At NWT we are passionate about technology and how it can be used to improve business outcomes and peoples lives in general. As 2018 draws to a close it is a good time to look forward at some of the major trends that are going to shape 2019 and beyond. The NWT technology office has selected six themes that will shape 2019.

#1 Digital Adoption

In 2019 enterprises will make more investments in Digital technology but these investments will be closely aligned to the business outcomes. New Digital solutions will provide enterprises with an excellent opportunity to remove technical debt at a lower cost and faster. Adoption of solution stacks from companies like AWS, Azure and others will provide a great platform for innovation.

#2 IoT

The adoption of IoT technology and solutions will continue to accelerate; this adoption applies to both the commercial and the consumer world. IoT technology provides the bridge from the physical world to the virtual world and delivers low-cost processing at the edge. The increased adoption of IoT and the data that these devices will stream will mean low-cost storage, massive data processing arrays and increased usage of Machine Learning solutions will be needed.

#3 Cloud

Corporate data centres will continue to become less relevant to many enterprise customers as more services delivered from cloud-based platforms. The trend of moving existing workloads to the cloud will continue because customers can then take advantage of the enormous investment in the new services from the likes of AWS, Azure and Google.

#4 Edge Computing

Computing at the edge will continue to advance no longer will it be necessary to move data sets back to central locations for processing. Instead, edge-based services will allow customers to process information near the consumer or device. The increased use of serverless architectures will allow very small applications to be developed to run in lightweight containers. Functional programming will become an increasing discipline in the industry.

#5 AI

AI/Machine Learning will continue to become easier to consume allowing any customer to build AI-based applications faster, companies like AWS, Azure, Google along with niche players like Bigml will make AI adoption much faster. Companies will be able to build applications using AI in hours/days.

#6 Compliance Technology (RegTech)

With the introduction of GDPR, the need to develop new tools that can manage compliance digitally is going to become increasingly more critical. Customers will need to think about privacy within all their applications and business services. Analytics and building metadata catalogues about the actual data stored will play a big part in the new wave of Regulatory Technology.

These are just some of the trends that are going to shape 2019. NWT

will continue to research and blog on these topics and more throughout 2019.