Top 3 Information Technology (IT) trends for 2020
The best tech trends in IT industry for 2020 year. What are they like? How to define and prove? Gartner, IDC, Google, Stack Overflow, Computer Economics…
Table of Contents
- Trend #1: AWS and Distributed Cloud
- Trend #2: Artificial Intelligence and AI Security
- Trend #3: Voice-Enabled Virtual Assistants and Multiexperience
- About the author
- Sources
Disclaimer: I do not represent my current/previous employers on my personal Medium blog.
Trend #1: AWS and Distributed Cloud
Cloud Computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user.
Market research firm Computer Economics has published an annual IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks report since 1990.
Top-line findings from Computer Economics’ 2019/20 survey are similar to last year: organisations are migrating to the cloud and increasing spending to reap the benefits.
AWS (Amazon Web Services) vs Microsoft Azure vs GCP (Google Cloud Platform). Upwork debuts The Upwork 100, ranking the top 100 in-demand skills for independent professionals:
1. .NET Core
2. TypeScript
3. Landing pages
…
15. Amazon Web Services (AWS)
…
34. Microsoft Windows Azure
…
94. Google Cloud Platform
The largest three players (AWS, Azure, GCP) will continue to dominate share of the market:
Ultimately, it seems clear that in the case of AWS vs Azure vs GCP market share — AWS still has the lead.
Distributed Cloud
Distributed Cloud is defined as the distribution of public cloud services to different physical locations, while operation, governance, updates and the evolution of those services are the responsibility of the originating public cloud provider. New services like AWS Outposts, Azure Stack, and Google Anthos.
Read more about Distributed Cloud trend in Gartner’s full research (pdf).
What to learn in 2020? I can recommend AWS Certified Developer — Associate 2020 course by A Cloud Guru.
How can we prove by ourselves the dominance of the AWS cloud provider? Let’s Navigate to Google Trends:
Based on Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2019, AWS 2X times more popular platform in professional environment than Azure or GCP.
Trend #2: Artificial Intelligence and AI Security
Artificial Intelligence (AI) — capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior.
IDC’s ICT Spending Forecast for 2018–2022 puts the worldwide spend at $5.1 trillion dollars in 2019 (5.2% YoY growth), rising to $5.3tn in 2020 (5.6% YoY growth). The analyst firm breaks ICT spend into two broad categories — traditional and new technologies.
Cloud, mobile, social and big data/analytics are seen as traditional technologies, while the new kids on the block include AI, robotics, AR/VR and next-generation security.
Between 2019 and 2022, IDC expects double-digit growth from these new technologies, with traditional tech at around 2.8%:
Now in its 21st year, the Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey is claimed to be the world’s largest global IT leadership survey. Key themes in the 2019 survey include: digital disruption; increasing investment in technology; the relentless pace of technology evolution; AI and automation; cyber security; the rise of business-managed (a.k.a. shadow) IT.
Skills shortages — technology leaders are struggling to find the right talent with skills shortages at their highest level since 2008. The three most scarce skills are big data/analytics (44%), cyber security (39%) and AI (39%).
AI Security
There are three key perspective to explore when considering how AI is impacting the security space:
- Protecting AI-powered systems. This requires securing AI training data, training pipelines and ML models.
- Leveraging AI to enhance security defense. This uses ML to understand patterns, uncover attacks and automate aspects of the cybersecurity processes while augmenting the actions of human security analysts.
- Anticipating nefarious use of AI by attackers. Identifying these attacks and defending against them will be an important addition to the cybersecurity role.
Read more about AI Security trend in Gartner’s full research (pdf).
What to learn in 2020? I can strongly recommend AI For Everyone and Machine Learning courses by Andrew Ng.
Do you think the AI hype will die down?! United States is motherland of IT. Let’s navigate to Google Trends and check trend of AI since 2004 year:
Let’s check Indeed. AI job postings on Indeed rose 29.1% from May 2018 to May 2019. However, that increase is substantially less than it was for the previous two years. AI job postings on Indeed rose 57.9% from May 2017 to May 2018 and a whopping 136.3% between May 2016 and May 2017. See full 2018 research findings.
At the same time, Indeed saw a 15 percent decrease in candidate searches for AI roles, suggesting a potential shortage of AI experts for companies looking to hire them. During the previous 12-month period, those candidates searches jumped 32 percent.
Trend #3: Voice-Enabled Virtual Assistants and Multiexperience
New devices and new modes of interaction — from natural-language-based chat and voice to gestures used in 3D or virtual environments — coexist with the ever-popular web browser and mobile apps. Any combination of these new touchpoints can be used by customers along their journey.
Read more about Multiexperience trend in Gartner’s full research (pdf).
Based on Think with Google 2019 research review (pdf), 27% of the global online population is using voice search on mobile.
Smart speaker usage is growing as they become more connected to users’ lives. Active users of the Google Assistant grew 4X over the past year. The Google Assistant is now built into more than 1 billion devices.
Based on Voice report 2019, the Amazon Alexa is surprisingly not the most popular digital assistant. Apple’s Siri and the Google Assistant tied for first place with 36% of respondents having used each. Alexa came in 3rd with 25% of respondents reporting usage.
What to learn in 2020? I can recommend Build Actions for the Google Assistant courses by Google.
About the author
I’m Ruslan, a Python Developer and certified Artificial Intelligence Engineer living in Poland. Visit www.korniichuk.com to hire me.
Sources:
- 5 Digital Technology Trends for 2020
- AI careers and salaries: 7 telling statistics
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Why?
- Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey
- ICT Spending Forecast
- Insights we uncovered in 2019 that will take you into 2020 (pdf)
- IT budgets 2020: How the money will be spent, and who will spend it
- IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks 2019/2020
- Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2019
- The cloud-computing market is set to double to $116 billion by 2021
- The Upwork 100: Q3 2019
- Top 10 AI Jobs, Salaries and Cities
- Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020 (pdf)
- Top 10 Trends Impacting Infrastructure and Operations for 2020
- Voice report 2019
