Finally, The Future Is Here

Over the past few years, the discussions about the next year’s Digital revolutions have been a call to repetition: Augmented Reality, Internet of Things, Edge Compute, Cloud technologies and the list goes on. It seems like rearranging the chairs around the same old room. 

While these core technologies dominated the 2020 collective Digital Transformation journey, no one ever thought about what plan 2020 has for us. Surprisingly, the last six months of the year have generated more digital advancements than the last decade, with every metamorphosis aspect underway finding itself accelerated and at pace. 

Also read : A QUICK GUIDE TO HELP YOU WITH SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT COMPANY

While many of my mobile app ideas for 2020 prove beneficial from this shift, others were displaced by more utter needs, like reliable and secure connectivity round-the-clock. 

What does this hold for 2021?

Will emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics still dominate the headlines, or will there be newcomers, previous core technologies will stay a hot-pick for app development companies in Dubai and take the lead. 

Only time will tell! 

2021 will be defined by a fresh new class of technologies all set to graduate to the sidelines to centre stage. Among them : 5G, AI, some like CDP (Customer Data Platforms) and cybersecurity may surprise you. 

Without any further ado, here are top promising digital revolutions that I believe will be the most significant in 2021. 

Digital Transformation 1 – Headless Tech Reshapes Commerce

Headless is the most effective and future-proof way of creating a commerce platform for the agile and experience-driven era. It seems like a nightmare, but all “headless tech” means the businesses can decouple logic/server-side from the front-end experience. 

As an outcome, the app developers in Dubai and across the world get complete front-end independence and a painless way to integrate with other API’s. This can be as easy as ABC or telling your Amazon Alexa to restore your favourite coffee recipe or being able to make instant shopping decisions off of social media.  

You must be thinking, why is this so crucial?

Simple, people are inclined a lot more to this type of commerce. Research portrays the lion’s share of businesses saying their customer acquisition costs have maximized in the past two years. 

This shed light on two critical aspects :

• Firstly, the firm needs to manifold the ROI (Return On Investment) of their net new customer acquisition costs.  

• Secondly, focus on high client retention rates. 

Therefore, by moving ahead the conventional Omni channels to connect everything straight from the warehouse to storefronts to online service, the firms in 2021 are all decked to be more efficient, more streamlined, and probably abreast the competition.  

Digital Transformation 2 – Work From Home Outlives COVID-19

Employees holler for increased work flexibility for many years, and a firm deciding to allow remote work at scale was profound enough to advocate a headline or two. But, in 2020 all went out the window when working from home was the only viable option to many firms, especially in areas with strict coronavirus lockdown protocols. 

Also, as economies slowly get back to the track, and employees again return to work, companies continue to be tasked with protecting employees from possible outbreak resurgences. For instance, many reputed and flourished names like Google and Facebook have extended their WFH policies through or parts of 2021. Even mobile app development companies in Dubai and across the globe are also matching their footstep with this newfound flexibility as an operational choice. 

With remote work demand and supply increasing, you must be thinking about what benefits it holds for employers? Here, I have pocketed some secrets you should know from a company standpoint.

• Remote workers are more interactive. 
• Remote work offers a high level of job satisfaction and a higher rate of employee retention.

Besides these lucrative and concrete reasons for WFH popularity, part of what made this possible has been the rapid deployment and development of smart work from home technologies. Possibly,we all have heard about Zoom, Webex and Microsoft Teams and have witnessed an explosive growth in use and development to make it easier and secure. 

Image Source

Nevertheless, we all have witnessed significant growth in the deployment of WFH, paving the way to growing PC sales as well as investment in new secure connectivity like SD-WAN at scale to proffer improved connectivity to the offices as well as the flexibility that VPN is not well suited. Presently, companies have the best resources with tools and technology to be more efficient and productive despite physical distances, seen remnants for the next few years and maybe beyond as this trend is already in momentum pre-2020.  

