Top Tech Trends for 2022

The past two years have created a great deal of change in how businesses use technology and elevated the importance of that technology to the overall business strategy as the pandemic forced more and more business online. The impact of the past two years is driving continued change and the economic uncertainty creates the need for businesses to accelerate their transformation efforts. The next two years will see many technology changes and innovations as companies scramble to be more competitive.

This is my 16th year doing some type of predictions or trends report. One of the most important assumptions that you need to understand is time. When I was at IDC the general time frame was 12 months. At G2, we looked at the next year, but also tried to take a longer view. For Arion I've decided to focus the analysis on 18-24 months. This brings several important trends into the mix, and excludes some that are "high visibility" but outside the time window. The other assumption that underpins the analysis is that these trends are business technology trends, not consumer trends. There can be some spillover of course, but that's the basic idea.

This brings me to the Metaverse. First I'll say that I'm not ignoring it, to the contrary, I've spent quite a bit of time looking at the technology today, and where it might go over the next 5-10 yrs+. That said, it simply does not fall into the 18-24 month window for business technology. Are there companies working on "parts" of the Metaverse, sure. But taken as a whole, the concept is not short term, at least not from a business to business perspective. There are component parts of technology that could well be a part of the future concept, and for now, I'll stick to looking at them piecemeal. In the short term look to online gaming and virtual entertainment events as the most obvious use case as well as the continued expansion of decentralized currencies.

To help understand the impact of each trend on business, I think it's useful to break business down into some manageable parts. I've used a construct like this for several years, so if you're familiar with any of my previous trend analysis this won't be a surprise. I've simplified it a bit this year, using 4 areas as a model: 1. Business strategy, 2. Business operations, 3. Workforce and 4. Customers. I've debated for some time on including a "partner" or "ecosystem" area, but for now its included in business strategy and operations. That doesn't mean it's not important to the future of business. In fact I think ecosystem is likely to be an even more impactful business strategy and an important part of "product" and go to market.

The overall trend for the year (this one and next) is "digital first". I wrote about that here, so I won't spend time on that in this post. This year I've broken down the trends into five general areas to make them a bit easier to consume. As you can see from the diagram those are:

1. Security

2. Digital Experiences

3. Automation

4. Digital Platforms

5. Privacy

In each of these general areas there are four associated trends to examine. I could have made it six, or ten for that matter, but four seems manageable. So these are the four trends in each area that I believe are having the most impact on and offer the biggest opportunity for businesses over the 18-24 months. This post is meant to introduce you to each of the trends. I do plan to expand on them over the next year.

Security

1. Zero trust is the security model of choice but companies continue to struggle with the implementation, particularly in a hybrid IT environment. The pandemic, with the massive number of new remote employees, acted as a catalyst to create momentum and continues to accelerate the adoption of zero trust. Hybrid work environments, widespread use of the cloud and increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats pushes laggards to make the move quickly.

2. Application-based multi factor authentication (MFA) is replacing SMS as the best method of adding a strong layer of account security. SMS vulnerabilities are not a new occurrence, but the frequency of scams involving intercepting SMS codes using techniques like SIM swapping or SS7 have dramatically increased during the pandemic, making app based MFA a necessity.

3. Security automation and the software tools to support it are a priority for businesses as they respond to increasingly more aggressive, creative and automation enabled threats. The next generation of the tools are starting to intersect with the no code paradigm to enable greater flexibility and adaptability in answering the changing threat landscape.

4. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) expands rapidly as companies continue to deal with distributed workforces, data privacy and increased government regulation. Technology advances have (finally) increased the speed of FHE, making it a viable and more secure alternative to partially homomorphic encryption (PHE) and somewhat homomorphic encryption (SHE). FHE helps meet regulatory requirements while increasing collaboration and efficient cloud usage.

Digital Experiences

1. Real-time drives everything from experience to communication. In a world of instant gratification customers and employees expect fast, relevant, personal interactions. Companies will need to rethink many systems and integrations to make their responses as near real-time as possible to meet these new expectations.

2. Product led growth (PLG) strategy sees wide spread use and adoption beyond SaaS and cloud companies. Industries like manufacturing, retail, and media leverage the strategy to move into a subscription business model. Self-service across the entire customer lifecycle is essential for the overall success of the PLG experience.

