The future is now

“The future has arrived – it’s just not evenly distributed yet” – Willian Gibson

Over the past year, the pandemic has accelerated technological trends, hastening the embrace of digital and cloud transformation initiatives. Prominent among them are technology trends and evolutions across nine key technology domains, which we believe will be the prominent torchbearers in the enterprise IT space over the next few years. They include Artificial Intelligence, Data, Cloud, User Experience, Micro-services, Low Code No Code, DevSecOps, Integrated IT/Business Operations, and Cyber Security.

While each of these nine technology domains are at various stages of maturity, we expect them to evolve along 115 micro trends to shape the future by becoming mainstream. We have been using these evolving macro and micro trends to shape our strategic big bets, platforms and make them relevant to our clients and their respective transformation journeys. I am sharing these Macro Trends and Micro trends covered in our Infosys TechCompass reports to help plan your technology strategy, initiatives and projects.

Macro Trend 1: We are at the second inflection point of AI, with AI moving from the consumer tech space into the enterprise space. As enterprises digitize their business processes, move to the cloud, and focus on the data economy, they are laying the foundation for AI. Businesses are experimenting with AI, but the key to AI's success is discovering, democratising and de-risking AI at scale.

Macro Trend 2: Data is the fuel that powers AI and enterprises are intentionally starting to collect, enrich and connect tremendous amounts of data. This connected data across the enterprise prepares the ground for AI to thrive, and consequently, lays the foundation of an organisational digital brain. How this data is stored, organized, and utilised is also moving the levers for significant shifts in the evolution of database architecture.

Macro Trend 3: Cloud is becoming distributed, and workloads are spreading across multiple clouds and edges. When enterprises operate across such distributed environments, they need the ability to operate across hybrid & multi clouds through one unified interface for their management, control and data planes. Polycloud platforms, Kubernetes and container ecosystem is becoming key to operate in this hybrid cloud ecosystem

Macro Trend 4: Shift from click and touch to natural, adaptive experiences. While traditionally engaging with technology was keyboard- and mouse-driven in the pre-cloud era, the app's era brought in the touch element. With advances in AI, many interactions will become natural – voice, image, video-driven, AR-based, essentially evolving all technological interfaces to become more natural to the way humans operate.

Macro Trend 5: The move from Monolith to Micro-services is driving the platform economy and new digital business models for enterprises. Most enterprises are starting to create developer and partner ecosystems to enable the ecosystem players to develop innovative solutions and customer experiences using enterprise API's

Macro Trend 6: Citizen developers across the organisation are increasingly using the Low Code No Code tools to rapidly experiment and innovate at scale. This democratisation will unleash myriad use cases that will eventually enable enterprises to have the ability to rapidly experiment and innovate across business and technology domains

Macro Trend 7: DevSecOps with embedded security, privacy and poly cloud policies is helping drive velocity of new digital initiatives into production. DevSecOps is also evolving into newer spaces like Machine and Deep Learning, as extreme automation drives velocity and value.

Macro Trend 8: Businesses are taking an integrated view across the business process, customer experience, apps, data, and infra layers, thereby providing better visibility to operations teams and driving operational resilience. As organisations become more digital and platform-driven, operations space is becoming autonomous and self service driven using AI Ops capabilities

Macro Trend 9: The rapid expansion of the cyber attack surface has made cyber security mainstream across digital journeys and programs. Cyber security is no longer the responsibility of the CISO alone but has become integral to the boardroom agenda given the implications for the brand and beyond.  

Hope you find these useful and actionable.