New year, new technology trends

Edge computing is ahead of the game: 5G is becoming a reality. Companies that want to prepare for it now are therefore using lower-cost sensors and mature AI applications to build compute-intensive edge environments.

This lays the foundation for high-bandwidth, low-latency Internet of Things environments that offer tremendous innovation potential.

It will still take a few years for 5G data technology to become established in the entire DACH region. In 2020, however, many players from the technology industry and business will already be investing in the development of edge environments in order to optimally prepare for the realization of an AI-driven IoT.

While the crypto frenzy in blockchain is in the media spotlight, most players in the industry already see the bigger picture of the technology and understand its full potential.

Therefore, 2020 will be a watershed year for major blockchain implementations: Companies will develop indelible ledgers based on hyperledgers.

This will make blockchain ripe for many more use cases and move into the "mainstream." In the healthcare sector, for example, companies can create universal patient records or improve pharmaceutical chain-of-custody processes, i.e. processes for the chronological documentation of evidence.

The validation of blockchain and indelible ledgers through these new use cases will greatly drive further adoption of the technology.

Software-based storage virtualization, combined with solutions for software-based (and hardware-accelerated) compute and network virtualization, provides much of the flexibility of today's composable architectures - at low cost and ever-increasing performance.

Next year will undoubtedly see continued attempts to build a true hardware-based rack computing model. The market for this will continue to develop rapidly.

However, many companies already need to transform in 2020 and therefore cannot wait any longer. A combination of modern HCI architectures (including disaggregated HCI) and software-based virtualization and containerization is therefore clearly the better solution for them.