Ongoing investment in cybersecurity solutions continues to grow. According to the latest worldwide market study by Canalys, cybersecurity solutions for public cloud and 'as a service' accelerated in the first quarter of 2019. Those deployment models collectively grew 46 percent year-on-year.

These type of solutions accounted for 17.6 percent of the total cybersecurity market value — that's up from 13.8 percent in the same period a year ago. Virtual security appliances and agent solutions also grew significantly, up by 18.2 percent on an annual basis.

Cybersecurity solutions market development

Traditional security hardware and software deployments still dominate, representing almost 75 percent of the total market. Both deployment models continued to grow but at a slower rate of just over 8 percent. This growth highlights the ongoing transition in cybersecurity solutions, as organisations look to protect more data assets and workloads located in the public cloud.

Moreover, IT vendors have introduced new ways of doing business with channels and enterprise customers in terms of purchasing, consumption and servicing — as well as helping simplify security operations within increasingly complex IT environments.

The worldwide cybersecurity market reached $9.7 billion in terms of shipments in the latest quarter — that's up 14.2 percent from $8.5 billion in Q1 2018.

According to the Canalys assessment, enterprise IT investment in cybersecurity shows no sign of slowing down. "The security industry will be immune to the increasingly challenging macro-economic and political environment," said Matthew Ball, principal analyst at Canalys.

There's a troubling trend that has raised awareness about the ultimate cost of an inadequate defense to counter online criminal activity. Recent high-profile ransomware attacks have resulted in some organisations paying large sums to regain access to critical IT systems and their related data.

Strengthening security strategies across devices, infrastructure, perimeters and applications will continue to be critical. Increasing employee training and gaining more comprehensive cybersecurity insurance will also be important.

As new cyber threats appear in the online arena, more security software startups will likely emerge, adding to an already crowded market. Product differentiation will be key, but also offering customers a choice of deployment models and simplified licensing will be vital.

Outlook for cybersecurity solutions growth

The challenge for enterprise organisations in both the public and private sectors is to maintain pace with the evolving and diverse range of online security threats. Many think they're too small or not high-profile enough to be targeted, but online hackers will seek to exploit any IT vulnerabilities.

This threat landscape is creating opportunities for IT channel partners to expand their capabilities to provide more holistic cybersecurity offerings to assess, recommend, deploy, integrate and manage multi-vendor solutions and services incorporating several deployment models.

Overall, the channel represented 92.3 percent of the cybersecurity solutions shipment value in the first quarter of 2019.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Digital transformation fuels upside market opportunities, and related growth goals are now the CEO's top business priority, according to the latest worldwide study by Gartner. Moreover, a growing number of CEOs will focus more on financial priorities – especially profitability improvement.

The annual survey of CEO and senior business executives in the fourth quarter of 2018 examined their business issues, as well as some areas of technology agenda impact. In total, 473 business leaders of companies with $50 million or more – and 60 percent with $1 billion or more – in annual revenue were qualified and surveyed.

Digital business market development 

"After a significant fall last year, mentions of growth increased this year to 53 percent, up from 40 percent in 2018," said Mark Raskino, vice president at Gartner. "This suggests that CEOs have switched their focus back to tactical performance as clouds gather on the horizon."

The survey results showed that a popular solution is to look in other geographic locations for growth. Responses mentioned other cities, states, countries and regions, as well as 'new markets' would also include some geographic reach — although a new market can also be industry-related, or virtual.

Twenty-three percent of CEOs see significant impacts arising from recent developments in tariffs, quotas and other forms of trade controls. Another 58 percent of CEOs have general concerns about this issue, suggesting that more CEOs anticipate it might impact their businesses in the future.

Another way that CEOs seem to be confronting softening growth prospects and weakening margins is to seek diversification — which increasingly means the application of 'digital business' to offer new products and revenue-producing channels.