3. Holistic commerce is the next progression of omni-channel retail strategies. The behaviors of hybrid shopping that grew up during the pandemic have blurred the concept of channel, leading to channel agnostic buyer behavior. Consumers expect to easily move across channels, blending the entire shopping experience on and off line, agnostic to locations and on any device.

4. Hybrid events or maybe more accurately hybrid "experiences" become the default for corporate events. The pandemic forced businesses to embrace virtual event platforms and taught attendees that for many events the format is effective. Going forward it's likely that companies will offer most events with both options to maximize attendance and meet attendees expectations. With the hybrid event platform in place it also makes companies more adaptable to changing markets, economic conditions and global crises.

Automation

1. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have been around for many years but had limited impact on businesses until the past 3-5 years. The rapid expansion of the use of AI is due to the perfect storm of availability of massive data sets, advances in supporting tech and new business use cases created by digital transformation and the changes in business strategy due to the pandemic response. The growing use of AI, which will accelerate over the next 12-24 months, is creating two issues that must be thoroughly examined and dealt with to prevent backlash and secondary business challenges. Harmonious automation, that is, finding the right balance between humans and automation, is critical. The rapidly expanding use of algorithms and the impact that the data used for training has on the output, creates questions on how to prevent inherent bias and ensure ethical use of those outputs. The tech industry needs to develop standards and regulate itself, which may or may not be enough to prevent governments from stepping in to provide stricter guidance and regulation.

2. The use of bots continues to expand across the business as they become more conversational and human like using AI and NLP, and ultimately gaining emotional intelligence. For customer interactions the bots are becoming more personalized using data integrations and advanced through self-learning capabilities including the use of neural networks. More companies will add payment processing capabilities to bot deployments over the next year as use expands. Bot use is not just for customer interactions though, internally bots will be used more and more to provide analytic capabilities across broad, massive data sets.

3. Modern workflow management and customization capabilities are showing up as both embedded application features and as a part of a full cloud digital platform. The flexibility and adaptability created by these new features are a key component in transforming a business, and are a welcome change from older inflexible business process automation (BPA) platforms.

4. IT automation is a major imperative for IT shops to automate manual processes and free up IT resources for more critical tasks. The more infrastructure can be automated the more adaptable the digital business platform. The automation is also a credible strategy to dealing with labor shortages coming out of the pandemic.

Digital Platforms

1. Self-service integration both as a platform and embedded in other no-code and low-code applications, rapidly becomes a big differentiator for cloud offerings. Companies looking to empower users and to build more flexible and adaptable business platforms make this a default selection criteria for new solutions.

2. Low code and no code platforms proliferate as process flexibility and adaptability become core to an effective business strategy. Enabling "citizen" developers frees up IT resources to focus on higher priority and more complex projects. Providing end users the ability to manage and modify process in real-time means that the business can adapt to rapidly changing market conditions early enough to both mitigate risks and take advantage of emerging opportunities. As a part of this trend more applications are available with no and low code capabilities embedded in the apps themselves.

3. Cloud communications platforms (CCP) see rapid adoption as companies struggle to eliminate communication silos created by disconnected solutions across the business. More coordinated and consistent communications are required to meet changing customer and employee expectations and deliver the necessary digital experiences.

4. The Internet of things (IoT) continues to expand use cases and add value to businesses. Supply chain visibility and automation, exacerbated by the pandemic, get much needed investments over the next 2 years. Other use cases of IoT across everything from smart devices to product authentication (anti-counterfeiting) and even customer engagement make IoT one of the most important priorities for businesses next year.

Privacy

1. Privacy-as-a-service (PraaS) proliferates as privacy law complexity and compliance overhead grows at a rapid pace. Managing the entire privacy data chain, particularly with increasing public awareness, is a burden for companies and the emergence of as a service solutions will greatly ease that burden.

2. Biometrics continue to grow as a preferred security solution but the management of the associated data creates serious privacy risks for businesses. New protocols and compliance processes are required to mitigate these risks.

3. Regulation driven by increased public awareness of privacy issues continues to expand and create complexity for businesses. In the US more states are enacting regulations, increasing the difficulty of compliance greatly. Across the globe in India, China, Brazil and many others data privacy is a priority and more regulation is imminent.

4. Third party risk management is a growing concern for businesses as regulations around data protection throughout the custody chain increases. This will be a central focus for compliance policies over the next 2 years.