As another year gets underway and we look forward to another year of technological breakthroughs and industry changing trends we often have to stop and re-evaluate our investments in some technologies and reaffirm our commitment to others.
2017 saw vast swings in technology with things like a Bitcoin bubble to rival any other bubble in history, amazing advances in Artificial Intelligence, Apple deliberately slowing their phones in an attempt to make us want to buy the “Latest and Greatest” phones and Cyber-attacks where at an all-time high including huge losses of user details across a wide range of companies such as Yahoo, Kmart, Equifax, Imgur, and even Uber.
2018 is shaping up to be even more disruptive as we see early indications of a buddle burst and potential entire collapse of Bitcoin, exciting advancements in mobile phone technology, VR and one of the most impactful security vulnerabilities to ever hit the industry in the form of the Meltdown and Spectre exploits.
So what are the technologies that are worth watching out for and looking in to how it may affect our businesses our industry or even society itself?
Here are my top 5 that I believe will make huge impacts in 2018.
Block Chain (The tech behind Bitcoin)
Bitcoin has been in the news a lot of late for some good reasons and some bad. More importantly than the massive swings in value of Bitcoin is the technology that makes it all work.
Block Chain is a new way of decentralizing the data required to drive many applications meaning that our transaction data is no longer required to be stored and secured by a specific company (Uber, AirBNB, Twitter, Google, FaceBook etc.). Instead, Block Chain databases allows for the authentication of a transaction (Let’s say a driver picking up and dropping off a passenger) with it all being encrypted, open source, highly available and unable to be corrupted without anyone noticing.
This technology does not have to be limited to financial transactions, but can also be used to verify identity of an individual. For example: Australia Post have announced it will be using Block Chain technology within its Digital ID platform.
I think that 2018 will be the watershed year for Block Chain and how it affects the way, we in the IT industry, think about data and trust across a wide range of applications.
AI, Bots and Digital Assistants
We’ve slowly seen the emergence of digital assistants such as Apples Siri, Amazons Echo and Alexa, Googles Assistant and even Microsoft’s Cortana, but these have been more of a novelty than something we rely on in our day to day lives.
As AI technology increases, even with basic pattern recognition improvements and big data mining techniques, we will see more and more applications for these will become more ubiquities and will really start to make an impact on our daily lives.
We are already seeing the emergence of Chat Bots in areas such as banking (Great examples are Wells Fargo and Australians Commonwealth Bank) however, each of these chat bots are specific to their own area of expertise and exposed to a specific data set that they can reply about.
Once we have a way to retrieve all of the required data from all of the companies we interact with, then we are going to see some great leaps ahead in how we interact with companies, consumers and even government agencies.
With access to more machine learning, in 2018 we should start to see proactive skills start to appear in our digital personal assistance that will notify us of suspect banking transactions, when our friends or pizza delivery are arriving, when we are due for a health check or even book all of our flights and accommodation ahead of time to get the best deals.
VR v’s AR v’s MR (Because we need more acronyms in our industry!)
Virtual Reality is awesome!
VR headsets such as the HTC Vive and the Oculas Rift are not new to 2018 but we will see increasing numbers of games and content that are tuned to VR. If you have ever used a VR headset then you will agree that the experience of playing an existing high end game in VR (Such as Fallout 4) is cool, but clunky as the original controls were never built with VR in mind. In 2018 we will see new high end content that is built for VR from the ground up will bring a level of realism to games that will literally be game changing. 🙂
Some tech that you may not have played with is AR or Augmented Reality especially in the form of the Microsoft HoloLens. I had a chance to try this nearly 2 years ago and the ability to see the real world but augment what you are seeing with the real world was revolutionary, but also limiting with its field of view etc.
MR, or Mixed Reality, is the next big thing and Microsoft are the leaders in this space with all the lessons they have learnt from HoloLens.
What is MR? Take all the positives of VR but remove the need for pre-mapping a room with special sensors. This opens up the world to a virtual experience without limitations.
2018 will see more innovation and a faster move towards some sort of augmentation on how we perceive the world. It may start with big bulky headsets but rapidly move to helmets, windscreens and regular old glasses before we start wearing them as contact lenses!!.
If the argument of VR v’s MR ever comes to a head, like the good old days of VHS v Betamax or Blue Ray v HDDVD, consider me squarely in the MR camp.
Being a System Center tragic I can’t predict technology in 2018 if I didn’t include some note about System Center and what I think will be on the horizon for the next 12 months.
System Center Configuration Manager
All of our favourite System Center product would have to be Configuration Manager. This has to be one of the easiest products in the IT industry to predict as we are not only given the opportunity to vote on the features we want using the UserVoice Feedback page but Microsoft even give us the next version ahead of time with the monthly Technical Preview releases.
One thing that is obvious from Microsoft’s direction is that InTune will become more and more integrated in to the product we know and love and make managing of devices outside of our perimeters easier and easier.
System Center Service Manager
Microsoft have announced that 2018 will be the year that Service Manager is going to join the Configuration Manager with a regular cadence of 6 monthly releases including new features by the end of 2018. This is fantastic news for the one System Center application that never seems to get the recognition it deserves.
v1801 has already been released and it adds the first new features we have seen since the release of 2012 and also some much needed security features, such as support for TLS 1.2.
For example, there is now Azure integration with Azure Action Groups via the IT Service Management Connector that allow you to set up rules to create incident work items automatically in Service Manager for alerts generated on Azure and non-Azure resources.
The authoring toolkit has also already been released and can be downloaded here.
There is no news at this stage on if Microsoft will release a Technical Preview of Service Manager or if they will host a UserVoice site for end user feedback…..  We can only hope.
Exciting times!