Eighty-two percent of Gartner's survey respondents agreed that they had a management initiative or transformation program underway to make their companies more digital — that's up from 62 percent in 2018.

Cost management has risen in CEO priorities. When asked about their cost-control methods, 27 percent of respondents cited technology enablement, securing the third spot after measures around people and organisation, such as bonuses and expense or budget management.

However, when asked to consider productivity and efficiency actions, CEOs were much more inclined to think of digital business technology as a tool. Forty-seven percent of respondents mentioned technology as one of their top two ways to improve productivity.

According to the Gartner assessment, digital business planning must include the whole executive committee. However, the survey results showed that CEOs are concerned that some of the executive roles do not possess strong or even sufficient digital skills to face the future.

On average, CEOs believe that sales, risk, supply chain and human resource officers are most in need of more digital expertise. And, once all executive leaders are more comfortable with the digital sphere, new capabilities to execute on their business strategies will need to be developed.

Outlook for digital transformation skills development

When asked which organisational competencies their company needs to develop the most, 18 percent of CEOs named talent management, closely followed by technology enablement and digitalisation (17 percent) and data centricity or data management (15 percent).

"Datacentric decision-making is a key culture and capability change in a management system that hopes to thrive in the digital age. Executive leaders must be a role model to encourage and foster data centricity and data literacy in their business units and the organisation as a whole," Mr. Raskino concluded.

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Demand for cloud computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is expected to drive the current $45.6 billion market toward $150.7 billion by 2023 – that's a compound annual growth rate of 27 percent, according to the latest worldwide market study by Frost & Sullivan.

Enterprises are using cloud services for strategic benefits such as supporting digital transformation efforts rather than for tactical ones, like reducing IT infrastructure costs and the hardware or software maintenance burden.

This market shift has changed the way enterprises choose and manage their IT infrastructure, and led them to deploy applications across multiple infrastructures, from on-premises private cloud to public cloud (multi- and single-tenant), resulting in higher demand for IaaS offerings.

Hybrid multi-cloud market development

"As the mix of deployment models and best-of-breed cloud IaaS vendors becomes increasingly diverse, single-tenant IaaS will gain revenue share over multi-tenant services," said Maiara Munhoz, senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

Meanwhile, the emergence of cloud brokerage and cloud management platforms is boosting the trend of hybrid and multi-cloud deployment strategies, making managed cloud services providers key in supporting enterprises and their CIO or CTO requirements.

Frost & Sullivan analysts believe that managed service providers (MSPs) will support their customers with workload assessment and placement, workload migration, and hybrid cloud integration.

The North America region continues to be the most mature cloud IaaS market globally, followed by EMEA, but they are expected to gradually make room for the APAC and LATAM regions.

Some countries in APAC, such as Japan and Australia, are more mature, while India, China, Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong are fast-growing markets.

Outlook for cloud IaaS applications growth

Going forward, it will be essential for vendors of cloud computing IaaS to invest in integrated services, on-premises and in the public cloud. For further growth opportunities, vendors should:

• Offer more advanced services in the cloud — such as containers and serverless architecture — and tools for enterprises to manage, analyze, and act on their data
• Support hybrid deployment models, as enterprises realize that a single cloud or deployment model will not address all their application requirements
• Partner with MSPs to deliver training, programs and features to support them
• Invest in educating clients on cloud computing technology, as enterprises still need guidance on how to use cloud services to meet goals for business innovation and digital transformation

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The pace of change from a traditional capital-intensive IT infrastructure model to a more flexible hybrid multi-cloud services model is influencing enterprise spending trends across the globe.

Worldwide IT spending is forecast to total $3.79 trillion in 2019 — that's an increase of just 1.1 percent from 2018, according to the latest global market study by Gartner.

IT infrastructure market development

"Currency headwinds fuelled by the strengthening US dollar have caused us to revise our 2019 IT spending forecast down from the previous quarter," said John-David Lovelock, vice president at Gartner. "Through the remainder of 2019, the US dollar is expected to trend stronger, while enduring tremendous volatility due to uncertain economic and political environments and trade wars."

