Dell Technologies’ Alok Ohrie on technology trends to watch out for in 2020

Sustainable innovation, edge computing, multi-cloud environments and better data viability are some of the top trends that Alok Ohrie, president and managing director of Dell Technologies, predicts could be game-changers in 2020.  

“Autonomous cars lining our streets, virtual assistants predicting our needs and taking our requests, connected and intelligent everything across every industry,” is how Ohrie describes 2020. The year will also see massive amounts of data and compute power that will be processed across the edge, cloud and core data centres.

“2020 marks the beginning of what we at Dell Technologies are calling the Next Data Decade,” pointed out Ohrie.

Organisations are finding it difficult to move the right data to the right place and at the right time. The year 2020 will see companies take their digital transformation journeys forward with better automation of IT infrastructure and consolidating systems into holistic solutions, Ohrie said.

This, Ohrie believes, will be possible with better consistency in architectures, orchestrating and service agreements and the ability for data to be used as part of artificial intelligence and machine learning to help in IT automation.

Read: How AI jumped out of the movies and into our everyday lives

The emergence of the multi cloud

Multi cloud IT strategies backed by hybrid cloud architectures will play a key role in better data management and visibility, according to Ohrie. However, the trend of private clouds existing within the data centre will be a thing of the past, thanks to 5G and edge deployments.  Vikas Arora, vice president, cloud and cognitive software and services at IBM India/South Asia is also of the opinion that multi-cloud deployments will the top trend for 2020.

See: Enterprises will accelerate hybrid multi cloud strategies to deploy applications

Cloud and software-defined IT infrastructures

The rise of the as-a-service model will accelerate rapidly in 2020 with many companies transforming their IT into software-defined and cloud-enabled models, said Ohrie.

“As a result – they’ll be able to choose the right economic model for their business to take advantage of end-to-end IT solutions that enable data mobility and visibility,” he added. As-a service models will also help companies crunch data-intensive artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads as required.

Edge computing gains more prominence

Although edge computing was once limited to the internet of things, today most systems, applications and services are interconnected. “The edge is emerging in many places and it’s going to expand with enterprise organizations leading the way, delivering the IT infrastructure to support it,” said Ohrie.

Finally, with the push for environment friendly measures, sustainable innovation will become the key for future enterprise success. “Greater investments in reuse and recycling for closed-loop innovation will accelerate, minimising eWaste and maximizing already existing materials,” pointed out Ohire.