In the second half of 2020, Gartner has successively released multiple reports on current technology hotspots in China and the global market, forecasts of future trends, and global ICT market outlook. These insights, forecasts, and prospects are of great reference value for the digital transformation that is currently in full swing.
First of all, six popular new technologies such as e-commerce live broadcast and China-Taiwan architecture have become the new highlights of Gartner's 2020 China ICT technology maturity curve. Gartner's 2020 China Information and Communication Technology (ICT) maturity curve covers 24 technologies and practices. This year’s technology maturity curve adds some new technologies that are gradually emerging or being hyped in China, including workflow collaboration, E-commerce live broadcast, data middle station, middle station architecture, cloud security technology, blockchain technology, etc.
The so-called workflow collaboration means that during the new crown pneumonia epidemic, due to the need to maintain social distance, workflow collaboration tools such as DingTalk, Huawei Cloud WeLink and Tencent Meeting have been widely used in China to maintain business continuity. Workflow collaboration has become a key capability to support daily communication, meetings, and other business operations of corporate organizations. In terms of e-commerce live broadcasts, during the epidemic, China's live broadcast e-commerce industry ushered in a spurt of development. The live broadcast attracted a large number of users, and a three-hour live broadcast could even contribute six months of passenger traffic to offline physical stores. With the cumulative daily active users approaching 1 billion, leading Chinese e-commerce live broadcast platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou have become important sources of traffic. E-commerce platforms such as Taobao, JD.com, and Xiaohongshu have also launched their own live broadcast channels, providing no Sewn shopping experience. In terms of the structure of China and Taiwan, China and Taiwan have become a key topic in the Chinese market. Many companies believe that China and Taiwan are one of the key factors in accelerating their digital transformation. Investment in China and Taiwan has been very active in the past 12 months. However, how to design a landing mid-office architecture is a challenge for many IT leaders in the market. Gartner's point of view is that mid-office architecture should evolve slowly by building scenario applications and using product management methods instead of deploying another large and comprehensive one. system.
Secondly, look at the overall ICT market expenditure scale in 2021. Gartner predicts that China's IT spending is expected to reach 3.04 trillion in 2021, an increase of 7.2% compared to 2020; China's IT spending is expected to reach 2.84 trillion in 2020, an increase of 1.3% compared to 2019. In 2021, global IT spending is expected to reach US$3.8 trillion, an increase of 4% compared to 2020; global IT spending is expected to reach US$3.6 trillion in 2020, a decrease of 5.4% compared to 2019.
It is worth mentioning that in the global market, all IT spending segments are expected to decline in 2020; in order to support remote workforces, provide virtual services such as remote learning or telemedicine, and use super automation to meet the needs of the epidemic Demand, enterprises are accelerating the digitization process, so enterprise software is expected to show the strongest rebound (7.2%) in 2021; as super-large enterprises accelerate the construction of global data centers and regular enterprises and institutions resume data center expansion plans and allow employees to return With the on-site resumption of work, the data center system expenditure will reach 5.2% in 2021, and this growth rate ranks second among all market segments. In the Chinese market, IT services and enterprise-level software have maintained a strong growth momentum from 2019 to 2021. Even under the influence of the epidemic, they will show strong growth of 8.5% and 5.2% in 2020, and will further reach 11.9% and 10.4% growth rate.
For 2020, John-David Lovelock, Gartner's Vice President of Distinguished Research, said: "Since Gartner began forecasting IT spending 25 years ago, there has never been a market with such strong volatility. Although the epidemic continues to spread, all industries are suffering. Under their respective pressures, companies with higher levels of digitalization will perform better in times of crisis and will continue to flourish in 2021."
Third, Gartner predicts important technology strategy trends for 2021 , including behavioral Internet, comprehensive experience, privacy-enhanced computing, distributed cloud, operations everywhere, cyber security grid, assembled smart enterprise, artificial intelligence engineering and super automation . Among them, the so-called behavioral Internet is to capture people's digital behaviors through various digital devices, such as computer vision to check whether employees wear masks or thermal imaging technology to identify feverish people. When using facial recognition, location tracking and Internet big data technologies Combine them and correlate the results with behaviors such as online purchases to get a bigger view.
Distributed cloud is a relatively important 2021 strategic technology trend. Distributed cloud distributes the public cloud to different physical locations, but the service operation, governance, and development are still the responsibility of the public cloud provider, providing a solution for enterprise organizations with low latency, reduced data cost requirements, and data residency requirements The flexible environment also enables customers' cloud computing resources to be closer to the physical location where data and business activities occur. Brian Burke, vice president of research at Gartner, believes: “Distributed cloud can replace private cloud and provide edge cloud and other new use cases for cloud computing. It represents the future of cloud computing.”
Artificial intelligence engineering solves the difficult problem of artificial intelligence project expansion. Artificial intelligence engineering is based on three core pillars: data operation and maintenance, model operation and maintenance, and development operation and maintenance. Gartner believes that a strong artificial intelligence engineering strategy will promote the performance, scalability, interpretability and reliability of artificial intelligence models, and fully realize the value of artificial intelligence investment.
Also worthy of attention is the trend towards super automation. Over the past few years, super automation has been continuously developing. And because of the epidemic, everything is suddenly required to be digitalized first, which has greatly increased market demand, especially the backlog of demand has prompted more than 70% of commercial organizations to implement dozens of super-automation plans.