In 2019, technology product managers will have to get more strategic with their portfolio mix by balancing products and services that will post growth in 2019 with those larger markets that will trend flat to down.

According to the Gartner assessment, successful IT product managers in 2020 will have had a long-term view of the changes made in 2019.

The data centre systems segment will experience the largest decline in 2019 with a decrease of 2.8 percent. This is mainly due to the expected lower average selling prices (ASPs) in the server market driven by adjustments in the pattern of expected component costs.

Moreover, the shift of enterprise IT spending from traditional (non-cloud) offerings to new, cloud-based alternatives is continuing to drive growth in the enterprise software market.

In 2019, the market is forecast to reach $427 billion; that's up 7.1 percent from $399 billion in 2018. The largest cloud shift has so far occurred in application software.

However, Gartner expects increased growth for the infrastructure software segment in the near-term, particularly in integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and application platform as a service (aPaaS).

"The choices CIOs make about technology investments are essential to the success of a digital business. Disruptive emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), will reshape business models as well as the economics of public- and private-sector enterprises. AI is having a major effect on IT spending, although its role is often misunderstood," said Mr. Lovelock.

Outlook for AI applications spending growth

Gartner believes that AI is not a product, it is really a set of techniques or a computer engineering discipline. As such, AI is being embedded in many existing products and services, as well as being central to new development efforts in every industry.

Gartner’s AI business value forecast predicts that organisations will receive $1.9 trillion worth of benefit from the use of AI this year alone.

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Leading hyperscale cloud service providers continue to disrupt the traditional IT infrastructure vendor landscape, as more enterprise CIOs and CTOs expand their adoption of multi-cloud strategies that marginalise the remaining applications for on-premises data centres.

Legacy IT vendors that were reluctant to evolve their business model will now seek niche cloud market segments where they can differentiate their offerings. There's no viable growth path that's based upon hardware or software market status-quo assumptions. However, distinctive professional services are still a source of new opportunities.

Cloud computing market development

The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 17.5 percent in 2019 to total $214.3 billion — that's up from $182.4 billion in 2018, according to the latest global market study by Gartner.

The fastest-growing market segment will be cloud system infrastructure services, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which is forecast to grow 27.5 percent in 2019 to reach $38.9 billion — that's up from $30.5 billion in 2018.

The second-highest growth rate of 21.8 percent will be achieved by cloud application infrastructure services, or platform as a service (PaaS).

"Cloud services are definitely shaking up the industry," said Sid Nag, vice president at Gartner. "At Gartner, we know of no vendor or service provider today whose business model offerings and revenue growth are not influenced by the increasing adoption of cloud-first strategies in organisations. What we see now is only the beginning, though."

Through 2022, Gartner projects the market size and growth of the cloud services industry at nearly three times the growth of overall IT services.

According to recent Gartner surveys, more than a third of organisations see cloud investments as a top three investing priority, which is impacting market offerings. Gartner expects that by the end of 2019, more than 30 percent of technology providers’ new software investments will shift from cloud-first to cloud-only.

This means that license-based software consumption will further plummet, while SaaS and subscription-based cloud consumption models continue their rise.

"Organisations need cloud-related services to get on-boarded onto public clouds and to transform their operations as they adopt public cloud services," said Mr. Nag.

Currently, almost 19 percent of cloud budgets are spent on cloud-related services, such as cloud consulting, implementation, migration and managed services, and Gartner expects that this rate will increase to 28 percent by 2022.

Outlook for cloud computing application growth

According to the Gartner assessment, as cloud computing continues to become mainstream within most organisations, technology product managers for cloud-related service offerings will need to focus on delivering solutions that combine experience and execution with hyperscale providers’ offerings.

This complementary approach will drive both the transformation and optimisation of an organisation’s IT infrastructure and operations. This vendor coexistence model is the multi-cloud market reality.