Yet another unintended consequence of this will be population migration. With more and more people opting to work from home continuously, I see migration from bigger cities to pocket-friendly locales. Eventually, this shift will drive greater investment in connectivity in rural and suburban areas, which will enable greater productivity in these less densely populated communities. 

Lastly, COVID-19 epidemic has caught numerous companies off-guard. However, simultaneously it also provoked that work can still work efficiently with remote employees, and sometimes can result in improvements in productivity and minimal operational costs. 

This is why I suspect that companies in 2021 will not be seen rushing to return to pre-COVID-19 onsite work models. 

Digital Transformation 3- 5G Go Mainstream For You and Me

Everyone is familiar with 5G behemoth benefits for years now, but it wasn’t discovered until Work From Home, video conferencing and digital collaborations became unskippable parts of everyone’s lives this year. And, this needs reliable connectivity, and more bandwidth becomes a reality, concrete benefits that anybody could wrap their heads around.   

Image Source

Besides, our reliance on smart devices, phones, tablets – consisting of an ever-growing number of IoT devices – shed lights on the need for the multi-lane superhighways that were already known to telecommunication and software development company in Dubai and worldwide. 

Presently, a business cannot leave a room for mistakes to get disconnected, and however, 5G deployments have become a vital part of the solution. As we all collectively continue to work and manage our work from our comfort zones, the value of 5G is going mainstream in 2021. 

Though initially, pandemic put 5G network deployments work on hold this year, these efforts have resumed, and more significant markets like China are already on the target to meet their deployment goals in 2020. In the meantime, every major handset manufacturer in the world – from Samsung and Apple to Xiaomi and Motorola is already launching 5G compatible mobiles in virtually every price-point tier with Qualcomm – making 5G affordable to a behemoth number. 

Digital Transformation 4 – CDP Outbreak

With an outbreak of CDP (Customer Data Platforms) in the past few months and surely for good reasons – fragmented data from several sources turns an uphill to streamline, which often isn’t ideal for companies that rely on frequent, well-curated data to operate optimally. 

According to IBM, bad data already costs U.S businesses approximately around $3 trillion annually, making it crucial for the organization of all sizes. CDP comes in the big picture by collecting data from all available sources, organizing it, tagging it and making it usable for anyone who needs it. Companies like Oracle, SAP, Adobe and Microsoft have already started investing in the market with a unique approach to solve the challenge of gaining the coveted 360-degree customer view. 

Image Source 

In the past few years, the USA has focused a lot on the proliferation of analytics and Big Data. To be clear, this is not going to stop. Data is growing exponentially with the use of social platforms, blogs, ecommerce channels by consumers enabling enterprises to gather insights about customer behaviour.  

Therefore, Data Warehouse, Visualization tools. Analytics platforms, from Cloudera to Snowflake to SAAS won’t lose relevancy, but the unprecedented rise of the customer data platform, is going to accelerate in 2021. As business operations have become somewhat more fragmented, in part because of the WFH policy, but because of the continuing acceleration of data collection across an ever-expanding surrounding of touchpoints, CDP is going to become the key player in 2021.  

Digital Transformation 5 – Turning To New Normal – “Smart Cities, Autonomous Drones and Connected Vehicles”

I know we have been hearing about them for years now, and still, we are not there. But, I think that the amalgam of edge computing and 5G will bring us significantly closer to genuinely autonomous cars, drones, and smart cities. Tesla, the fore-runner in terms of welcoming this to the market, but this is not something Elon Musk is trying to solve. 

This is happening through close strategic alignments between automotive manufacturers and technology makers. From innovative mobile app development companies in Dubai to flourished companies like Intel/ Nvidia/Qualcomm and Volvo/BMW are partnering up to turn once imagined ideas to reality. Also, Uber is creating their autonomous fleet with Amazon following the trail to ship every need to your doorstep through autonomous drones, to bring much-awaited technologies to the market. 

