Implement Innovations in Business: Tech Trends 2022

A leader is the first one who finds, believes, and does. In the fourth industrial revolution, the dominant role is in technology and innovation in business. This means that being a leader in a modern business environment involves being the first one to adopt innovations, masterwork principles, and even being the first to make and present solutions to the market. In this article, we analyze existing trends and foresee upcoming changes, taking into account insights from reports of leading and reputable consulting companies—McKinsey, Deloitte, and Gartner. Let’s figure out what awaits us in the future. There are so many reasons for innovation in business, and maybe changes are not so far away.

Close Future Trends

The speed of world development is so stunning that within the following decade we will experience more technological changes than those during the past 100 years combined. These innovations are meant to reform operations and boost business growth due to more people being connected via digital solutions all over the world. In addition, innovations make companies more flexible and give space for creativity—for instance, enabling them to implement elements of gamification in financial or healthcare services.

Why is innovation important in business? If we don’t want to be disadvantaged or confused by overall automation, digitalization and application of artificial intelligence, we need to catch up to them. Understanding the effects of this change can help both individuals and organizations get used to new systems.

Take a closer look at the infographic below. It demonstrates some trends and their impacts on key future industries:

In short, major trends are connected to data management. Some tendencies that will be with us in the near future can be segmented into such huge groups according to key technologies and task-solving—IoT, Cloud, AI, Cybersecurity and their synergies. Let’s take a closer look at the top ones and clear up whether your business has enough reasons for innovation.

The Future of Connectivity

5G and IoT infrastructure are already in our lives in one form or another. The statistics show that the trends are strengthening, being already some of the most-awaited tech inclinations for the next decade. According to McKinsey, the usage of connectivity solutions in only just four domains—mobility, healthcare, manufacturing and retail technology—could increase global GDP by $1.2 trillion and reach $2 trillion by 2030. Up to 80 percent of effectiveness can be achieved with existing advanced connectivity technologies.

This means that high-speed mobile networks and interconnected devices have the potential to severely transform future economic activity if effectively implemented. These changes can accelerate business growth in all business fields—for example, making manufacturing more digitized due to wireless control of mobile tools, machines and robots, optimizing energy delivery and making remote patient monitoring more common.

One of the industries that actively implements connected technologies is medicine. The medical technology market is already huge and was enhanced by COVID-19 as more people wanted to be aware of their health without visiting clinics physically. Especially pronounced is the medical IoT-solutions segment. These technologies help doctors have 24/7 access to patient health data, give diagnostics remotely, even perform robotic surgeries. Furthermore, patients, who can monitor their health metrics in real-time, get medications and, if needed, take other urgent measures that save lives.

We, as a world-class software engineering company, have experience in creating telemedicine solutions. One of them is an iOS and Android application that enables users to consult with diverse medical experts without visiting hospitals.

The world will benefit from IoT architecture, embracing devices that collect necessary data, presenting it in forms suitable for further usage and being able to act according to certain signals. This can be smart home systems and lighting appliances, medical sensors and wearables, security systems and connected cars. The interrelation between IoT devices makes operations and data processing more effective and beneficial, encouraging organizations all over the world to implement innovations. As a result, the global IoT market will account for more than $1.3 billion by 2026.

IoT infrastructure is already widely used and has huge prospects. As one of the implementation examples, an automatized system is commonly used for developing, producing, and managing the logistics chain. NIX developers have already designed a similar solution—an IoT Monitoring and Analysis System—a multi-operational IoT system providing real-time location, status data, and critical activity alerts to enable proactive management of every shipment anywhere in the world. Via cloud technologies, it connects, collects, and processes telemetry from the devices. It allows monitoring temperature changes during cargo movement—when unwanted heating or cooling occurs, the administrators and drivers are immediately notified. Furthermore, the temperature measurements help to construct more accurate routes and prevent deviations, as well as detect and avert crime risk.

Distributed Infrastructure

The new way for businesses to restructure their operations and make the interchange of data and signals faster and more secure lies in interconnectivity. This is a new trend to build a distributed infrastructure architecture—a system where components serve one purpose and communicate with each other, but are independent and allocated between different machines. This system can include containers, APIs and cloud solutions like private and public clouds and combinations of both.

This tech trend will help companies boost their speed and agility, reduce complexity, save costs and strengthen their cybersecurity defenses.
McKinsey

The most prominent example of distributed infrastructure is the internet. Nevertheless, innovation benefits and the potential of distributed systems are much bigger and currently aren’t used fully. The future of this infrastructure relies on cloud solutions.

One of the possibilities here is to build a broad cloud infrastructure. According to McKinsey, by 2022, 70% of companies will implement hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud platforms as part of a distributed IT infrastructure. Access to diverse cloud systems will make data exchange and analyses faster.