Fourth, for IT organizations and users in 2021 and beyond, Gartner puts forward ten trend forecasts. Gartner Distinguished Research Vice President and Academician Analyst Daryl Plummer said: "Technology is approaching its limits, and traditional computing is also hitting walls everywhere. The world is developing at an unprecedented speed, and technology and processes need to be able to meet the needs of digital innovation. This is crucial. Important. From now on, non-traditional technological methods will lead to major innovations in the next decade.
An important trend is the continuation of the strategic technological trend of super-automation. Various new technologies are turning more and more manual tasks into automated tasks, excluding manual participation in the process and the trend is significantly accelerated during the epidemic, which makes people Start to rethink product design, material use, factory location and resource utilization. For enterprises, automation is a new driving force for competitive advantage and change. For example, smart machines will not crush grapes like humans do when packaging grapes. Gartner predicts that as automation becomes an inevitable new trend, end buyers will gradually become the first batch of people who come into contact with these industrial products and agricultural products. By 2025, more than 20% of the world's industrial products and agricultural products will be the first end buyers. contact. In 2021, the number of factories or farms that plan to transform to full-process automation will increase.
Another trend worthy of attention is that CIOs and IT executives will not be able to use current computing technologies to execute key digital plans. Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, and speech recognition require huge computing power, and these Technology will become ubiquitous, and ordinary processors will become increasingly unable to adapt to these digital innovations. Various advanced computing architectures will appear in the next ten years. In the short term, massively parallel architecture, DNN chips or neuromorphic computing may appear; in the long term, technologies such as circuit process upgrades, DNA storage and chemical computing will bring about a larger range Innovation opportunities.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, traditional computing technologies will encounter digital bottlenecks, forcing corporate organizations to turn to neuromorphic computing. Ji Xinsu, senior research director of Gartner, said that traditional computing resources and computing technologies may gradually fall into a bottleneck in the next five years. The technical performance, requirements for power resources, and possible increased costs of these traditional methods cannot support future digitalization. Innovative. Looking forward to the next ten years from now, what we have to face and prepare is iterative technological innovation. It is difficult for the existing technology to solve some problems ten years later.
In terms of changes in the role of CIO, Gartner predicts that CIO will assume responsibility for digital business operations and digital transformation operations in the future, and will transform into a role similar to acting COO or quasi COO. Some large, global enterprises have integrated the responsibilities of COO and CIO, allowing CIOs to also assume part of the responsibilities of COO. Ji Xinsu said that digitalization is not only related to technology. Digital transformation is actually digital business transformation. It uses digitalization to transform business, not technology stacking. Business and technology cannot be viewed separately. They must be viewed in a unified manner. The processes in many business scenarios require technical implementation. Gartner predicts that after 2021, more and more corporate CIOs will report directly to the CEO among companies that have achieved initial results in digital transformation. If the CIO can quickly empower the business and influence the business scenario during the entire digital transformation process, the increase in the influence of the CIO itself will be huge.
Ji Xinsu puts forward some suggestions for CIO. First of all, through the business department, fully understand the biggest "differentiation capabilities" of the company's own business system and which can be achieved with digital products, so that the technical department and the business department can slowly build a partnership, rather than just a "order man." Second, build digital-based capability modules for some business scenarios. In the future, there may be a combined enterprise or an assembled enterprise that will structure future business processes through the combination of specific modules. That is, the business scenarios and business capabilities of the enterprise are broken up to form modules, and only a certain combination is needed to meet new business challenges. Only in this way can we accelerate innovation and build a truly new digital transformation.
Fifth, Gartner released five emerging trends that will promote technological innovation in the next decade . Special attention should be paid to key technologies such as social distancing technology, marshallable enterprises, artificial intelligence-aided design, differentiated privacy, and naturally degradable sensors. Among Gartner's many technology maturity curves, the emerging technology maturity curve is a relatively unique one. It selects more than 1,700 technologies researched by Gartner, generates a technology set containing 30 emerging technologies and trends, and provides profound Insights, the emerging technology maturity curve pays particular attention to those technologies that are expected to provide a greater competitive advantage in the next 5 to 10 years.
In emerging technologies, the marshalling (assembled) architecture is mentioned, which is the design concept of an assemblable enterprise, that is, to respond to rapidly changing business needs through encapsulated business capabilities based on flexible data weaving. To build a marshalling (assembled) architecture, a series of packaged business capabilities need to be marshalled into a solution. The built-in intelligence presents the trend of decentralization and extends to edge devices and end users.
In terms of algorithm trust, the trust model based on the authority responsible agency has been replaced by the algorithm trust model, which is used to protect the privacy and security of data, asset sources, and personal and object identity information. Algorithmic trust can help enterprises avoid the risk and loss of losing the trust of customers, employees and partners. Emerging technologies related to algorithm trust include: secure access to the service edge (SASE), differentiated privacy, verifiable traceability, self-contained identity, responsible AI and interpretable AI.
At the far end, there is also chip material beyond silicon. For more than 40 years, Moore's Law (the number of transistors that can be accommodated in a dense integrated circuit [IC] doubles every two years) has been guiding the development of the IT industry. With the improvement of technology, the development of silicon materials has approached its physical limits. New advanced materials are creating breakthrough opportunities for component technology, creating faster and smaller components. Key technologies that should be considered include DNA computing, naturally degradable sensors, and carbon-based transistors.
Looking forward to 2021 and the next five years: Gartner believes that we will face a market that may be "reset" but not necessarily "restart". In the post-epidemic era, many companies cannot return to their original path or restore their original state, so how to find a new path? Gartner's recent forecast reports may provide clues. (Text/Ningchuan)