15 Emerging Technologies

The cloud, big data, the internet of things, and wearable technology have all featured heavily in Forrester’s latest list of fifteen technologies to watch before 2020.

It is becoming a reality for businesses that they need to adapt and change to an increasingly technologically-minded customer base. Traditional marketing campaigns are decreasing in effectiveness as customers take advantage of greater choice, while companies’ ability to anticipate business needs for emerging technology is getting demonstrably worse. Mobile technology has forced enterprises to rethink completely how they win, serve and retain customers, meaning their business strategy is under increasing pressure to find ways to address new digital competitors – some of which have become serious threats overnight. 

To address the new realities, Forrester grouped their list into four ‘innovation groups’ – emerging business solutions innovations, emerging interaction technologies innovations, emerging aggregation and delivery technologies, and emerging infrastructure technology innovations. Within each of the four sections they listed up to four technologies. 

Their fifteen technologies are as follows: 

Emerging Business Solutions Innovations

1. Customer analytics that can help firms better understand what their customers need and when they need it.
2. A digital experience that can provide an easier and more effective way of managing the customer life cycle.
3. Customer-driven design solutions that can allow designers to conceptualise, learn and test, and with increased customer input.
4. An Internet of Things that can offer packaged business process and integration by combining sensors, networks and platforms.

Emerging Interaction Technologies Innovations

5. Next-generation connectivity that enables a wide range of new digital endpoints, using very low-power wireless technology that cuts costs significantly.
6. Wearable technology that creates many innumerable information sources with on-body gadgets, thus expanding companies’ digital reach.
7. Natural user interfaces that can offer new methods for interacting with computing experiences.

Emerging Aggregation and Delivery Technologies Innovations

8. Real-time sourcing and delivery that brings increased knowledge to critical decisions, consequently making marketing and operations have a better insight from fresh data.
9. Advanced analytics that allows firms to get better and faster at garnering knowledge from vast amounts of diverse data.
10. Greater digital identity management technology that helps firms and individuals control access across channels; employees and customers with more ease.
11. Software acceleration platforms to help companies deliver more engagement and better value.

Emerging Infrastructure Technology Innovation

12. New silicon devices that can offer higher levels energy efficiency with better and types of sensors types.
13. Software-defined infrastructure that will enable flexible, easy data centre adjustments.
14. Better cloud integration tools that will have the ability to integrate apps and management across cloud and On-Premises.
15. Big data management technology that will provide a more affordable basis for customer insight.

By Daniel Price