Top 10 Emerging technology trends in 2019

2019 has been a fantastic year, and there have been a series of developments on the emerging technology front. This article tries to list out all the emerging technologies in 2019.

Quantum Computing

Believe it or not, quantum computing is on the rise. 2019 has been phenomenal for a series of announcements from giant corporations involved in quantum computing development and research. In May 2019 IBM announced its plan to commercialize quantum computing within the next 4–5 years time frame. Other players in quantum computing involve Google, Microsoft, D-wave systems. Many different approaches have been put forward for building a practical quantum computer, and these include ion trap method, superconducting circuits, etc. Amongst these Ion Trap has been tried out by most of the organizations for building a practical quantum computer. According to the research report by Tractica, the quantum computing market will reach $2.2 Billion by 2022. IBM has launched its service open to the public for free. Right now companies are in the race to achieve the quantum supremacy where quantum computers will supersede the classical computers. At present the quantum computers are confined to lab space with controlling temperatures equivalent to that of -273 degree Celsius. Thus having a personal quantum computer is far from reality. There has been debate among experts whether quantum computers would replace classical computers or not. Classical computers operate on binary bits 0,1 where information can have any one of the states either 0 or 1, whereas quantum computers work on the principle of quantum mechanics and information can have two states simultaneously that is either 0 or 1 and combination of 0 and 1. This gives the possibility to have many solutions for complex problems which at present the classical computers are unable to solve. Hopefully, in the next 3–5 years, the job market will require people with skills in quantum computing.

Serverless Technology

Over the past two decades, IT infrastructure has evolved to the point where interdependence has reduced drastically. IT industry has moved from a monolithic architecture to microservices. Programming world has shifted towards event-driven development, which has given rise to microservices where each component interacts with another component when an event is triggered. When Amazon launched AWS Lambda in 2014, it introduced to the world a new kind of infrastructure which was termed as serverless. Now serverless does not actually mean there is no server at all. Indeed there are hardware servers working behind the scene. It is just that the organizations need not worry about any hardware and application servers. Everything is taken care of by the service providers. The serverless technology has brought the cost of infrastructure drastically to such a low level that it almost costs nothing to host a web application or even a website. Many serverless vendors have emerged over the period of last five years, and some name includes Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Netlify, etc. Serverless has also given rise to the concept of NoOPS, which is seen to replace DevOps, possibly in many domains. At present, still manual effort is required to configure and maintain a microservice; thus, a DevOps team is required to handle a large infrastructure. Serverless further removes the requirement of maintaining a DevOps team by introducing NoOPS where configuration and maintenance are taken care of by service provider. This allows the development team to focus on code development. A single push of the code results in triggering a build automatically configured by the service provider based on the parameters set by the development team. Build and deploy now takes only a fraction of time and maintenance requirement is almost negligible, making the business application live all the time without any downtime. According to Deloitte’s survey, serverless market will reach $14.93 billion by 2023. This technology is worth a try for the people looking to build a career path.

Machine Learning

This is one of the emerging technologies that is worth mentioning. Industrial revolution 4.0 is underway and its a data-driven world. We are generating data in humongous volume, and making decisions based on data has become more complex than ever before. Machine learning involves programming a system to learn by itself based on patterns found in the data. This will help to make key business decisions. According to Forbes magazine, here are some of the cool statistics related to the present trend in machine learning. ML patents grew at the rate of 34% CAGR between 2013–2017. The overall spending on AI and ML will grow from $12 Billion in 2017 to $57.6 Billion by 2021.

