Gartner looks ahead, identifies 10 key strategic technology trends for 2020

Gartner Inc. highlighted on Monday the top strategic technology trends that organizations need to explore in 2020. Analysts presented their findings during Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, which is taking place here through Thursday.

Gartner defines a strategic technology trend as one with substantial disruptive potential that is beginning to break out of an emerging state into broader impact and use, or which is rapidly growing with a high degree of volatility reaching tipping points over the next five years.

The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2020 include hyperautomation, multiexperience, democratization of expertise, human augmentation, transparency and traceability, empowered edge, distributed cloud, autonomous things, practical blockchain, and AI security.

Hyperautomation is the combination of multiple machine learning (ML), packaged software and automation tools to deliver work. This technology refers not only to the breadth of the pallet of tools, but also to all the steps of automation itself (discover, analyze, design, automate, measure, monitor and reassess). Understanding the range of automation mechanisms, how they relate to one another and how they can be combined and coordinated is a major focus for hyper automation.

This trend was kicked off with robotic process automation (RPA). However, RPA alone is not hyperautomation. Hyperautomation requires a combination of tools to help support replicating pieces of where the human is involved in a task.

Through 2028, the user experience will undergo a significant shift in how users perceive the digital world and how they interact with it. Conversational platforms are changing the way in which people interact with the digital world. Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) are changing the way in which people perceive the digital world. This combined shift in both perception and interaction models leads to the future multisensory and multimodal experience.

Democratization is focused on providing people with access to technical expertise (for example, ML, application development) or business domain expertise (for example, sales process, economic analysis) via a radically simplified experience and without requiring extensive and costly training. “Citizen access” (for example, citizen data scientists, citizen integrators), as well as the evolution of citizen development and no-code models, are examples of democratization.

Through 2023, Gartner expects four key aspects of the democratization trend to accelerate, including democratization of data and analytics (tools targeting data scientists expanding to target the professional developer community), democratization of development (AI tools to leverage in custom-developed applications), democratization of design (expanding on the low-code, no-code phenomena with automation of additional application development functions to empower the citizen-developer) and democratization of knowledge (non-IT professionals gaining access to tools and expert systems that empower them to exploit and apply specialized skills beyond their own expertise and training).

Human augmentation explores how technology can be used to deliver cognitive and physical improvements as an integral part of the human experience. 

Physical augmentation enhances humans by changing their inherent physical capabilities by implanting or hosting a technology element on their bodies, such as a wearable device. Cognitive augmentation can occur through accessing information and exploiting applications on traditional computer systems and the emerging multiexperience interface in smart spaces. 

Over the next 10 years, increasing levels of physical and cognitive human augmentation will become prevalent as individuals seek personal enhancements. This will create a new “consumerization” effect where employees seek to exploit their personal enhancements — and even extend them — to improve their office environment.

Consumers are increasingly aware that their personal information is valuable and are demanding control. Organizations recognize the increasing risk of securing and managing personal data, and governments are implementing strict legislation to ensure they do. Transparency and traceability are critical elements to support these digital ethics and privacy needs.

Transparency and traceability refer to a range of attitudes, actions and supporting technologies and practices designed to address regulatory requirements, preserve an ethical approach to use of artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies, and repair the growing lack of trust in companies. As organizations build out transparency and trust practices, they must focus on three areas - AI and ML; personal data privacy, ownership and control; and ethically aligned design.

Edge computing is a computing topology in which information processing and content collection and delivery are placed closer to the sources, repositories and consumers of this information. It tries to keep the traffic and processing local to reduce latency, exploit the capabilities of the edge and enable greater autonomy at the edge. 

A distributed cloud is the distribution of public cloud services to different locations while the originating public cloud provider assumes responsibility for the operation, governance, updates to and evolution of the services. This represents a significant shift from the centralized model of most public cloud services and will lead to a new era in cloud computing.

Autonomous things are physical devices that use AI to automate functions previously performed by humans. The most recognizable forms of autonomous things are robots, drones, autonomous vehicles/ships and appliances. Their automation goes beyond the automation provided by rigid programing models, and they exploit AI to deliver advanced behaviors that interact more naturally with their surroundings and with people. 

As the technology capability improves, regulation permits and social acceptance grows, autonomous things will increasingly be deployed in uncontrolled public spaces.

