Anexia IT Trends 2019
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the completion of probably the most spectacular project in human history: the landing of a manned spacecraft on the moon. When John F. Kennedy set the goal in 1961 to bring a human to the moon and back in the same decade, his idea was technologically feasible in centuries and completely dismissed as crazy. The doubters shouldn’t be right and Kennedy’s visionary view into the future was a milestone in technological development.
We – precisely four of our experts – want to take a visionary look into the future of 2019, too. Where does the digital transformation begin? How will cloud-native applications evolve? How important will apps for a Smart Watch become and what is “The Intelligent Digital Mesh”? – Our experts explain this to you in this blog post.
Humanity in the Digital Transformation
Alexander Friessnegg, Head of Human Resources
If you look at the pioneers of technological trends for the year 2019, you can’t get around concepts like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, natural language processing and blockchain. These are all trends which will also have a major impact on human resources departments. Innovative companies – and we don’t exclude ourselves – will take up these discussions and developments. We let ourselves be inspired by these trends, for example, when it comes to the working world of tomorrow. We proactively create the conditions internally and in the corporate environment to implement new work concepts confidently and efficiently.
IT processes are complex and so are the people and needs behind them. We are aware of this and therefore see a clear counter-trend in the megatrend of digitalization that leads us to even more humanity and individualization in teamwork. Digital transformation begins with the understanding of our own employees. In particular, the topics of cultural change, transformation of leadership and employee engagement will therefore accompany us strongly in the upcoming years.
The Intelligent Digital Mesh
Matthias Rettl, Senior Solution Architect
You’ll be amazed when you look at the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019 on Gartner’s homepage: “The future will be characterized by smart devices delivering increasingly insightful digital services everywhere, we call this the intelligent digital mesh.” so David Cearley, Gartner Distinguished Vice President Analyst. It is astonishing above all, because “The Intelligent Digital Mesh” was already proclaimed by Gartner in 2016 and 2017 as an important technology disruptor. Does Gartner simply not come up with anything new, or is there more behind this ominous mesh than a short-term technology hype? Should this topic dealt with at all? In my opinion, yes, absolutely and not only if you are interested in IT. A completely new way in which technology and people interact with each other, but also among each other is emerging here. But let’s take a look at Gartner’s definition behind the three terms:
“Intelligent: How artificial intelligence is in virtually every existing technology, and creating entirely new categories.” Today, with very few exceptions, hardly any technology deserves the attribute intelligent, since it is mainly a statistical system, without any form of self-organization or autonomous learning. Here, development is still lagging miles behind what marketing wants us to believe. But this can change abruptly – and then the world in which we live will be a different one.
“Digital: Blending the digital and physical worlds to create an immersive world.” Anyone who has ever played with virtual or augmented reality can immediately get something out of this sentence. Once you’ve submerged in one of these worlds, the physical and the digital become blurred in our perception into a pulp that, by definition, can no longer be differentiated between real and “unreal”.
“Mesh: Exploiting connections between expanding sets of people, businesses, devices, content and services.” All these intelligent units – from autonomous vehicles, software- and hardware-based robots, networked cameras, biofunctional sensors in our clothing and much more – get used and permanently supplied with data by billions of autonomous units (humans, machines). They are networked, exchange with each other and offer us infinite possibilities to bring the digital and the physical world even closer and even less distinguishable to each other.
We are still far way from these visions becoming reality, because the systems clearly still lack intelligence. Only then, when AIs develop AIs and they in turn design AIs, there will be “The Intelligent Digital Mesh”. Until then, it is to be hoped that our own intelligence and reason will prevent “The Intelligent Digital Mesh” from being our last invention. Nevertheless, I remain curious to see how far the trend will develop in 2019.
Smartwatch Apps on the rise
Darko Damjanovic-Lichtfuß, Senior Mobile Developer
When it comes to mobile development, most people think of smartphone apps and programs for iOS and Android. Although don’t lose sight of the Smartwatch development: The Apple Watch grew up last year. It can now operate independently of the iPhone and even make calls independently. In 2018, a mobile ECG was introduced for the Apple Watch and security features such as fall detection (the Apple Watch recognizes when a user crashes and alerts an emergency contact) were implemented. This development in particular, shows that Apple is pushing the topic of health monitoring. By the way – the Apple Watch is currently the most successful watch of all: The sales figures are even ahead of giants like Rolex. So anyone who thought the Smartwatch was on the descending branch was wrong. Exciting mobile applications for the Apple Watch could shake up the market in 2019.
cloud-native applications
Christian Kreuzberger, Senior Software Developer
Therewith web applications run on cloud platforms like Kubernetes, CloudFoundry and Infrastructure-as-a-Service platforms, they must be developed on the basis of the cloud-native approach (e.g. as a 12-factor app). A brief explanation: we speak of cloud-native when the application is available for installation on one or more cloud instances without making any changes on the code base. The aim of the approach is to get an application to run on any cloud infrastructure with relatively little effort. On the one hand, this saves costs for installation and configuration, and on the other hand, this approach also allows the simple relocation of the application to another infrastructure provider. In the best case, it is even possible to use several providers at the same time in order to increase the reliability and performance of the application (keyword Hybrid Cloud).
I think that in 2019 the cloud-native approach will become very important, because companies want to have their applications installed on cloud servers more and more often. Especially for us at Anexia, this approach is already a lived reality. We developers benefit here from the proximity to our cloud hosting experts. All in all, we can remain curious, how the share of cloud-native applications will grow next year.