Opportunities in 2020

We are at the end of the calendar year 2019 and it doesn’t seem more interesting than ever before to look at the techno-functional challenges and the opportunities that enterprises will see in 2020. 2019 is rapidly coming to an end. Enterprises across the globe have adopted new development methodologies with one important goal in mind –

Provide quality customer experience by accommodating rapid changes in business with a quick turn around from IT

Enterprises were able to achieve the milestone by taking key ‘First’ initiatives like –

1. “Cloud computing” – first back-end development
2. “Event-driven” – first architecture
3. “Low Code or Zero Code” – first front-end development
4. “Customer journey” – first design methodologies
5. “Multi-experience” first user experience

The eventual adoption of the above principles leads to interesting opportunities –

Opportunity 1 – Global business roll-out and deployment strategy

The recent trend in the business is to take your business to the global market and not just serve one country or geography. Global business expands on a very massive scale. Cloud computing helps businesses to go global in minutes. However, one of the biggest challenges will be managing the deployment of the business code for different countries or geographies. For instance, even though amazon’s core business is online retail, the code that gets deployed in the cloud to serve the US will be different from the code that gets deployed in cloud to serve India. The majority of users who use amazon.com will be from the US and the majority of the users who use amazon.in will be from India. The common deployment model in this case based on the consumer base will be to deploy the package relevant to India in AWS regions over there and the same applies to the US. But, there is no restriction to use amazon.com from India or amazon.in from the US. In this case, a user trying to access amazon.in from the US is routed all way to the India region. This adds to latency and provides a bad user experience.

So how do we take care of even the relatively small user base to have a good user experience?

CDN takes care of the edge hosting the static files necessary to load the websites. Still, the core business logic and transactions have to be deployed in virtual machines residing in availability zones in regions. Solutions like AWS Fargate can take care of container scaling without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. But this is again a regional solution. If we have to deploy amazon.com throughout the globe, then we will have to setup AWS Fargate in every region. This is the closest solution that the cloud providers offer in today’s world.

My questions –

1. Is this the only the latest solution available to handle the global business roll-out using cloud?
2. Is it not time to think about AI-Ops with auto-scaling based on the behavior of the requests(Something like Behavior-driven auto-deployment to different cloud regions)?
3. How far can enterprise go to achieve good user experience (The first parameter in good user experience is the load time)?

Opportunity 2 – Voice assistant – revenue shares

Google and Amazon own the majority of the stake in the smart speaker segment. Apart from answering simple queries voice assistants will be able to do a lot more in the coming years. Google and Amazon are building every capability into their smart assistants, ranging from smart speakers to smart displays.

Recent adobe study reveals that voice commerce emerges as the top priority for the enterprises. Predominantly android and iOS are the 2 major mobile OS and they dominate the market share in smartphones. Similarly, Google and Amazon have emerged as the 2 key players in the case of voice assistants. Google and Amazon will have more analytical data with regards to voice when compared to any other online business giants because the first point of contact will always be google or amazon.

So what is the real challenge here? – How can companies beat the silos of the monopolies and still win voice commerce?

There are many ways to build a voice assistant apps that run on hardware, however, there is only a specific way to invoke the application in the smart voice assistant devices. Given these scenarios, would anyone who wants to monetize their business out of smart speakers will end up in revenue share with amazon and google?

My questions –

1. Should enterprises be ready to ship voice assistant apps at the same time when the roll-out of the feature to web or mobile?
2. Is voice the primary pillar of ubiquitous computing like how mobile device was a decade ago?
3. Are Google and Amazon gaining a monopoly in controlling the voice commerce industry?

Opportunity 3 – Human (vs) Machines and Tools

Interestingly all the new technology trends rely on modern tools. In most cases, enterprises expect the high skilled labors to understand and work on the tools to provide an output. Even the Gartner predictions for 2020 are in line with the same thoughts.

My questions –

1. New tools and technology pop up very often clearing the old trends. What are the new ways that the enterprises will come up to re-train their skilled workforce?
2. How much are the enterprises ready to re-skill their existing workforce?

There may be plenty of other challenges and opportunities the new year may bring on. The only way to crack the future puzzles is by continuous unlearning and learning. Share your thoughts on what you think will be a good opportunity for the tech industry to solve in 2020.

Happy new year 2020!