Technology Reseller v26

31 technolog y reseller.co.uk PREDICTIONS with 86% expressing a preference for meetings that embraced technology in some way. 2 Video and AI technologies to become the standard Employees expect workplace IT to keep pace with consumer technology. Of those surveyed, 77% believe video will be standard in meetings within the next three years; 83% want to see voice recognition in meetings within the next two years; and 81% want video filters (like those available on apps like Instagram) to feature in meetings within the next two years. Nearly one third (30%) want to be able to use hand gestures to control meeting room technology. 3 Employees want a new reality Office workers would like to see further investment in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Two thirds of those surveyed want the ability to overlay information onto visual content in real-time using AR technology like that popularised by Pokémon Go. Four out of five (81%) would like to be able to meet within virtual spaces within the next three years. 4 Remote working will continue to proliferate The number of remote workers has more than doubled over the last decade, and this trend is set to accelerate in 2020, with 74% of those surveyed expecting to see an increase in remote attendee-only meetings over the next three years. Already, 53% of meetings involve attendees who join remotely. For remote collaboration to succeed, participants must be able to interact in the same way they would in a face-to-face meeting. 5 Prepare for a Bring Your Own Meeting (BYOM) future As the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend matures, employees expect not only to join meetings from their personal devices, but also to host them using their choice of conferencing solution (Bring Your Own Meeting). Seven out of 10 workers surveyed say they can already choose which conferencing solutions they use. Supporting choice in this area will aid collaboration with contractors, interns and other members of a diverse workforce. www.barco.com Customer experience The era of the digital reflex James Harvey , EMEA CTO, Cisco AppDynamics : Any outage, inconvenience or poor digital customer experience will cost UK businesses dearly in 2020. As we enter a new decade, we also enter the ‘Era of the Digital Reflex’. Our use of digital services and applications has evolved to become an unconscious extension of human behaviour and, in turn, consumer expectations about the performance of applications and digital services have sky-rocketed. Almost three quarters (74%) of UK consumers are less tolerant of problems with digital services than they were two years ago, and over half switch suppliers when performance issues do occur (according to the recent App Attention Index Report). This highlights just how unforgiving customers have become. With 5G network transformations in full-swing, next year will see consumer expectations escalate further. Consumers will expect faster download speeds, better video quality and immersive experiences in any location and on any device. Poor performance is no longer acceptable. As businesses develop even more intuitive digital experiences to meet these demands, they must also be ready to deal with the increased back-end application complexity. Application performance monitoring, machine learning and AI are critical solutions in solving this level of complexity. They can give businesses visibility into a performance issue, insight into the root cause of the anomaly and enable them to take immediate action and address performance issues before they impact the customer. The ‘Era of the Digital Reflex’ will bring great opportunities to brands that invest and innovate in their digital customer experience. For those that fail to do this, 2020 will be a tough year. Presentations The changing face of meetings in 2020 Barco ClickShare identifies five key trends set to change meeting room culture in 2020 1 The end of the generational divide 2020 will finally put to rest the stereotype of the technophobic older generation. In a recent ClickShare survey of 1,509 white collar workers, 74% of people of all ages said they were confident with technology, Data Management IT will run itself while data acquires its own DNA Jasmit Sagoo , Senior Director, Head of Technology UK&I, Veritas Technologies : Organisations are already drowning in data, but the flood gates are about to open even wider. IDC predicts that the world’s data will grow to 175 zettabytes over the next five years. With this explosive growth comes increased complexity, making data harder than ever to manage. For many organisations already struggling, the pressure is on. Yet the market will adjust, and over the next few years organisations will exploit machine learning and greater automation to tackle the data deluge. Machine learning applications are constantly improving when it comes to making predictions and taking actions based on historical trends and patterns. With its number-crunching capabilities, machine learning is the perfect solution for data management. We’ll soon see it accurately predicting outages and, with time, it will be able to automate the resolution of capacity challenges. It could do this, for example, by automatically purchasing cloud storage or re-allocating volumes when it detects a workload nearing capacity. At the same time, with recent advances in technology, we should also expect to see data becoming more intelligent, self- managing and self-protecting. We’ll see a new kind of automation where data is hardwired with a type of digital DNA. This data DNA will not only identify the data but also program it with instructions and policies. Adding intelligence to data will allow it to understand where it can reside, who can access it, what actions are compliant and even when to delete itself. These processes can then be carried out independently, with data acting like living cells in a human body, carrying out their hardcoded instructions for the good of the business. With IT increasingly able to manage itself, and data management complexities resolved, what is left for the data leaders of the business? They’ll be freed from the low-value, repetitive tasks of data management and will have more time for decision-making and innovation. In this respect, AI will become an invaluable tool, flagging issues experts may not have considered and giving them options, unmatched visibility and insight into their operations. Jasmit Sagoo James Harvey