The more complex solution is a single cloud environment—data fabric. This is an entire information management architecture with complete, flexible and frictionless access and data sharing within a distributed data environment. Data fabrics create the metaverse in the world of collecting and operating with mass information that results in cost savings in data management. Furthermore, effective implementation of such innovations maximizes the value of your data and accelerates digital transformation. Integrating Big Data, AI, and ML technologies, data fabrics optimize data management algorithms, solve sophisticated business problems and are effective no matter what kind of apps, platforms, and data storage the company possesses. That is their strength—and that’s why their implementation is near.

By 2024, data fabric deployments will quadruple efficiency in data utilization while cutting human-driven data management tasks in half.
Gartner

Vertical Clouds Architecture

Even existing cloud architecture fields of integration are changing while business tasks are accelerating. For example, clouds go vertical—this means that more often companies will seek innovation benefits and, as a result, opt for cloud solutions that help to automate human-made operations, pay more attention to competitive digital differentiation, as well as scale as fast as possible. This involves, for example, creating infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) systems that precisely meet the business needs of the company in the context of technical power.

Composable Architecture and Enterprises

Cloud technologies help even those who have insufficient back-end coding skills build customized and highly-functional apps due to modular-based composable solutions.

By 2024, the design mantra for new SaaS and custom applications will be “composable API-first or API-only,” rendering traditional SaaS and custom applications as “legacy.”
Gartner

A composable architecture is a flexible principle of fitting separate app blocks where enterprises can scale storage, databases, networks, and computation functionality. Such a method is a golden opportunity to design business logic for specific needs and create applications, saving time and extra development costs to present it to the market. The basic scenarios of such composable solutions are infrastructure-as-an-application (IaaS), infrastructure automation, and multi-cloud approach. All have APIs as core elements of their ecosystems.

Applied Artificial Intelligence

We hear about the application of artificial intelligence and industry-changing possibilities on a daily basis. This is a massive tech trend of 2022 and further years that modern businesses are not using to their full potential.

During the coming decades, the application of AI will mature and continue to scale. It will be a part of new app models, give developers more tools for rapid app architecture construction, and enable companies to get deeper insights regarding user behavior and experience. Furthermore, it will help minimize manual repetitive tasks like filing, document preparation, and indexing.

By 2025, the 10% of enterprises that establish AI engineering best practices will generate at least three times more value from their AI efforts than the 90% of enterprises that do not.
Gartner

Applied AI will also automate and digitalize the industrial sector—like enabling engineers to work on oil rigs from the ground—and healthcare. Actively, AI architecture fits the health field—its functions here are wide and include ranking and smart restructuring of medical information, recommendations, classification and prediction of diseases, as well as anomaly detection.

AI applications are already incorporated into smart wearables, devices, and apps, as well as highly adopted by companies—46% of those working in service operations, 28% of those in products and services development, 19% of those in risk management, 21% of those in supply chain management, and 17% of those in marketing and sales.

Still, globally, companies are just getting acquainted with the almighty AI infrastructure.

Cyber AI—a New Way of Security

As the cost and frequency of cybercrime continue to rise, the application of artificial intelligence will change regular approaches to data security issues. And though currently, cyber AI technologies are in the early stages of adoption, the global market is expected to grow by $19 billion by 2025.

AI technologies, and in particular machine learning (ML) algorithms, are good at detection, containment, and response to malicious operations. Cyber AI, as it’s called according to Deloitte, can help businesses not only to respond to attacks faster but also to foresee them and react in advance. Moreover, AI can serve as a force multiplier. ML and deep learning algorithms, especially paired with natural language processing and other decision-making AI solutions, help security teams automate manual time-consuming activities, detect streamlined containment, and respond to complex threats faster.

Cyber threats can also interfere with and damage vehicle applications and networks. In such cases, an AI-based solution is an effective option. NIX developers have experience in creating software for preventing vehicles from cyberattacks and malfunctions. The team created vSentry—an ML-trained system that, using raw vehicle data, could precisely detect anomalies and decrease the chances of false-positive alerts. Consequently, automotive business owners can decrease warranty costs, minimize vehicle downtime, reduce the total cost of ownership, and optimize vehicle performance.

Trust Architecture and Blockchains

Blockchain is not just about cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Indeed, this technology is highly effective in industries that work with data and need solutions to protect their corporate systems from data leaks, fraud, and contamination. This means it can be an integral part of plenty of modern and next-generation industries, where it is critical to ensure the data protection and transparency of such operations.

In addition to lowering the risk of breaches, trust architectures reduce the cost of complying with security regulations, lower the operating and capital expenditures associated with cybersecurity, and enable more cost-efficient transactions, for instance, between buyers and sellers.
McKinsey

Blockchain-based technologies such as distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are changing the nature of doing business and helping companies work with tangible and digital assets in a more efficient way. In the near future, shared ledgers could become an integral part of business operations, allowing companies to create new delivery models and value streams, and increase standards and data transaction speed.

Blockchain architecture possibilities are multidimensional and beneficial for all businesses working with massive data flows. The use cases include:

Self-sovereign data and digital personal identity
Trusted data-sharing among third-parties
Grant funding
Intercompany accounting
Supply chain transparency
Customer and fan engagement
Creator monetization

As an example, blockchain technologies have been already broadly deployed by companies in the financial services field. The benefits of DLTs are extremely obvious when dozens of organizations access and share the same data and require visibility of transaction history. Still, blockchain use cases are far more multidimensional.