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Smart data is generated by filtering out the noise from big data that's generated by media, business transactions, Internet of Things (IoT), and data exhausts from online activity. Smart data can uncover valuable commercial insights, by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of data analytics.

Furthermore, vast amounts of unstructured big data can be converted into smart data using enhanced data analytics tools that utilise artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms.

Advancements in data processing tools and the adoption of next-generation technologies – such as augmented analytics used to extract insights from big data – are expected to drive the smart data market toward $31.5 billion by 2022.

Augmented analytics market development

Augmented analytics automates data insights gathering and provides clearer information, which is not possible with traditional analysis tools. Companies such as Datameer, Xcalar, Incorta, and Bottlenose are already focusing on developing end-to-end smart data analytics solutions to obtain valuable insights from big data.

"Markets such as the US, the UK, India, and Dubai have rolled out several initiatives to use AI and ML-powered data analytics tools to generate actionable insights from open data,” said Naga Avinash, research analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

Smart data will help businesses reduce the risk of data loss and improve a range of activities such as operations, product development, predictive maintenance, customer experience and innovation.

Frost & Sullivan’s recent worldwide market study uncovered key market developments, technologies used to convert big data to smart data, government programs, and the IT organizations applying data analytics. It also found use cases for smart data applications.

"The evolution of advanced data analytics tools and self-service analytics endows business users instead of just data scientists with the ability to conduct analyses," noted Avinash.

Technology developers can ensure much wider adoption of their solutions by offering in-built security mechanisms that can block attackers in real time. They could also develop new business models such as shared data economy and even sell data-based products or utilities.

Outlook for augmented analytics application growth

As an example of other application scenarios, various governments have already begun to use data analytics on 'open data' sets to solve issues related to smart city and municipal water crises. Other important growth opportunities for smart data solution providers include:

• Employing augmented analytics and self-service data analytics tools, as they enable any business user to make queries, analyse data, and create customized reports and visualisations
• Leveraging a data monetisation approach, as it allows businesses to utilize and bring value at every point in the data value chain
• Adding new data analytics services to existing offerings, driven by enterprise CIOs and CTOs
• Partnering with innovative smart data solutions providers (emerging startups) across the world. This will help companies enhance their implementation capabilities by leveraging open-source smart data solutions focused on enterprise data management and analytics
• Collaborating with the government to address the digital transformation talent shortage and setting clear investment and data strategy goals

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Hyperscale cloud service providers continue to leverage their low-cost advantage to drive growth. According to the latest worldwide market study by Canalys, Google Cloud was the fastest-growing cloud infrastructure vendor last year – up more than 90% year on year – increasing its share of the total market from 6% in 2017 to 8% in 2018.

The top four hyperscale cloud service providers accounted for 61% of the total market in 2018. Amazon Web Services (AWS) remained the leader on 32%, followed by Microsoft Azure with 17%, Google Cloud in third place with 8% and Alibaba Cloud with 4%.

Hyperscale cloud market development

Canalys reports that hyperscale cloud infrastructure services are in a period of sustained growth, with spending up 46% in 2018 to more than $80 billion. Expenditure is also forecast to surpass $143 billion in 2020.

More businesses are deploying a hybrid multi-cloud strategy, integrating multiple providers with their existing on-premises IT infrastructure. Canalys estimates 30% of cloud infrastructure services spend, just over $24 billion, went through the IT channel of distributors, resellers, service providers and systems integrators in 2018.

"AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud are all increasing channel investment to raise their profiles, as competition for enterprise customers increases and workload cloud migration diversifies," said Alastair Edwards, chief analyst at Canalys.

The channel will play a vital role for the cloud service providers, in terms of boosting their customer reach, from both a sales and technical perspective. But each of the hyperscale cloud service provider titans current partner reach, engagement and program maturity differs — with Google Cloud trailing both AWS and Microsoft Azure in all areas. Alibaba Cloud is further back, behind the leaders.

