• Gartner added eight new technologies to the Hype Cycle this year including 5G, artificial general intelligence, deep learning, edge computing, serverless PaaS.
• Virtual personal assistants, personal analytics, data broker PaaS (dbrPaaS) are no longer included in the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.

The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2017 provides insights gained from evaluations of more than 2,000 technologies the research and advisory firms tracks. From this large base of technologies, the technologies that show the most potential for delivering a competitive advantage over the next five to 10 years are included in the Hype Cycle.

The eight technologies added to the Hype Cycle this year include 5G, artificial general intelligence, deep learning, deep reinforcement learning, digital twin, edge computing, serverless PaaS and cognitive computing. 10 technologies not included in the hype cycle for 2017 include 802.11ax, affective computing, context brokering, gesture control devices, data broker PaaS (dbrPaaS), micro data centers, natural-language question answering, personal analytics, smart data discovery and virtual personal assistants.

The three most dominant trends include artifical intelligence (AI) everywhere, transparently immersive experiences, and digital platforms. Gartner believes that key platform-enabling technologies are 5G, digital twin, edge computing, blockchain, IoT platforms, neuromorphic hardware, quantum computing, serverless PaaS and software-defined security.

Key takeaways from this year’s Hype Cycle include the following:

• Heavy R&D spending from Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook is fueling a race for Deep Learning and Machine Learning patents today and will accelerate in the future – The race is on for Intellectual Property (IP) in deep learning and machine learning today. The success of Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google’s Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana and others are making this area the top priority for R&D investment by these companies today. Gartner predicts deep-learning applications and tools will be a standard component in 80% of data scientists’ tool boxes by 2018. Amazon Machine Learning is available on Amazon Web Services today, accessible here.  Apple has also launched a Machine Learning Journal. Baidu Research provides a site full of useful information on their ongoing research and development as well. Google Research is one of the most comprehensive of all, with a wealth of publications and research results.  IBM’s AI and Cognitive Computing site can be found here. The Facebook Research site provides a wealth of information on 11 core technologies their R&D team is working on right now. Many of these sites also list open positions on their R&D teams.
• 5G adoption in the coming decade will bring significant gains for security, scalability, and speed of global cellular networks – Gartner predicts that by 2020, 3% of network-based mobile communications service providers (CSPs) will launch 5G networks commercially. The Hype Cycle report mentions that from 2018 through 2022 organizations will most often utilize 5G to support IoT communications, high definition video and fixed wireless access. AT&T, NTT Docomo, Sprint USA, Telstra, T-Mobile, and Verizon have all announced plans to launch 5G services this year and next.
• Artificial general intelligence is going to become pervasive during the next decade, becoming the foundation of AI as a service – Gartner predicts that AI as a service will be the enabling core technology that leads to the convergence of ‘AI everywhere’, Transparently immersive experiences and digital platforms. The research firm is also predicting 4D printing, autonomous vehicles, brain-computer interfaces, human augmentation, quantum computing, smart dust and volumetric displays will reach mainstream adoption.

Sources:

Gartner Identifies Three Megatrends That Will Drive Digital Business Into the Next Decade

Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2017 (client access required) 

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Floyd “Money” Mayweather made headlines last weekend for making light work of Mixed Martial Arts superstar Conor McGregor. But he also made tech headlines recently by endorsing the Hubii Network, an initial coin offering (ICO), on his Instagram and Twitter accounts.
This isn’t the first time Mayweather (who’s dubbed himself Floyd “Crypto” Mayweather) has endorsed an ICO. In late July, he promoted the ICO for the Stox project, which went on to raise more than $30 million in its token sale. (BTW: There are subtle differences between an ICO, a token sale, and a crowdsale, although the terms are often used interchangeably. Search the terms to learn more.)

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Enterprises often face challenges when integrating Salesforce and NetSuite. But, despite the fact that NetSuite offers an out-of-the-box solution to integrate with Salesforce, companies’ data flow requirements are far too complex even for a simple integration.
NetSuite is highly popular among enterprise customers for its accounting, financial and ERP toolkit. Even though it has fully functional CRM module, Salesforce is considered to be perfect blend in cloud-based CRM solution. Alternatively, some Salesforce users feel like it lacks the ERP, Accounting, Financial solution capabilities which NetSuite delivers.