Blockchain has the potential to reshape industries by enabling trust, providing transparency and enabling value exchange across business ecosystems, potentially lowering costs, reducing transaction settlement times and improving cash flow. Assets can be traced to their origin, significantly reducing the opportunities for substitutions with counterfeit goods. 

Asset tracking also has value in other areas, such as tracing food across a supply chain to more easily identify the origin of contamination or track individual parts to assist in product recalls. Another area in which blockchain has potential is identity management. Smart contracts can be programmed into the blockchain where events can trigger actions; for example, payment is released when goods are received.

AI and ML will continue to be applied to augment human decision making across a broad set of use cases. While this creates great opportunities to enable hyperautomation and leverage autonomous things to deliver business transformation, it creates significant new challenges for the security team and risk leaders with a massive increase in potential points of attack with IoT, cloud computing, microservices and highly connected systems in smart spaces. Security and risk leaders should focus on three key areas — protecting AI-powered systems, leveraging AI to enhance security defense, and anticipating nefarious use of AI by attackers.

Cortex Labs releases Digital clash on blockchain, in bid to improve deep learning

Cortex Labs launched Monday its AI decentralized application (DApp), independently developed by DevBug, to their mainnet. The AI DApp is called Digital Clash and has been designed as a game for users to play and earn rewards from.

Cortex Labs has brought machine learning to the blockchain ecosystem by creating the first - and currently the only - blockchain that allows realistic, on-chain execution of machine learning models.

Digital clash is a game that can be played by anyone with access to a Chrome browser and the Cortex wallet. The game is set up with two teams - red or blue - and players attempt to draw over the pixels in order to make a certain digit appear on the canvas. 

The red team aims for 0-4 whereas the blue team aims for 5-9. Players can draw over the pixels by buying them and earn profits when others draw over their pixels. The more a pixel changes hands, the higher its price becomes. 

The game ends when the highest priced pixel reaches ​100,000​ ​keys​, or the accumulated number of pixel transactions reaches ​10,000​, at which point the canvas freezes and a deep learning model, trained with the MNIST handwritten digit dataset and quantized using Cortex’s MRT, decides the winning team and distributes the reward pool. One can learn the rules directly on the game page of Digital clash.

On the Cortex blockchain, AI developers can upload trained models to the storage layer, and DApp developers can later incorporate these models into their applications. Whenever the models are called, AI developers are rewarded a portion of the transaction fees. The infrastructure not only encourages the sharing of state-of-the-art AI models but also gives birth to exciting AI DApps such as the Master of Digital Clash.

The emergence of Digital Clash highlights the future of DApp development, which will feature the incorporation of more AI functionalities, taking advantage of recent progress in deep learning. This application will lessen the skepticism of combining the two hottest technologies of the day and deepen the knowledge of how they can operate and evolve together. 

New Teradata study reveals 94 percent of enterprises are facing hyper disruption and digitization

Across industries, markets and geographies, businesses are facing a new reality in terms of remaining competitive in the hyper-digitized world. These new imperatives – driven by rapidly evolving technologies, new entrants into the market and changing customer demands – require action from enterprises to ensure survival. 

A new survey conducted in September 2019 by Vanson Bourne, and sponsored by Teradata, called “Adapt or Perish: The New Reality in a Hyper-Digitized World,” captures the five forces impacting business success in this new global paradigm: Hyper Disruption, Pervasive Digitization, Autonomous Action, The Cloud Imperative and Enterprise Consumerization.

Most business leaders believe digitization can help address growing customer expectations for rapid and personalized engagement, and are beginning this process by refining business operations. While almost all survey respondents are in the process of digital transformation, some are further along than others.

99 percent of respondents are in the process of either moving to a digital business or leveraging/piloting digital technologies to change business models. More than four in 10 respondents (41 percent) indicated that digitization efforts were widespread, but almost as many (40 percent) indicated that digitization only existed across certain aspects of the business. Just 10 percent confirmed they had fully realized widespread digital transformation.

Nearly half (45 percent) of respondents believe their business requires improvement in their approach to managing data accessibility, which may include breaking down the many data silos in their organization, a critical requirement to becoming a digitally pervasive business.

New Microchip RT PolarFire FPGA enables high-bandwidth space systems with lower total system cost

Developers of spacecraft electronics use radiation-tolerant (RT) field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to create on-board systems that meet the demanding performance needs of future space missions, survive the brutal launch process and continue to operate reliably in the harsh environment of space. 