Canalys estimates the top three providers represented 65% ($16 billion) of the channel's total cloud infrastructure services business in 2018. Microsoft manages one of the largest channel ecosystems in the technology sector and its Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program is the most mature among the cloud titans, according to the Canalys assessment.

Approximately 74% of revenue from Azure is estimated to come via its partners, which is by far the highest percentage in the sector. In contrast, AWS channel business accounts for around 15%, though its reach is growing rapidly, AWS having recruited over 35,000 partners to date, with hundreds a month wanting to join its partner program.

Canalys estimates that Google Cloud's channel business accounts for just over 25% of its $7 billion cloud infrastructure revenue. In spite of Google Cloud's rapid growth, its channel reach is relatively small, though it is trying a differentiated approach by being more focused on specific applications and verticals.

An estimated 13,000 partners have joined its partner program, of which just over 100 have achieved the highest-tier Premier Partner status, while less than a third of those have achieved a Specialization Partner designation.

Outlook for cloud channel application growth

In a recent Candefero channel survey, 20% of respondents think there is huge potential to working with Google Cloud, while 22% said they will work with other cloud service providers instead. Cloud computing service channel partners will continue to align with the market leaders.

That said, 44% of partners were intrigued to know more about partnering with Google. Their new leadership brings the experience of working with the largest enterprise customers. But to date, Google has not captured the broader channel where AWS and Microsoft are being more proactive.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Cybersecurity investment continues to be a top priority for most IT organizations. Worldwide spending on security-related hardware, software, and services is forecast to reach $103.1 billion in 2019 — that's an increase of 9.4 percent over 2018. The pace of growth will continue as industries invest heavily in IT security solutions to meet a wide range of cyber threats.

According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide spending on IT security solutions will achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.2 percent over the 2018-2022 forecast period and total $133.8 billion in 2022.

IT security market development

Three industries will spend the most on security solutions in 2019 — banking, discrete manufacturing, and federal or central government — will invest more than $30 billion combined. Three other industries (process manufacturing, professional services, and telecommunications) will each see spending greater than $6 billion this year.

The industries that will experience the fastest spending growth over the forecast period will be state or local government (11.9 percent CAGR), telecommunications (11.8 percent CAGR), and the resource industries (11.3 percent CAGR). This spending growth will make telecommunications the fourth largest industry for security spending in 2022 while state or local government will move into the sixth position ahead of professional services.

"When examining the largest and fastest growing segments for security, we see a mix of industries – such as banking and government – that are charged with guarding highly sensitive information in regulated environments. In addition, information-based organizations like professional services firms and telcos are ramping up spending, said Jessica Goepfert, program vice president at IDC.

Managed security services will be the largest technology category in 2019 with firms spending more than $21 billion for around-the-clock monitoring and management of security operations centers. Managed security services will also be the largest category of spending for each of the top five industries this year.

The second largest technology category in 2019 will be network security hardware, which includes unified threat management, firewalls, and intrusion detection and prevention technologies. The third and fourth largest investment categories will be integration services and endpoint security software.

The technology categories that will see the fastest spending growth over the forecast will be managed security services (14.2 percent CAGR), security analytics, intelligence, response and orchestration software (10.6 percent CAGR), and network security software (9.3 percent CAGR).

From a geographic perspective, the United States will be the single largest market for IT security solutions with spending forecast to reach $44.7 billion in 2019. Two industries – discrete manufacturing and the federal government – will account for nearly 20 percent of the U.S. total.

The second largest market will be China where security purchases by three industries — state or local government, telecommunications, and central government – will comprise 45 percent of the national total. Japan and the UK are the next two largest markets with security spending led by the consumer sector and the banking industry respectively.

Outlook for IT security application growth

Large and very large businesses will be responsible for roughly two-thirds of all IT security-related spending in 2019. These two segments will also see the strongest spending growth over the forecast with CAGRs of 11.1 percent for large businesses and 9.4 percent for very large businesses.

