearts.
Technology
has made lives easier for all and has accelerated the growth and transformation
of industries and businesses. Early adopters of technology have enjoyed the
most prominent positions in the world. Let’s have a look at what 2019 might
have in store for us.
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
PWAs
have been gaining momentum over the last few years and 2019 should be the year
where it will be adopted as the mainstream for mobile app development. Mobile
web already has better discoverability but the user engagement on mobile apps
is much better. PWAs are here to provide the best of both worlds while being
lightweight, secure, responsive, ubiquitous and providing faster and easier
updates. We should see iOS support for push notifications in Safari this year which
should fast-track its adoption.
Data lakes
Data
lakes have been around for a while, in fact, since the advent of Hadoop. While
they have been successfully used in bigger companies, its adoption has not been
as widespread in smaller companies as they are slow, difficult to develop, test
and maintain, and require a specialized skill set. But thanks to the decoupling
of storage and compute in cloud, and the proliferation of open-source tools
like spark, presto and cloud tools like athena and bigquery, storing,
maintaining and analyzing data should not cost an arm for smaller companies.
So, the traditional data warehouses are going out of vogue, and Data lake
adoption has grown and will continue to do so through 2019.
NewSQL databases
It
has been a decade since NoSQL databases have rocked the world and they still
continue to go strong. People who used to hate SQL quickly embraced NoSQL for
its simplicity, but soon started to realize the shortcoming of these systems.
Most of them do not provide us with ACID transactions. Even the ones that claim
to be CP systems (consistent and partition tolerant) tend to be only eventually
consistent. This is where these so-called NewSQL systems, led by Spanner and
followed by CockroachDB and TiDB, tip the scales back in favour of SQL. They
are consistent, scalable, handles replication and automatic failover. Some of
them even received rave reviews from the distributed system community. Expect
them to gain momentum and market share in 2019.
Blockchain
What
a decade it has been for cryptocurrency! It has its lovers and haters but one
thing is for certain - the underlying technology, blockchain, is here to stay.
While blockchain has been the technology powering cryptocurrency for the last
decade, we will notice a trend shift to cryptocurrency being reduced to just
being a currency for other blockchain-based technologies. Dubai has vowed to
replace all its government systems to distribute ledger technology and a few
states in India seek to do the same despite the government's negative attitude
towards cryptocurrencies. DLT provides the underlying trust, immutability and
transparency that many systems desperately need and startups and governments
alike seem to be onboard with it.
Edge Computing
Cloud
computing has changed the way that many companies efficiently use and share
computing power over the last decade. Edge computing can go a step further by
taking control of the computing applications, data and services away from the
central nodes to the other extreme i.e. closer to where the data is
produced/consumed. This reduces the communication bandwidth and helps
efficiently utilize the unused computing power. Google has released TFlite,
which is one of the first steps to doing ML on devices. Expect your devices in
your pockets to get hotter this year.
Technological
changes are tremendous and fast-paced, and scale up businesses without any
geographical limitations. Active implementation and embracing of technology and
its related changes will help a business survive in this cut-throat, competitive
and predatory market. If one fails to embrace these technological advancements
and changes or even falls behind in implementing them, then they face a
potential threat or extinction. It is not that these new technological trends
will benefit only businesses, they will also open up the floodgates for a
skilled workforce like developers and data scientists who would be in high
demand to meet the future requirements. All in all, a win-win situation for all
could be in the making in 2019.
http://bwcio.businessworld.in/article/Top-5-Tech-Trend-Predictions-To-Watch-Out-For-This-Year/10-01-2019-166033/