Digital Transformation 6 – Blockchain Steps Ahead Than Crypto

Blockchain was imbued and thus was a bust in 2019. But in 2020, it was scaled for some meaningful use cases for Blockchain much beyond cryptocurrency. According to Technavio latest market research, the global Blockchain technology market predicts to accelerate at a CAGR of close to 56% during the time of 2017-2021. 

As already known, Artificial Intelligence is an early entrant in the ICT space. But powered by AI comes to the most advanced IT development taking place in the Blockchain and cryptocurrency space. AI algorithms can be put to use to predict the value of bitcoins, which offers an easy hand to traders managing bitcoin transactions. 

Moreover, FinTech firms are analyzing the integration of AI in financial transactions. An upsurging number of financial businesses are trying to unfurl the different implications of ML and AI to the companies. To add, Robotics also plays a crucial role as consultants and is automating the process of FinTech solutions by ignoring disruptions. These robots offer help in minimizing the financial transactions, thereby bringing in complete transparency, so firms know the real profitability that is accomplished on a day-to-day basis.  

So, many finance companies are on the lookout for the best mobile app developer in Dubai and across to help customers with easy access. Moreover, it offers access to comparative information allowing investors to be better informed before making decisions about financial plans. 

Lastly, 2021 could be the start of the true rise of Blockchain. 

Digital Transformation 7 – Hybrid Cloud Declared As Winner Enterprise Infrastructure

In today’s business world “legacy modernization” is a priority. But, increased customer demand for digitized services and growing popularity of DevOps and agile approaches -rigid monolithic are not anymore sufficient. 

You must be thinking what the solution is?

Hybrid cloud architecture. 

Hybrid cloud continues to uphold in popularity since it promises the best of both the worlds – the data centre aspect provides more control over resources, whereas a public cloud offers scalability and agility to the launched apps. It’s known for a while that businesses are increasingly drifting towards hybrid cloud infrastructure. Starting from the Saas apps and on-prem solutions to a mix of public and private clouds, hybrid cloud strategies help organizations strike the right balance for their unique cloud infrastructure needs.  

These investments with the right mobile app development in Dubai are all about meeting the customer where they are at the moment. Addressing the challenges of explosive data growth, being proactive on issues like security, privacy and compliance. This modernized approach to hybrid cloud is emerging from conventional IT support industrial apps.  

Digital Transformation 8 – Quantum Makes It Mainstream

Quantum computing may not be in your list now, but its quintessential existence has seen unprecedented growth, insignificant parts thanks to Honeywell and IBM, among others app development companies in Dubai and across. 

Some names to list here are as Splunk and Quantum Computing Inc, Honeywell and Microsoft, and AWS and IonQ are also spurring continual growth in the space. Quantum computing has been at the forefront of pandemic efforts managing the spread of the disease, as well as the development of therapeutics and awaited vaccines. That’s not all; there are many other use cases in other industries as people realize the power that quantum computing has to offer:

• The capability to easily query
• Ability to easily monitor and analyze
• Easy availability to act on data at scale from any source at any time. 

Irrespective of traditional computing, Quantum has a long way to go before it becomes a buzzword. Along with partnerships, I aforementioned bringing Quantum computing and traditional computing together to make apps run seamlessly in a familiar computing environment.   

Undoubtedly, it’s a powerful and exciting trend to gain momentum. 

In The End… The COVID-19 pandemic has mutated both – the trajectory and the velocity of digital transformation, is likely to do so into 2021. The trend lines and new priorities facing organizations of different sizes and natures observed in 2020 will inform the focus, decisions, and technology investments that dominate the list of digital transformation strategies defining 2021, and a speedy eradication of the virus.  

So, if you are wise up to craft your place in the fast and digital world, then rely on the best app developers in Dubai at Xicom that are ready with your free project estimation to focus on the imperative that makes the year ahead of a SUCCESS as YOUR APP.