Extending its RT FPGA offering to bring these capabilities to emerging high-performance space applications, Microchip Technology introduced Tuesday the RT PolarFire FPGA that is optimized to meet demanding requirements in spacecraft payload systems’ high-speed data paths with the lowest possible power consumption and heat generation.

A growing number of space applications need greater computational performance so they can transmit processed information rather than raw data and make optimal use of limited downlink bandwidth. 

The RT PolarFire FPGA enables this at significantly lower cost and with faster design cycles than possible with application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). It also reduces power as compared to the alternative of using FPGAs based on static random access memory (SRAM), while eliminating their vulnerability to radiation-induced configuration upsets. The RT PolarFire FPGA is supported by all necessary radiation data, specifications, package details and tools customers need to start new designs now, initially with the commercial version of the device. 

The RT PolarFire FPGA builds on the success of Microchip’s RTG4 FPGA, which has been widely deployed in space applications that require its radiation-hardening by design against single event upsets (SEUs) and inherent immunity to single event latch-ups (SELs) and configuration upsets. 

For space applications that require up to five times the computing throughput, the RT PolarFire FPGA provides 50 percent more performance and triple the logic elements and serializer-deserializer (SERDES) bandwidth. It also provides six times the amount of embedded SRAM to enable more system complexity than previously possible using FPGAs and withstands total ionizing dose (TID) exposure beyond the 100 kilorads (kRads) that is typical of most earth-orbiting satellites and many deep-space missions.

The RT PolarFire FPGA cuts power consumption to approximately half that of alternative SRAM-based FPGAs with equivalent density and performance. Its SONOS non-volatile (NV) technology enables its configuration switches to be implemented in a more power-efficient architecture that cuts development and bill of materials costs through simplified, less expensive and lighter power system design, while minimizing heat dissipation to reduce thermal management problems. 

Designs are further simplified as compared to using SRAM-based FPGAs because the RT PolarFire FPGA eliminates the cost, complexity and recovery downtime of mitigating configuration SEUs.

The RT PolarFire FPGA will undergo the standard process for meeting QML standards including class V qualification for highly critical applications. Microchip has lengthy experience achieving QML qualification for its RTG4 FPGAs and other products, which requires extensive and continuous testing including screening each wafer and package assembly lot.

“We are supporting an evolving set of on-orbit space applications that need high levels of operating performance and density, low power consumption and minimal heat dissipation, while reducing system-level costs,” said Bruce Weyer, vice president of Microchip’s FPGA business unit. “Our RT PolarFire FPGA enables the major leap in computing throughput required for these applications including processing-intensive neural networks for object detection and recognition, high-resolution passive and active imaging, and high-precision remote scientific measurement, while maintaining a path to QML qualification.”

Red Hat, Vodafone Idea collaborate on building Network as a Platform

Red Hat announced Sunday that Vodafone Idea Limited (VIL), an Indian telecom service provider, is leveraging Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to transform its distributed network data centers to open standards, open interfaces based ‘Universal Cloud’. These will be also extended to serve third party workloads.

With the largest distributed cloud deployment in the country, VIL will be rapidly transforming its 100+ data centers across a “Universal Cloud,” where a shared software platform is capable of running multiple workloads e.g. Network, IT and third party applications across its distributed cloud locations.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform is enabling VIL to design efficient pods, which can be geographically distributed and taken closer to the end- users, helping to reduce latency and enable an optimal user experience. With Red Hat’s open APIs, VIL will be able to deliver actionable insights to its enterprise users, and help them potentially create a competitive advantage.

In collaboration with Red Hat, VIL plans to set up a DevOps team, to drive more consistent innovation and to help co-create new solutions and extend the platform to start-ups and developers.

In addition, VIL will further deploy Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate workflows, and extend self-provisioning to VIL enterprise customers. VIL plans to work closely with the Red Hat Global Services team to build new capabilities and execute these initiatives.

Trend Micro strengthens cloud security position with Cloud Conformity acquisition

Trend Micro announced on Monday that it has acquired Cloud Conformity, a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) company. The acquisition instantly broadens the cloud services Trend Micro can secure and resolves often overlooked security issues caused by cloud infrastructure misconfiguration.

Trend Micro’s strategy is built to ensure cloud security without disrupting how customers need to do business. This acquisition builds upon Trend Micro’s continuous innovation in cloud security, adding complementary capabilities that automatically identify and fix a range of cloud infrastructure configuration issues. 

