COMMENTARY: What to Expect from 2020?

COMMENTARY: What to Expect from 2020?
Dražen Tomić - Tomich Productions

How will you remember last year? What were the key events for you? What are you expecting for the following years to come? These are the questions what we ask ourselves at the end of each year thinking about what the next one will bring. In the coming days, we will publish the past and future facts and vision from the representatives of the Croatian IT and telco sector.

According to what we've learned discussing with IT decisionmakers, last year was in fact very good for them. Not just one but many IT companies have opened new offices around the world. They were working on new and exciting projects, digitazing, transforming themselves and others in the various industries. Of course, many of them have started from themselves and then applied the knowledge to key solutions and technology in sectors that had to be competitive from their basic needs to full competitive solutions.

Today digitalization and digital transformation are all around us. Perhaps too many times we talk about these terms, and maybe we are just using them wrong. Aside from the already mentioned digital transformation, the term everyone spoke about last year, machine learning or AI, virtual, expanded, and mixed reality are also likely to be presented in the next year as the key themes. Maybe, in the mean time, someone comes up with another type of reality. It's hard to know because buzzwords are something that IT people love very much.

And we will certainly continue to talk about the blockchain and variety of solutions that use this technology as its essential part to give them credibility and security. We should certainly not forget the use of cloud computing, robotics, IoT, cybersecurity. Cloud computing topics will remain active, big data analytics, from unstructured to structured and anonymized, because we now have GDPR, all the way to analytics and the representation of what can be learned and implemented in business from the data. Don't forget the in-memory computing as well. There will be a lot of solutions, but some new ones currently don't have a specific name.

The software will be developed in the form of ‘cloud native,’ microservices, even more as SaaS or software-as-a-service but soon also as a PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service. In the telecom world, 2020 will be the of 5G networks and the first stronger commercialization of 5G solutions in the industry and the public sector.