Meet the experts
I’ve been studying technology roadmaps and the future of tech since the 1990s dot-com boom, and my role has evolved year on year.
Today, it’s less about demonstrating technologies and more about exploring the strategic impact on our business and associated investments.
There’s always been a fast pace of change. But after the COVID years, with limited R&D and few product releases, it feels like a dam broke. Now the industry is churning out innovations that have been worked on in the background for two years.
You can see it at exhibitions and business conferences. It feels intense. Many emerging technologies have been in the pipeline for decades. But now we are seeing significant breakthroughs.
GRAPHIC: The Gartner hype curve. Source: Gartner Hype Cycle Research Methodology (2022) Gartner.
Tech always follows a ‘hype curve’1. And some technologies that are touted as the next big thing, won’t make it through to changing the way we do business.
I try to catch tech before it reaches its peak. Once a technology is fully in train, a business positions itself to deliver on that technology and starts using it productively.
My role is to see what's coming, understand its possibilities and consider the infrastructure needed to support it. Rather than following the hype curve, it’s best to anticipate the real, practical use cases and ensure that businesses are equipped to capitalise.
That’s why, rather than framing this guide around a tech’s position on the hype curve, I will look at the five technologies least well understood by the business community.
As a member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, I drew on its study about senior leaders’ understanding of various technologies2.
We’ll start with the least well-understood: distributed ledger technology (DLT) before moving on to the metaverse, quantum computing, extended reality and artificial intelligence.
Many of these technologies overlap. They never exist in isolation. Consider your mobile phone, it’s a communication tool. But it’s also a camera, a map with GPS and a digital payment system.
Graphic: Business leaders understanding of emerging technologies. Source: IET skills for a digital future survey, 2023
So, there will be blurring of the lines between all these technologies. To what degree depends on the success of their uptake. There are no guarantees when you look beyond a three-year horizon.
Many factors, commercial and technical, can influence the path a technology will take. Because we don't know the final stage or the final outcome, we must allow room for divergence.
But it's important to understand the potential implications and the application of various technologies. As a business leader, you don't need to understand the detailed mechanisms or the underlying operations of tech.
We won’t dive into that level of detail. But it’s important that you understand at a high level what the technology is.
Whatever your business may be, whether running a network, operating a data centre or offering managed services, there are implications from large technology shifts.
Understanding those implications can shape your investment decisions for future growth. So, you can continue to provide capacity at scale to customers in a cost-efficient way. Robust connectivity requires investment and forethought.I will help show you what technologies are out there, what they might do to our businesses and what it really means for you. So, you can have an understanding from the bottom up.
My team provides new perspectives, ideas and solutions to help our customers develop scalable, flexible network architecture. So they can concentrate on growing profitability.
You know your future traffic is going to come from a different set of users and applications. And this is going to impact your network demand.
Organisations that adapt to the new reality will get stronger and grow revenue faster.
Those that don’t will undoubtedly fall behind their competitors.
In today’s dynamic market, we see daily innovations, acquisitions, partnerships and service launch announcements.
The digital revolution is right here, right now. The pace of change is enormous and that will only grow in the coming years. It’s no surprise that some struggle to keep up.
Here, our goal is to help you prioritise and focus on the fast-emerging technologies most relevant to your business, whether that’s AI, extended reality or quantum computing.
You need to consider each technology’s ease of execution in parallel with its potential to bring new value to your business.
The chart below is a simple, visual representation of the global landscape. This snapshot shows how fast each technology will impact your network.
Graphic: Sweet spot of emerging technologies. Source: Ciena, 2023
The ‘sweet spot’ will be different depending on your industry, real-world use cases for the tech and your potential to monetise them.
Application and functional workloads are increasingly dynamic. They need to spin up and down on-demand to support high-quality user experience.
Rather than making millions of connections, networks must now scale to connect billions of devices and trillions of virtual endpoints across the world.
Static services are in decline. Monetising these technologies means looking towards on-demand, subscription-based services.
This means having a network that allows you to add value. It will require a few tricks. You’ll need to learn new strategies to extend your reach and capability.
My advice is: don’t wait for the killer app. Don’t hide behind traditional commercial models. You need to reimagine all aspects of your business.
I hope this report helps you prioritise changes to your network to make sure your business stays ahead of the game.
[1] https://www.gartner.co.uk/en/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle. [2] https://www.theiet.org/media/11064/skills-for-a-digital-future-survey.pdf