As of 2018 data, 60% of organizations were found to have adopted ML at different levels of their organizations. While all these numbers and insight from Forbes magazine look cool, it presents a clear picture about how ML market would shape up in the future. For getting further insight, read the Forbes page. As the market will boom, so does the requirement of ML engineers, ML scientists would and ML skills are already a hot skill in the market.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is the next hot emerging technology of 2019. AI implementation has been the most buzzing word in the market. AI implementation is quite vast and includes machine learning, NLP, computer vision, chatbots, social intelligence, motion detection, facial recognition, etc.. Still, there is a debate going on whether AI will replace human beings. Already many organizations have rolled out AI implementation in one form or other. A most common implementation is a chatbot, which most organizations have rolled out to cater to the needs of customer care. According to statista AI, software market would be rise around $ 118.6 Billion. According to Forbes, as of 2018, 83% of organizations have AI as a strategic priority.

Further insight into AI can be read here. Definitely, AI is after sought hot skill in the market, and the demand for AI professionals would rise drastically by 2025.

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

AR is going to supersede VR as the most sought reality tech soon. As of 2019 market valuation of AR and VR market stands at 16.8 billion USD and would be around 198 billion USD by 2025. Augmented reality uses the information of the physical environment for the user to interact accordingly. As of 2019, there are around 1684 organizations listed in AngelList working on AR. So far, these industries have been working and implementing AR.

The AR definitely looks promising technology, and people looking for making a career in this field can start to explore opportunities in this field.

Blockchain

Blockchain has been in the news for quite some years now. Thanks to cryptocurrencies that have popularized blockchain for creating decentralized apps or apps. But several industry experts already have a vision for future use of blockchain. Several industries such as supply chain, healthcare have started working on the proof of concept. Though blockchain is yet to make a major mark on the industry but going by the push given by several big names has definitely caught the attention of several people who are willing to make a career in this field. Over the years several blockchain technologies have evolved but most popular has been the one that has powered ethereum coin. Out of several industries so far only health care and supply chain industries have shown some valuable use cases.

Internet of Things (IoT)

The internet has come to lead a dominant role in our lives. Nowadays, almost everything can be connected to the internet. Hence this phenomenon is termed as the Internet of Things or IoT. Basically, this is achieved via means of sensors, small size computers such as Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Intel boards which connect almost every device to the internet. Some coolest examples which you might have seen are smart home lighting system which can be controlled through a mobile app, smart refrigerators, smart television sets, smart radios, smart automobiles, etc. As of 2019, there are 26.6 billion IoT devices worldwide, which is going to increase to 75 billion by 2025. Healthcare industry would see a sharp rise of about 40% in usage of these devices by 2020. The market capitalization of IoT would be around 457 billion USD by 2020. IoT devices have seen a series of success in the healthcare industry and consumer-driven industry but are expected to produce more use cases in other sectors as well.

Cybersecurity

This has been not new rather old technology trend and deals with security concerns over the use of internet-related apps. This technology dates back as long as the history of the internet goes. But as we are moving into a more data-driven world, the demand for Cybersecurity specialist has risen significantly. Data needs to be secured and safeguarded from possible cyber attack. It is rather a more challenging field as compared to other technologies because each day presents new sets of challenges and hackers find new ways to hack into the system thus requiring the Cybersecurity professionals to come up with the new plans to prevent any attack and also to identify the malicious attack and categorize them. Every industry that is working on ML, AI, blockchain, web development, IoT will require Cybersecurity technologies implemented alongside to safeguard the progress in these fields.

Robotic Process Automation

This field has been rapidly making its mark in the industry. It involves a combination of software with ML, AI to automate repetitive tasks which earlier required human intervention. Technically it replaces human effort where job volume is quite high and is of repeatable nature. According to Gartner RPA market stood around 680 million dollars in 2018 which would rise to 2.2 Billion dollars in 2022. RPA is being pursued by banks, insurance, utilities, and telecom industry. By 2022 Gartner predicts that 85% organizations big or small would have deployed RPA. It is another emerging technology worth noting in 2019.

Conclusion

There are many developments going around emerging technology in the world, such as robotics, driverless cars, drones, etc., It is not possible to cover all these emerging technology trends in one article. In the backend ML, AI, IoT, Cybersecurity are going to play a vital role and have been the most discussed technology trends of 2019.

Originally published at https://rejolut.com on August 3, 2019.