Medium and small businesses will spend nearly $26 billion combined on IT security solutions in 2019. Across the globe, consumers are forecast to spend nearly $5.7 billion on security-related products and services this year.

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As more CIOs and CTOs focus attention on selecting the best-fit IT infrastructure for their particular cognitive computing needs, vendors of semiconductor technologies are exploring new ways to optimize their investment in solutions at the edge of enterprise networks.

Revenue from the sale of artificial intelligence (AI) chipsets for edge inference and inference training will grow at 65% and 137% respectively between 2018 and 2023, according to the latest worldwide market study by ABI Research.

During 2018, shipment revenues from edge AI processing reached $1.3 billion, and by 2023 this figure is forecast to reach $23 billion. While it's a massive increase, that doesn’t necessarily favor current market leaders Intel and NVIDIA.

AI chipset market development

According to the ABI assessment, there will be intense vendor competition to capture this revenue between established players and several prominent startup players.

"Companies are looking to the edge because it allows them to perform AI inference without transferring their data. The act of transferring data is inherently costly and in business-critical use cases where latency and accuracy are key, and constant connectivity is lacking, applications can’t be fulfilled," said Jack Vernon, industry analyst at ABI Research.

Moreover, locating AI inference processing at the edge also means that companies don’t have to share private or sensitive data with public cloud service providers, a scenario that has proven to be problematic in the healthcare and consumer sectors.

That said, edge AI is going to have a significant impact on the semiconductor industry. The biggest winners from the growth in edge AI are going to be those vendors that either own or are currently building intellectual properties for AI-related Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs).

By 2023, it's predicted that ASICs could overtake GPUs as the architecture supporting AI inference at the edge, both in terms of annual vendor shipments and revenues.

In terms of market competition, on the AI inferencing side, Intel will be competing with several prominent AI startups – such as Cambricon Technology, Horizon Robotics, Hailo Technologies, and Habana Labs – for dominance of this market segment.

NVIDIA with its GPU-based AGX platform has also been gaining momentum in industrial automation and robotics. While FPGA leader Xilinx can also expect an uptick in revenues on the back of companies using FPGAs to perform inference at the edge, Intel as an FPGA vendor is also pushing its Movidius and Mobileye chipset.

Outlook for AI chipset applications growth

For AI training, NVIDIA will hold on to its current position as the market leader. However, other AI applications at the edge will likely favor alternative vendors.

"Cloud vendors are deploying GPUs for AI training in the cloud due to their high performance. However, NVIDIA will see its market share chipped away by AI training focused ASIC vendors like Graphcore, who are building high-performance and use-case specific chipsets," concluded Vernon.

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Augmented analytics, continuous intelligence and explainable artificial intelligence (AI) are among the top trends in big data and analytics that have significant disruptive potential over the next three to five years, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner.

"The size, complexity, distributed nature of data, speed of action and the continuous intelligence required by digital business means that rigid and centralized architectures and tools break down,” said Donald Feinberg, vice president at Gartner. “The continued survival of any business will depend upon an agile, data-centric architecture that responds to the constant rate of change."

Gartner recommends that data and analytics leaders collaborate with senior business leaders about their critical business priorities and explore the ten top related trends.

Augmented analytics

Augmented analytics is the next wave of disruption in the data and analytics market. It uses machine learning (ML) and AI techniques to transform how analytics content is developed, consumed and shared.

By 2020, augmented analytics will be a dominant driver of new purchases of analytics and business intelligence (BI), as well as data science and ML platforms, and of embedded analytics. Data and analytics leaders should plan to adopt augmented analytics as platform capabilities mature.

Augmented data management

Augmented data management leverages ML capabilities and AI engines to make enterprise information management categories including data quality, metadata management, master data management, data integration as well as database management systems (DBMSs) self-configuring and self-tuning.