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As consumers in the age of digital innovation, we benefit from an abundance of technologies, each seeking to simplify our daily lives. Be it Apple, Amazon or Google, our digital service providers are only too happy for us to take advantage of their latest cool apps or funky new tools. With so much free stuff and low cost pay as you go options, we’ve never had it so good. It’s a no brainer, win-win for both consumer and producer. Or is it?

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Snowflakes are beautiful, unique creations. But, let’s keep them in nature. They don’t belong in our server infrastructure. Snowflake servers, where every configuration is just a little different, can introduce unnecessary security vulnerabilities and complications. While common in IT infrastructure, in the DevOps realm they are gradually becoming ancient history. At All Day DevOps 2016, Erlend Oftedal (@webtonull), with Blank and head of the OWASP Norway chapter, discussed the benefits of immutable infrastructure practices within serverless architectures. Erlend walked us through the positive effects on security as well as offered insight on potential problems.

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No hype cycles or predictions of a gazillion things here. IoT is here. You get it. You know your business and have great ideas for a business transformation strategy. What comes next? Time to make it happen. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jay Mason, an Associate Partner of Analytics, IoT & Cybersecurity at M&S Consulting, will present a step-by-step plan to develop your technology implementation strategy. He will discuss the evaluation of communication standards and IoT messaging protocols, data analytics considerations, edge-to-cloud technical architecture, IoT platform selection, end-to-end security, enterprise systems integration and monetization techniques. Seize market opportunities by following this methodology to design and implement a systems architecture that meets complex demands for security, flexibility, durability, and scalability.

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My discussions with organizations looking to “digitally transform” themselves is yielding some interesting observations. I expect that when these discussions move into the execution phase, we will start to create some “Laws of Digital Transformation” that will guide organizations digital transformation journey. So with that in mind, let me start by proposing these “4 Laws of Digital Transformation.”

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“Cloud computing platform as a service, recently adopted by the New York Times (6, 3, 6)”

The New York Times has announced it has moved its games platform to Google App Engine from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Having first published its daily crossword in 1942, the NYTimes built its first website in 1996, with the digital daily crossword starting life as a web-based Java applet. Since then, the publisher has overseen growth into a suite of mobile apps and a website with more than 300,000 paid subscribers. The further introduction of a free daily mini crossword three years ago put ‘a lot of strain’ on the company’s architecture, according to JP Robinson, NYTimes principal software engineer.

“As the crossword grew in popularity, our architecture started to hit its scaling limitations for handling game traffic,” explained Robinson in a post announcing the move. “Due to the inelastic architecture of our legacy system, we needed to have the systems scaled up to handle our peak traffic at 10pm when the daily puzzle is published.

“The legacy stack leaned on technologies that required some level of human interaction and could take hours to scale up and down. We needed to scale within minutes,” he added. “The system is generally at that peak traffic for only a few minutes a day, so this setup was very costly for the New York Times games team.”

Among the features of Google App Engine that Robinson and the games team have taken advantage of is combined access and app logging – helping simplify debugging – API security and autoscaling, although noting the 10pm daily peak caused problems at first.

Robinson added that while the migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was undertaken seven months ago, all games API traffic now goes through App Engine, with 90% of traffic served purely by App Engine services and GCP databases. The publisher also claims it has cut infrastructure costs by half as a result of the move.

AWS has been creating some interesting headlines of its own in recent weeks. As this publication has previously reported, in June Walmart told technology companies and vendors to move off Amazon’s cloud or risk losing the retail giant’s business. Last month, columnist David Auslander argued that the potential winners in such a move could be Microsoft and Google, AWS’ primary rivals in cloud infrastructure, adding that while AWS remains the “clear leader” in public cloud provisioning, it “also makes them the hunted.”

Since then, Walmart’s anti-Amazon feeling has become more pronounced. According to a note from Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research – first spotted by Barron’s – Walmart should expect to go “full steam” on NVIDIA, utilising its graphics chips to create its own NVDA GPU Clusters on ‘Walmart Cloud’, or, rather, OneOps, which the company acquired in 2013. Similarly, Walmart last month announced it was teaming up with Google for voice-enabled commerce – again with Amazon in its sights.

Despite all this, of course, Amazon remains by far and away the market leader. AWS hit $4.1 billion in revenue for its most recent quarter, and cited Discovery Communications, Ancestry California Polytechnic State University as among its latest customer wins, the latter two going ‘all-in’ on the Amazon cloud.

You can read the full NYTimes blog post here.