While it would be an exaggeration to say that the last few years have been a golden age for technology companies, there’s no denying that things have been remarkably calm considering some of the seismic shifts taking place in the way that many organizations consume IT resources. That may be about to change, as a new market landscape begins to emerge at the same time as the global economy shows signs of losing steam. From the impact of a slowdown in China to the growing influence of service providers, here are 3 things you can expect to see in the IT market this year.
The SaaS market has been growing at rapid pace for several years, and that momentum shows little sign of slowing. While the market is dominated by a small handful of large vendors, the long tail of the SaaS market is filled with many up-and-coming companies who demonstrate tremendous innovation, and as such, are experiencing staggering growth. From a SaaS buyer perspective, expectations continue to heighten surrounding what software vendors should, and ultimately must, provide if they want to survive over the long term.
Over the past two years there has been mounting evidence of the Russians attacking the U.S. utility grid. Recently, the Wall Street Journal provided more specific details about the campaign revealing that hundreds of small contractors were attacked. While the techniques used were not novel, the campaign highlights an increasingly pervasive problem, as the Journal points out:
In October 2018, a Reuters article informed the world that Amazon had scrapped an AI–based recruitment application that turned out to be biased against women. Most headlines about this story highlighted the company’s failure in developing an actionable and fair solution for one of the most important processes of the HR team.
However, what this and similar examples of today’s AI “failures” neglect to acknowledge is the complexity of end-to-end process automation based on AI technology. This complexity stems not only from current technical limitations but also from the immaturity of corporate policies, government regulations, and legal systems to deal with machines that automatically analyze, decide, and act.
It seems that 2-in- PCs are having a bit of a resurgence these days as every major PC manufacturer offers a variety of screen sizes, features, materials, and product lines with the ability to use the device both as a notebook PC as well as a tablet.