Another use case is in our own practice. The NIX engineering team created a solution for scientific & academic research—the ARTiFACTS platform. Scholars and researchers benefit from it as they can get formal recognition and see the outcomes of their scientific work—securing the provenance of written materials by certifying them in the blockchain, increasing credibility by creating incontestable citation evidence of published or unpublished papers, algorithms, data, protocols, etc., and making hidden data accessible.

Cybersecurity Mesh

Cybersecurity on demand—this is what awaits us in 2022. This is a model of data management when each access point security is controlled from a centralized point of authority, thereby allowing distributed enterprises to enforce security policies by centrally plugging into the mesh. It is what comes to mind for businesses that are required to ensure reliable, flexible, and scalable cybersecurity for digital transformation. According to Gartner, by 2024, organizations adopting cybersecurity mesh architectures to integrate security tools to work as cooperative ecosystems will have obvious innovation benefits—reducing the financial impact of individual security incidents by an average of 90%

Hyper-Automation and Its Evolution

Organizations globally think about how to scale faster, digitalize more smoothly, and implement innovations leading to better operational results. They turn to hyper-automation, which embraces multiple technologies, tools, and platforms, including RPA, low-code platforms, and process mining tools. Automation helps companies be agile and transform business models. According to Gartner, in just 2 years, diffuse hyper-automation spending would exceed the total cost of ownership 40-fold, and adaptive governance would be a leading factor in corporate performance.

By 2025, more than 50 billion devices will be connected to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT),” Robots, automation, 3D-printing, and more will generate around 79.4 zettabytes of data per year.
McKinsey

Far Future and How to Prepare for It Now

Not all tech changes are at arm’s length regarding implementation in business operations. Reformation is a long-lasting process, and the future will not change in a couple of weeks. There are many stages of innovation adoption and one of them is being denied. Despite this, companies should keep pace with tech trends and forecast what will drive enterprises in 50 years. Thus, be ready beforehand.

Here are some tech trends that will form our future, but not tomorrow.

Next-generation computing. While data processing becomes more complex, next-generation computing capabilities will integrate quantum cryptography algorithms that will, for example, simulate molecule-level processes, reduce empirical expertise, test dozens of applications, and create self-driving vehicles of high quality a few times faster. Thus, final products and services will be more personalized, secure concerning cyberattacks, and autonomous—no matter if the business is in a first-wave industry or depends on sensitive trade secrets.

Next-generation computing is accompanied by future programming, also called Software 2.0, that develops new ways of writing software and reduces the complexity of this process, allowing companies to scale faster.

Bio revolution. Significant changes will also affect such conventional market sectors as manufacturing, industry, energy, pharma, transportation, health, and semiconductors. For example, more commonly used will be graphene, which is thin and 200 times stronger than steel material constituting a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice configuration, and molybdenum disulfide, nanoparticles of which are already being used in flexible electronics. Changes will also affect biological science, promising the development of gene-therapies, hyper-personalized medicines, and genetics-based guidance on food and exercise.

Total-experience. As operations, computing, and technologies become more sophisticated, experience also evolves, becoming comprehensive. The total experience, as an effect, interlinks the user experience, customer experience, multi-experience, and employee experience disciplines. That improves the impression and process of interaction with a product or service and leads to a transformational business outcome. Eventually, by 2026, 60% of large enterprises will integrate the total experience to evolve their business models and achieve better customer and employee advocacy levels

By 2025, generative AI will account for 10% of all data produced, up from less than 1% today. Gartner
Gartner

Tech Trends Influence All Industries

Tech trends affect all sectors, but the severity of changes, reasons for innovations, and final impacts will vary depending on the industry, conservatism of business leaders, and existing force allocation on the particular market. The general picture is that most economic sectors will be influenced by automation—they already are. New approaches to AI, computing, and programming implementation will impact mostly healthcare and mobile and telecommunication sectors, while clean technologies and materials of next-generation usage will be the top priority in Industry 4.0—precisely in fields like chemicals and advanced industries.

How NIX United Adopts Tech Trends

As a world-class software vendor, we at NIX United are constantly mastering new technologies and putting our ears to the ground for upcoming changes as we need to offer our customers the most modern and technological solutions and innovation in business. In order to do this, we have an internal R&D center, where engineers investigate, develop and test new technologies and approaches before implementing them on our clients’ projects.

Tech innovations that, in pursuance of leading organizations, businesses anticipate are already in our portfolio. We have experience and have achieved significant results in the designing of Cloud Native platforms, composable apps, data fabrics, AI engineering, and intelligent business automation solutions in numerous areas.

And we are not about to stop. In the near future, as part of the R&D group, we will deal with Vertical Cloud Systems, Generative AI, and the strengthening of our blockchain expertise.