2019 Will be the Year of Innovations and Re-inventions

In this article, five technology experts from around the sphere of business IT have compiled their predictions for what the trends will look like in 2019.

After a year of major technologies taking root and sprouting potential, 2019 could be the year the tech industry reaps a full harvest of breakthrough technologies from 5G telecommunications, hybrid clouds from public cloud providers and edge computing.

But in the process, many of the companies behind these innovations and those affected by them will reinvent and rebuild their own underlying infrastructures.

In the 5G space, for example, the industry this year saw major wireless carriers in the U.S. and around the world announce and launch commercial 5G services. In the U.S., Verizon launched its 5G Ultra Wideband residential offering in four initial markets while AT&T has announced plans to roll out mobile 5G soon.

“2019 will be a breakout year when enterprise and public sector customers will start to ‘Cut the Cord’ and migrate their WANs to wireless 4G LTE connections” – Lindsay Notwell, Senior Vice President of 5G Strategy and Global Carrier Operation, Cradlepoint

However, Notwell says there’s an underlying framework below the radar of these headline-grabbing 5G announcements that will impact more people in a big way.

“As a prelude to 5G, just about every major carrier is busy upgrading their current LTE infrastructure to prepare for the more widespread rollout of 5G and in the process are providing gigabit-class LTE services. With more urban 5G services deploying in 2019 and gigabit-class LTE available on a nationwide level, I’m predicting that 2019 will be a breakout year when enterprise and public sector customers will start to ‘Cut the Cord’ and migrate their WANs to wireless 4G LTE connections that deliver game-changing levels of performance and integrate seamlessly with 5G when and where it’s available.”

“Automation of data ingestion will be a part of any cloud migration effort.” – Neil Barton, CTO, WhereScape

Cloud computing has also spent this year evolving as it addresses hybrid data computing and storage demands. “Cloud-first is the new norm. In 2019, large enterprises will fully embrace this stance and will expend considerable resources on creating and maintaining hybrid cloud environments. Alongside this, as businesses modernize their data infrastructure, we’ll also see a move to being automation-first – making automation of data ingestion and processing a standard part of any cloud migration effort,” explains Barton.

Companies are realizing that some data simply doesn’t belong on the cloud or that the cloud lacks the speed to process data from sensors for analytics. Then there are also concerns over security, as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes hold. As the IT industry continues to evolve, cloud has become a complex piece of property to maintain. Many experts think 2019 will be the year IT professionals will need the help of experts to be quick, agile, adaptable, and resourceful.

“Companies will continue to focus on short-term cloud planning.” – Derrin Rummelt, Director of Cloud Engineering, US Signal

“In 2018 saw companies continue to focus on short-term cloud planning – stumbling into the cloud, constraining budgets and only focusing on current organizational needs. 2019 needs to be the year of long-term cloud planning,” said Rummelt. “So much information is out there about cloud adoption and cloud strategy, that it can be hard to know where to start.”

Rummelt predicts that in 2019, more companies looking to achieve cloud agility will offload their internal teams by working with a knowledgeable cloud services providers (CSPs), particularly ones that employ a consultative approach and can customize cloud solutions.

CSPs can help companies re-examine their cloud strategies to ensure they have a custom approach that includes an exit plan. Rummelt encourages organizations to work with CSPs to be independent of cloud service providers and know how to switch to a new cloud technology if necessary.

“CSPs are in the ‘cloud’ business. They possess the expertise and experience in cloud technologies that internal IT staffs may not have. They can explain the options and their advantages and disadvantages. That alone is a timesaver,” said Rummelt. “In addition, CSPs that take a consultative approach make it a priority to understand your business so that they can steer you towards solutions best suited to your organization’s needs.”

While a lot of talk has been about the growing demand for cloud, many in the industry have noticed an increased demand for dedicated servers as specialized companies seek greater control over their infrastructures, costs, and performance. This is leading to customers to create hybrid environments where specific parts of the infrastructure – or the base load – end up on dedicated servers, while the commodity piece stays in the cloud.

“There is going to be a bigger push towards commodity hosting in cloud environments.” – Eltjo Hoftsree, Managing Director, Leaseweb

“In 2019, there is going to be a bigger push towards commodity hosting in cloud environments as they offer performance levels and lots of flexibility. Specifically, when there are many peaks in the load, and you want minimal maintenance, cloud is the preferred solution,” said Hoftsree. “However, if you really need to pinch out the CPU frequency or lowest latency, a cloud price tag might be a bit shocking. This is exactly where the demand for dedicated servers comes in and continues to grow.”

Edge computing is also driving companies to re-invent themselves to take advantage of this growing market. The demand to capture and analyze data at the source is expected to drive strong growth in the hybrid cloud market including cloud services like Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS, to make their stacks available to run through on-premise micro-data centers.

“Cable and telco companies reinvent how they use their switching-infrastructure to join the edge-computing market.” – Bill Miller, CEO, Axellio

Miller stresses that these workloads don’t run well in the cloud, so companies, such as Microsoft and Amazon are likely to adapt their cloud services to run on the edge. And then there’s more.

“We can also expect to see cable and telco companies reinvent how they use their switching-infrastructure to join the edge-computing market,” he said. “Telco companies have thousands of headends used to process television signals, which can be repurposed to create low latency, edge-computing services for their customers. Between the cloud providers and these cable companies/telcos, we could see some pretty interesting business moves to adapt to the edge-computing market.”