There is no doubt that 2020 will go down as a momentous year in history. For many organisations, it was a year filled with trepidation and change, with many forced to relook at their business strategy and accommodate the mass shift to remote work.
One thing that has been made clear in the past year, is the necessity of digital transformation to business longevity. Our reliance on digital services, and the connectivity that underpins it all, will continue to be a key driver of our modern economy, even in a post-pandemic world. So what can we expect to see in the technology landscape over the next 12 months? Anup Changaroth, Chief Technology Officer, Asia Pacific and Japan at Ciena shares his predictions for 2021:
Continued growth in IoT and wearables
In 2020, the demand surge for connectivity because of the shift to remote working and learning placed unexpected pressure on the networks. Driven by the need to get data and applications closer to end-users, 2021 will see an even greater focus among businesses to invest in the Edge Cloud. As companies in Asia continue to adopt cloud services and mobile devices to consume content and data to ensure business continuity, critical industries such as manufacturing and automotive are also leveraging cloud-native applications that are more compute-intensive and latency-sensitive. This means compute and storage cloud resources need to move closer to the edge of the network, in order to meet and deliver expectations for quality of experience.
5G adoption continues; businesses find “killer app"
Alongside the ongoing expansion of reach and scale of 4G in some emerging markets across Asia, 5G commercial service will continue to be rolled out progressively. In fact, while businesses and developers start building the “killer app” that could call out the significance of 5G, early enterprise deployment of 5G will also begin, enabling them to get the first true taste of its potential. This will drive early implementation of network slicing, and push investments to the edge infrastructure, as businesses realise the need to transform the network to keep up with the speed demands of 5G.
Drive for “openness" in collaboration apps
In 2021, the adoption of collaborative applications and e-learning applications will continue to pace both in private and public sectors in Asia. In fact, Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack shows how collaboration apps will change the way we work, even though there is still a huge preference for in-person interaction.
Infrastructure efficiency momentum
The telecom network infrastructure has been going through significant changes in the last few years with the increasing adoption of automation for operational efficiency. In 2021, with the continued build-out of 5G networks including early 5G Standalone (SA) networks, as well as increased Cloud services adoption by Enterprises, this trend of adopting programmable network elements and automation software systems will accelerate even further, both within the Telecom I.T software stack, and out towards the access and edge of the Service Provider networks.
