Following a discussion on her role as CTO, Tendü Yogurtçu explained to Information Age the five major tech trends that she sees disrupting business and society in the coming years.

Four of them have been talked about and acted upon since 2018.

1. Hybrid cloud

Hybrid cloud is not even a trend, because it’s happening today.

Big data disruption started in 2010, but hybrid cloud and cloud is really happening now. And every single executive that I have spoken to from our customers has a cloud initiative.

They are not necessarily running all their workflows on the public cloud, but they want to make sure that all new workflows are created in a way that they will be taking advantage of elasticity of the cloud. Then they move at some point.

See also: Hybrid cloud moving businesses forward – away from restrictive legacy systems – Connecting Asia with tech hubs around the world, Cathay Pacific Airways had to embrace an open source hybrid cloud model to ensure it continued innovating and delivering a good service to its customers.

2. Streaming

The second one is streaming, and the Internet of Things is definitely one part of this. But, it’s the ability to go from micro-batch to real-time, and create these data pipelines in a way.

We start with a megapixel, gigapixel or petapixel view of the world; so much data is being collected now.

The ability to sort through that data quickly and be able to feed it into an application pipeline as quick as possible is becoming a real challenge and requirement.

3. Artificial intelligence

Everybody is talking about AI. But ultimately what we are talking about is a very strong use of machine learning — we are able to do that successfully and have mastered the use of machine learning, and our predictions automate the actions afterwards.

AI has become too much of buzzword

Many years ago when I started my PhD, I started in the pattern matching and machine learning area. At that time, this is a couple of decades back, we weren’t able to leverage as much data. Now we have so much data which is helping with the use of machine learning and the gaming industry made the hardware advances, so we have an opportunity and many financial services and insurance firms and are already using.

Related: A guide to artificial intelligence in enterprise – Is it right for your business? – While true artificial intelligence is some way off, businesses are taking advantage of intelligent automation, like machine learning, to improve business operations, drive innovation and improve the customer experience.

Eliminating the bias from the data and delivering trusted data to the AI pipeline becomes very critical, because we have so much data, we have to be focusing on creating a trusted data pipeline and eliminating the bias, so that our use of machine learning and predictive analytics can lead to the right automation at the end.

4. Blockchain

The fourth trend that we weren’t talking about in 2018 is blockchain.

Investors are putting in a lot of money in at the moment and the technology advance still has to happen.

It’s like the early days of blockchain so it will take a couple of years to make sure of the technology, but financial services and supply chain are already jumping in now with the use cases.

Blockchain is yet another platform, ultimately. It’s just another platform and it’s not going to happen on its own. It is going to live side-by-side with the existing infrastructure and transactional systems. It’s just a distributed ledger and since it sits side-by-side with the existing transactional systems, we will have the similar challenges that we had with the data lakes and the cloud — the data has to be moving in and out.

Related: The blockchain space race is all about connection – Information Age spoke to Colin Cantrell, founder of Nexus, about the real applications and innovation surrounding the emerging blockchain world. Read here

In this case they have to be even more careful, because it’s an expansive platform and it is immutable; so we have to make sure we are delivering trusted data for the participants or the goods in the supply chain etcetera for the blockchain.

That’s another trend we are seeing and at the moment, supply chain use cases like the Walmart tracking green lettuces or Cargills trade finance, those are the low-hanging fruit because it’s really important to track and create visibility for the supply chain. It has less regulatory obligations than the financial services. So we will see those use cases.

5. Data governance

And the fifth one is something that has been the centrepiece in 2018 and it will continue — data governance.

We are talking about these trends with hybrid cloud, streaming, machine learning, AI and blockchain.

As a result, managing data, securing data, creating visible data and the data quality becomes even more critical.

We will see data governance again as the main centre theme across these trends. And I think security is one of the focus areas going into 2019.

Thoughts

Interesting quantum computing did not make it into Yogurtçu’s standout tech predictions; perhaps it’s still too far off?

See also: Quantum computing — coming soon to an enterprise near you? – Quantum computing will be one of the defining technologies that will emerge over the next five to ten years, according to Chris Lloyd-Jones from Avanade.