By Mark Cressey, SVP and GM of Hosting Services at Liberty Mutual

6 Megatrends to Watch in 2020

For the last few years, like many companies, we've been focused on digital transformation, but 2020 will be the tipping point. Most enterprises have developed a large enough footprint in the cloud that they can make big bets on software-defined tools and processes that use automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to gain efficiencies and drive better employee and customer experiences. As we look at the year ahead, here are six megatrends that we have our eye on:

Customer Centric IoT and Edge Based Capabilities Become Real with 5G  

• The fifth generation of mobile internet connectivity is going to provide companies and end-users super-fast download and upload speeds as well as more stable connections.In 2020, there will be opportunity to adopt 5G in certain wireless markets and learn real-world capabilities and impact.This will help companies get ready for larger scale adoption as various markets come online in following years. Early challenges, beyond where the 5G service is available, will include compatible device offerings.Winners here will determine how to leverage services for performance and density-dependent applications while managing early premium expenses.
  

AI/ML Transforms IT Operations

• Machine data generated from infrastructure, platforms and applications has become the critical element that IT Operations teams will harness and normalize to fuel a new digital future. Operations teams will evolve to build, train and deploy machine learning models that will equip them with a new set of capabilities to provide predictive and self-healing-based environments for the digital businesses of today and tomorrow to be built on.
  

Omni-Channel Contact Center and CRM Capabilities

• Omni-Channel contact center and CRM capabilities such as Voice, Text, Chat, Video and Web channels are exploding.As these traditionally single-vendor, premise-based solutions move to the cloud and become more easily adopted, there will be opportunities to integrate best-of-breed services with multiple vendors.Challenges will include ensuring a quality customer journey with context-aware capabilities across a heterogeneous ecosystem.Winners in early adoption will solve for being able to guarantee seamless CX, with ability to replay the customer journey as they transition from one channel or vendor to another.
  

Kubernetes Evolves to Normalize Infrastructure

• While many workloads have moved to the public cloud, the journey to the cloud for organizations is beginning to create a fragmented ecosystem across a vast number of providers, platforms and technologies.Fragmentation in a hybrid, multi-cloud ecosystem is an unintended consequence of digital transformation, but nonetheless, a consequence that now must be brought into focus to ensure that the cloud is a strategic and sustainable asset. The new technology ecosystem being built is enabling the delivery of software and digital services much more quickly with significant flexibility and choice available to organizations across the world. With all the great benefits organizations can realize form cloud technology, a level of normalization is needed to simply the wide variety of infrastructure and platforms.
• In 2020, Kubernetes will evolve and integrate as the API to infrastructure and platforms across many formats and is positioned to normalize the infrastructure layer enabling a consistent experience for developers, operators and security to build, ship and deliver continuous streams of value. All modern platforms are standardizing on Kubernetes as the foundation and the API standard to integrate into existing PaaS developer productivity platforms, new greenfield platforms for Function as a Service, Edge and IoT applications, event-driven frameworks, digital ledger technology and machine learning platforms for our AI powered future.
  

Workload Modernization Becomes Primary Focus for Hybrid Cloud

• Hybrid cloud is the reality for many organizations that are on the path to transforming their core technology platforms to leverage public cloud capabilities. Maintaining a technology footprint that straddles an existing private cloud and spans to at least one and sometimes multiple public cloud providers has become the new normal.With hybrid cloud firmly positioned as today's operating model and the ongoing drive to move more workloads into the public cloud, traditional architectures and classic application patterns will become a key focus area for how enterprises move these often mission critical workloads efficiently and effectively to the public cloud.
• In 2020, modernization of these classic enterprise workloads will move to the top of the priority list to drive down technical debt, improve speed and consistency of delivery to customers and maximize the benefits of running these workloads in a cloud environment. Enablement and acceleration are the two dimensions that evolve to support this movement in 2020. Core enablers such as hyperconverged infrastructure will expand to deliver a cloud experience within organizations' existing data center and be leveraged to support workloads that can't move to the cloud due to regulatory, security or data latency implications.Acceleration will take shape with the arrival of new frameworks, platforms, utilities and service offerings to further accelerate and simplify workload modernization efforts.
  

XaaS Platforms

• Serverless experiences, as well as those of highly capable platforms, are driving the desire for "everything as a service" consumption. In 2020, tech users want everything to feel like a platform experience with better integrations and presentation tiers. This will allow users to take advantage of the vendor-specific tools with a company-specific lens. This also allows companies to more easily swap out technologies and providers as needed without impacting the end-user experience.
  

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