Top 5 Tech Trend Predictions To Watch Out For This Year

Devendra Rane Jan 10, 2019

Technology has made lives easier for all and has accelerated the growth and transformation of industries and businesses. Early adopters of technology have enjoyed the most prominent positions in the world. Let’s have a look at what 2019 might have in store for us.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

PWAs have been gaining momentum over the last few years and 2019 should be the year where it will be adopted as the mainstream for mobile app development. Mobile web already has better discoverability but the user engagement on mobile apps is much better. PWAs are here to provide the best of both worlds while being lightweight, secure, responsive, ubiquitous and providing faster and easier updates. We should see iOS support for push notifications in Safari this year which should fast-track its adoption.

Data lakes

Data lakes have been around for a while, in fact, since the advent of Hadoop. While they have been successfully used in bigger companies, its adoption has not been as widespread in smaller companies as they are slow, difficult to develop, test and maintain, and require a specialized skill set. But thanks to the decoupling of storage and compute in cloud, and the proliferation of open-source tools like spark, presto and cloud tools like athena and bigquery, storing, maintaining and analyzing data should not cost an arm for smaller companies. So, the traditional data warehouses are going out of vogue, and Data lake adoption has grown and will continue to do so through 2019.

NewSQL databases

It has been a decade since NoSQL databases have rocked the world and they still continue to go strong. People who used to hate SQL quickly embraced NoSQL for its simplicity, but soon started to realize the shortcoming of these systems. Most of them do not provide us with ACID transactions. Even the ones that claim to be CP systems (consistent and partition tolerant) tend to be only eventually consistent. This is where these so-called NewSQL systems, led by Spanner and followed by CockroachDB and TiDB, tip the scales back in favour of SQL. They are consistent, scalable, handles replication and automatic failover. Some of them even received rave reviews from the distributed system community. Expect them to gain momentum and market share in 2019.

Blockchain

What a decade it has been for cryptocurrency! It has its lovers and haters but one thing is for certain - the underlying technology, blockchain, is here to stay. While blockchain has been the technology powering cryptocurrency for the last decade, we will notice a trend shift to cryptocurrency being reduced to just being a currency for other blockchain-based technologies. Dubai has vowed to replace all its government systems to distribute ledger technology and a few states in India seek to do the same despite the government's negative attitude towards cryptocurrencies. DLT provides the underlying trust, immutability and transparency that many systems desperately need and startups and governments alike seem to be onboard with it.

Edge Computing

Cloud computing has changed the way that many companies efficiently use and share computing power over the last decade. Edge computing can go a step further by taking control of the computing applications, data and services away from the central nodes to the other extreme i.e. closer to where the data is produced/consumed. This reduces the communication bandwidth and helps efficiently utilize the unused computing power. Google has released TFlite, which is one of the first steps to doing ML on devices. Expect your devices in your pockets to get hotter this year.

Technological changes are tremendous and fast-paced, and scale up businesses without any geographical limitations. Active implementation and embracing of technology and its related changes will help a business survive in this cut-throat, competitive and predatory market. If one fails to embrace these technological advancements and changes or even falls behind in implementing them, then they face a potential threat or extinction. It is not that these new technological trends will benefit only businesses, they will also open up the floodgates for a skilled workforce like developers and data scientists who would be in high demand to meet the future requirements. All in all, a win-win situation for all could be in the making in 2019.