2020 Trends

The last decade brought some fundamental changes to the nature and role of enterprise IT. As we kick off the new year – and a new decade – the 451 Research analyst team is committed to providing our clients with the data and insight required to help navigate these challenges and opportunities.

The modern, cloud-native IT environment – with its intelligently connected and orchestrated multi/hybrid/edge execution venues supporting workloads like IoT and AI – is becoming too complex, distributed and strategic for humans to manage alone. The result is a growing need to rethink end-to-end IT strategy and architecture to support the increasing reliance on intelligent toolchains and algorithms to run efficiently.

The cloud space continues to evolve as hybrid/multicloud emerges as the key organizing principle for increasingly heterogeneous IT, cloud-native technologies enter into IT environments, and complexity (and lack of in-house skills) create a new landscape for IT operations. Enterprise workloads are on the move, and they’re transforming. The winners in the new cloud battleground – managing complexity – will be those that can deliver both integration and innovation.

Significant disruption across industries, fueled by the rising influence of the empowered consumer, continues to exert pressure on businesses to deliver differentiated and consistent experiences across the entirety of the customer journey. In effect, this is forcing the evolution of the entire technology stack and organizational culture in order to enable real-time, contextually relevant experiences.

It is becoming increasingly clear that new approaches to data processing, data management and analytics not only are key to differentiating the most data-driven companies from the least data-driven, but are also fundamental to the ability to execute digital transformation strategies. As we look ahead to 2020, we outline six key data trends that will enable successful digital transformation in the years ahead.

Despite being complex, multi-million-dollar projects, clients expect datacenters to be built within weeks at an ever-lower cost, then to operate without fail as efficiently as possible for years, adapting along the way to technology that hasn’t been invented yet. Facilities must be the right size, in the right location, with the right connectivity.

Existential change is sweeping across technology along multiple fronts, and security is being reshaped by these forces. What will be among the most visible manifestations of these changes in 2020? The 451 Research information security team explores the trends forcing the ‘innovator’s dilemma’ in security, and some of the most visible ways in which we expect the market to embrace them in the coming year and beyond.

The Internet of Things market is maturing from early enthusiasm to specific use cases with tangible benefits. With this maturity has come deeper understanding of which venues are best for specific tasks and workloads, which sensors provide the most benefits, and more approachable development tools for IoT deployments.

Cloud is critical enterprise technology, but the breadth of platforms, features and combinations is creating new complexity. Businesses are universally discovering gaps in cloud skills, now the major roadblock to transformation. This demand for access to specialized talent is defining the next phase of the managed services market.

The demand for more flexible, extensible and purposeful forms of communication is growing, taking enabling technologies out of application silos with growing programmability, voice user interfaces, and automation.

In 2020 we anticipate seeing more around new approaches to visual and spatial productivity, a growing emphasis from HR and IT working in unison to craft an engaging employee experience, and new types of digital workspace.