It also optimizes costs and helps ensure compliance with industry regulatory standards such as PCI, GDPR, HIPAA and NIST.

Kingston Technology debuts enterprise-grade data center 450R SSD with enhanced I/O and latency predictability

Kingston Digital, the flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, announced Monday that it is shipping the Data Center 450R (DC450R) Enterprise SSD, a high performance 6Gbps SATA SSD with 3D TLC NAND, designed for read-centric application workloads. This streamlined server SSD delivers on performance while providing exceptional I/O and latency predictability, a requirement now amongst Data Center Class SSDs. 

Built to Kingston’s strict QoS requirements, the DC450R is designed to ensure performance consistency over a wide range of read intensive and read caching workloads.

Kngston’s DC450R is designed for workloads that require 24/7 uptime and reliability, such as Content Delivery Networks (CDN), edge computing applications and a wide array of software-defined storage architectures. DC450R presents a specifically focused feature set that enables data centers to select the most cost effective SSD for their workloads. 

Businesses require results as they deliver on products, solutions and service level agreements (SLAs) and DC450R provides system builders and Cloud providers with a high performance, economical SSD standard they can count on.

FileShadow delivers thin provisioned storage for virtual desktops, allowing access to the FileShadow vault within the desktop

FileShadow announced this week FileShadow for Windows Virtual Desktop that provides thin provisioned storage to companies using virtual desktops, separating users’ data from the operating system, local applications and user settings in the data center—reducing costs for any company using virtual desktops.

FileShadow thin provisioned storage allows virtual desktops to have access to large vaults without synchronizing data to the virtual desktop server. All of the content is available, but only downloaded on demand to the local virtual desktop when edited or modified.

FileShadow is a service that aggregates files from multiple cloud sources, Windows Virtual Desktops, Windows PC and macOS desktops and Drobo network and direct attached storage (NAS/DAS) devices into one secure, reliable and searchable cloud vault.

Compatible with Amazon WorkSpaces, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, HVE ConneXions VDI Solutions, IOXO Workspace Technology, Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop, and VMWare Horizon, FileShadow for Windows Virtual Desktop delivers thin provisioned access to the user’s vault.

Using machine learning, FileShadow provides superior indexing and searching capabilities. With FileShadow, users can quickly find any file with advanced search features such as file content, OCR of PDFs, GPS location and image searches.

FileShadow is hosted on Google Cloud and IBM Cloud with storage on IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) and Wasabi’s Hot Cloud Storage, providing “11 nines” of durability for optimal file protection. FileShadow supports multiple cloud storage sources, including Windows PC and macOS desktops (including iCloud Drive files and iCloud Photos), Drobo NAS/DAS devices, Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe’s Lightroom solutions, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and OneDrive for Business.

Users can store all of their content in FileShadow, enabling them to access their content and receive the archiving, aggregating and searching capabilities of FileShadow’s service. IT departments will save money by using FileShadow to minimize the amount of storage allocated for their virtual desktop servers, and user storage will be protected by the FileShadow vault—made explicitly for reliable storage, search and access of files.

FileShadow for Windows Virtual Desktop supports and integrates with cloud-based Desktop as a Service (DaaS) and premise-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions. With FileShadow in place, customers can move between DaaS and VDI because their data is now portable.

“One of the issues that accompany a virtual desktop deployment is how to secure long-term storage of users’ files,” said Tyrone Pike, president and CEO of FileShadow. “With FileShadow, all of the archiving, aggregation and searching capabilities used by traditional desktop users are now available for virtual desktop users. Users simply install the FileShadow Desktop App on their virtual desktop and sign in; all of their files are available.”

The FileShadow Service is free of charge for up to 100 GB of data. Subscriptions for FileShadow for Virtual Desktops are available for $25/month for 2TB and each additional terabyte is $10/month.

J.P. Morgan joins Microsoft to push adoption of Quorum in a bid to get more enterprises on to its free-to-use platform

J.P. Morgan and Microsoft announced Thursday that they have signed a memorandum of understanding to form a strategic partnership to accelerate the adoption of enterprise blockchain.

Through this partnership, Quorum, developed by J.P. Morgan, will become the first distributed ledger platform available through Azure Blockchain Service, enabling J.P. Morgan and Microsoft customers to build and scale blockchain networks in the cloud.