It is automating many of the manual tasks and allows less technically skilled users to be more autonomous using data. It also allows highly skilled technical resources to focus on higher value tasks.

Augmented data management converts metadata from being used for audit, lineage and reporting only, to powering dynamic systems. Metadata is changing from passive to active and is becoming the primary driver for all AI and ML.

Through to the end of 2022, data management manual tasks will be reduced by 45 percent through the addition of ML and automated service-level management.

Continuous intelligence

By 2022, more than half of major new business systems will incorporate continuous intelligence that uses real-time context data to improve decisions.

Continuous intelligence is a design pattern in which real-time analytics are integrated within a business operation, processing current and historical data to prescribe actions in response to events. It provides decision automation or decision support.

Continuous intelligence leverages multiple technologies such as augmented analytics, event stream processing, optimization, business rule management and ML.

Explainable AI

AI models are increasingly deployed to augment and replace human decision making. However, in some scenarios, businesses must justify how these models arrive at their decisions. To build trust with users and stakeholders, application leaders must make these models more interpretable and explainable.

Unfortunately, most of these advanced AI models are complex black boxes that are not able to explain why they reached a specific recommendation or a decision. Explainable AI in data science and ML platforms, for example, auto-generates an explanation of models in terms of accuracy, attributes, model statistics and features in natural language.

Graph analytics

Graph analytics is a set of analytic techniques that allow for the exploration of relationships between entities of interest such as organizations, people and transactions.

The application of graph processing and graph DBMSs will grow at 100 percent annually through 2022 to continuously accelerate data preparation and enable more complex and adaptive data science.

Graph data stores can efficiently model, explore and query data with complex interrelationships across data silos, but the need for specialized skills has limited their adoption to date.

Graph analytics will grow in the next few years due to the need to ask complex questions across complex data, which is not always practical or even possible at scale using SQL queries.

Data fabric

Data fabric enables frictionless access and sharing of data in a distributed data environment. It enables a single and consistent data management framework, which allows seamless data access and processing by design across otherwise siloed storage.

Through 2022, bespoke data fabric designs will be deployed primarily as a static infrastructure, forcing organizations into a new wave of cost to completely re-design for more dynamic data mesh approaches.

NLP conversational analytics

By 2020, 50 percent of analytical queries will be generated via search, natural language processing (NLP) or voice, or will be automatically generated. The need to analyze complex combinations of data and to make analytics accessible to everyone in the organization will drive broader adoption, allowing analytics tools to be as easy as a search interface or a conversation with a virtual assistant.

Commercial AI and ML

Gartner predicts that by 2022, 75 percent of new end-user solutions leveraging AI and ML techniques will be built with commercial solutions rather than open source platforms.

Commercial vendors have now built connectors into the Open Source ecosystem and they provide the enterprise features necessary to scale and democratize AI and ML, such as project & model management, reuse, transparency, data lineage, and platform cohesiveness and integration that Open Source technologies lack.

Blockchain

The core value proposition of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies is providing decentralized trust across a network of untrusted participants. The potential ramifications for analytics use cases are significant, especially those leveraging participant relationships and interactions.

It will be several years before four or five major blockchain technologies become dominant. Until then, technology end users will be forced to integrate with the blockchain technologies and standards dictated by their dominant customers or networks. This includes integration with your existing data and analytics infrastructure.

The costs of integration may outweigh any potential benefit. Blockchains are a data source, not a database, and will not replace existing data management technologies.

Persistent memory servers

New persistent-memory technologies will help reduce costs and complexity of adopting in-memory computing (IMC)-enabled architectures. Persistent memory represents a new memory tier between DRAM and NAND flash memory that can provide cost-effective mass memory for high-performance workloads.

It has the potential to improve application performance, availability, boot times, clustering methods and security practices while keeping costs under control. It will also help organizations reduce the complexity of their application and data architectures by decreasing the need for data duplication.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.