The partnership with Azure will further strengthen Quorum as a fully integrated, Ethereum-based blockchain platform and suite of applications. Together, the platform will enable enterprise businesses across industries to shift their focus from infrastructure management to application development, driving transformative business value. Customers will be able to rapidly grow their networks while benefiting from lower costs, simplified deployment and built-in governance enabled through Azure Blockchain Service.

Going forward, J.P. Morgan and Microsoft will continue to work together to address common enterprise, Independent Software Vendor, and developer needs for building and deploying blockchain applications on Quorum in the cloud. Microsoft will also provide engineering, consulting and go-to-market support for Quorum.

“We are incredibly proud of the success Quorum has had over the last four years, as organizations around the world use Quorum to solve complex business and societal problems via blockchain solutions,” said Umar Farooq, Global Head of Blockchain, J.P. Morgan. “We are delighted to partner alongside Microsoft as we continue to strengthen Quorum and expand capabilities and services on the platform. Azure will bring unique strengths to enterprise clients using Quorum.”

“As digital transformation extends beyond the walls of an individual organization, companies need solutions that enable them to securely share their business processes and data in order to drive imaginative new business models and reinvent industries. We’re thrilled to partner with a leader like J.P. Morgan to establish a foundation on which enterprises and partners can rapidly build and scale blockchain networks,” said Peggy Johnson, Executive Vice President of Business Development, Microsoft. “Together, we’re taking a truly transformative technology like Quorum and making it available through the Azure platform to accelerate innovation for our customers.”

In addition to providing a platform for Quorum customers to build blockchain networks and applications, Quorum will continue to power J.P. Morgan and Microsoft blockchain programs and first-party apps, such as the Interbank Information Network, JPM Coin and Microsoft’s Xbox royalty payment process, among others.

Virtium debuts high-endurance, low-power, M.2-compliant USB 3.1 solid-state drives for industrial embedded applications

Virtium introduced this week its TuffDrive M.2 USB line of SSDs that bring high-endurance, low-power, small-form-factor solid-state storage to industrial-embedded applications.

These SSDs enable designers to take advantage of USB 3.1’s widespread host support and efficiently connect M.2 form factor drives to host systems lacking the SATA storage interface. The drives provide cost-effective, secure storage to a wide range of uses that require lower capacities, such as operating system boot, code and application storage, virtualization, and light data logging.

Virtium’s TuffDrive SSDs leverage the M.2 2242 form factor (22mm x 42mm) and USB 3.1 to achieve small-footprint solid-state storage connected to host systems via a common, cost-effective interface. That combination reduces power consumption, and thus heat generation, compared to SATA-SSD storage.

It also lowers electromagnetic interference (EMI), making the SSDs a viable option for medical, telecommunications and other EMI-sensitive applications, as well as for densely populated circuit boards. Additionally, the new drives’ high-integrity M.2-to-USB 3.1 connection enables shock and vibration resistance superior to designs using alternative form factors and interfaces.

The hot-pluggable TuffDrive M.2 USB line is designed with lower-capacity applications in mind; the embedded SSDs not only lower power requirements and generate less heat than SATA drives, they also reduce system bill-of-materials outlays because those applications call for relatively low capacities.

The drives are available with high-endurance options and supported by Virtium’s vtGuard power-fail protection, vtView industrial SSD software for drive monitoring, and value-added service and support that includes ten-plus years of product availability and in-field integration support. Additionally, Virtium offers optional AES-256 self-encryption for the TuffDrive M.2 USB line, as encrypted SSDs with this feature provide significantly greater protection for data at rest than drives without it.

“Virtium is bringing to market the lowest-power, highest-reliability, M.2-compliant USB drives,” said Scott Phillips, vice president of marketing at Virtium. “Our engineers took a highly creative approach in developing an SSD line that leverages a form factor proven in embedded-industrial designs and a widely used, highly efficient interface. This achievement is particularly important for designers designing with IIoT SSDs and have to work with host systems that lack SATA, while still requiring lower power and heat.”

“By combining the ubiquitous USB interface with the small form factor of the M.2 SSD, Virtium makes it easy for embedded-industrial systems designers to extend Flash data storage into new applications,” said Alan Niebel, president of WebFeet Research and author of the 2018 Non-Volatile Memory Market Shares by Vendor Report. “The drives' high endurance, low power and cost-effectiveness empower those designers with solid-state storage providing secure data storage in demanding designs.”

The TuffDrive M.2 USB solid-state drives are sampling now and have been qualified by select Virtium customers.