Tech trends

Technologies that will Impact your

Business

Smart Machines

Advanced Robotics
Quantum
Computing
Maturity
Brain-Computer Interface
Mainstream
Autonomous Memristors 5G Early adoption
Vehicles
Cognitive Computing Biocomputer Adolescent
Swarm Computing Emerging

Internet of Everything

Self-Adaptive Security
3D Printing Exascale
Privacy-Enhancing
Technologies
Ubiquitous PIM

SDx
Blockchain
Insight Immersive Fabric-Based Computing
Platforms Experience
Wearable Computing Virtual Assistants
Deep Natural User
Interfaces Context Broker
Learning Semantic
Technologies
Digital Workplace
Edge Computing Distributed
Web-scale Trusted Devices Social Networks
Computing
Wireless Power
LPWAN
WebRTC
In-Memory Computing Location-Based Plastic Transistors
Cloud Service Services NG
Containers
Integration
Advanced Data Visualization IPv6
Biometrics Digital Signage
NFC Open Source Hardware

2016 2017 2018 2019+

Atos 2016. All rights reserved.

Time of impact Business Impact Maturity

2016 Look today at how solutions could
address these needs.
2017 Consider potential solutions by
running pilots, for example.
2018 Understand now. Consider potential
implications and how these could be
addressed.
2019+ Follow for now. Watch how it's
evolving.
Transformational Likely to require
transformational changes within
organizations.
High Will have a high impact at work and in
people's home lives.
Medium Will impact organizations'
processes & services or affect users' &
consumers' lives.
Low More likely to require minor
improvements than radical changes.
Emerging Mainly seen in academia and a
small number of specialized markets.
Adolescent Discussed more widely by
analysts and thought leaders.
Early adopter Clients are starting to look
for solutions.
Mainstream There's a clear need and
many clients are implementing solutions.

The radar diagram provides a pictorial view of our findings, allowing you to quickly understand how disruptive emerging technology is
likely to be and the actions you might consider taking. Polar co-ordinates depict the likely time to impact your business along with the
potential size of the impact, while colors represent the current maturity of each topic.

160 #AscentLookOut

Each trend has been analyzed from three perspectives: potential size of impact on your business;
likely time to impact your business and maturity.
3D Printing
Concept
Definition
Also referred to as additive manufacturing,
3D printing is a manufacturing approach
that materializes 3D objects from virtual
designs created using CAD (Computer
Added Aided Design) programs. The size of
objects that can be printed extends from
nanoscale to buildings.
To create parts the 3D printer superposes
layer upon layer of material using various
additive processes until the entire object
is created. Each layer is effectively a thinly
sliced horizontal cross-section of the
eventual object.
Applications
Rapid prototyping making fabricating a
part or model, often designed using CAD
tools, quick and easy
Rapid manufacturing inexpensive
production of a small number of parts
Mass customization manufacturing
unique objects personalized directly by
users through a web-based interface
Maintenance creating parts for vehicles,
aircraft, machinery and more
Casting creating foundry patterns for
casting parts
Retail allowing consumers to purchase
and download a product design to print
at home
Healthcare creating bespoke
replacement knees, hips, ears, blood
vessels, heart valves and other body parts
Pharma creating personalized pills
Trajectory
Impact
Alters the product supply chain,
eliminating the need for both component
and end product transportation
May spawn a new wave of manufacturing
relocation across the globe as
components can be created anywhere
Simplifies customization while reducing
material waste and accelerating lead
times
Allows vehicle and aircraft manufacturers
to create lightweight parts to help
improve fuel efficiency
Helps reduce the cost of cast parts while
Tech trends
enhancing precision lifecycle maintained.
Improves after sales maintenance by Issues may arise relating to the
making replacements immediately intellectual property of models and CAD
available designs.
Lowers the investment barrier for people 3D printing could mean countries
needing to manufacture small series of international trade strategies for goods
objects become difficult to enforce.
Allows individuals to design and share Tracing the use of raw materials in
objects in the same way they share specific value chains will likely become
content within the Creative Commons more complex with 3D printing.
movement or software pieces in the open
source movement
5G
Concept
Evolution
Definition
3D printing was initially dedicated to
5G represents the next generation of
prototyping in the manufacturing industry
communication networks and services. It is
during the early stages of product
not intended to be an evolution of legacy
development.
communication technologies, but a novel
A drop in the price of 3D printers, the
approach for fulfilling the requirements of
appearance of open hardware initiatives
future applications and scenarios. As such,
and the general Do It Yourself movement
legacy 4th generation LTE technologies
spread 3D printing to the open source
continue to evolve in parallel.
and makers communities.
CAD object design libraries are starting
Applications
to appear, allowing people to share,
Connecting trillions of smart devices on
customize and print their own objects at
the Internet of Things (IoT)
home.
Providing massive broadband access
Amazon and other players have
for high quality TV or video streaming to
opened a 3D printing store online with
mobile devices, video conferencing and
commercial 3D printers and scanners,
other applications
printer filaments, CAD software and more.
Enabling extreme real-time applications
Advances in 3D printing means
including augmented reality
composite objects made of multiple
Delivering ultra-reliable applications
materials can also be printed.
including e-health and energy services,
Research into new materials with high
manufacturing control and connected
mechanical properties, such as steel or
vehicles
titanium, has opened new uses in new
Providing life-line communications
sectors, such as aerospace where SpaceX
including emergency calls during a
created the first 3D printed rocket parts.
natural disaster
Progress is also being made in printing
Enabling vehicle communications
bio-materials as well as other materials
improving traffic safety, assisting drivers
such as concrete, glass, plastic, metal,
with real-time traffic conditions, enhancing
ceramic and foodstuffs.
vehicle reliability and more
Progress is also being made toward high-
volume printing.
Trajectory
Complementary 3D scanning technology,
Impact
which collects data on shape and size of
Offers high levels of network flexibility
objects, is making it easier to create initial
and dynamic network reconfiguration
designs.
based on analytics enabled by Software-
Defined Networking (SDN) and Network
Issues
Function Virtualization (NFV)
3D printing systems will need to be linked
Delivers higher levels of security and
to current manufacturing systems to
improved user privacy control
ensure end-to-end visibility of the product
Expected to cut network latency to
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Tech trends
around one to two milliseconds, enabling
innovations such as the connected car
Expected to improve wireless capacity
1,000-fold and, as such, deliver the
capacity needed for mobile video
streaming, video conferencing and more
Projected to save up to 90 percent on
energy, mainly from the radio access
network
Forecast to connect more than seven
trillion wireless devices serving over
seven billion people in the IoT
Accelerates new service time-to-market,
potentially reducing the average creation
time cycle from 90 hours to 90 minutes
Evolution
Current research is focused on the 5G
networks architecture, functionality and
capabilities.
First 5G deployments are expected
around 2020.
In the meantime, legacy 4th generation
LTE technologies are continuing to evolve,
offering a fully IP-based, integrated system
providing high speeds indoors and
outdoors, with premium quality and high
security.
LTE-A (LTE Advanced), for example, offers
increased speeds, performance and
capacity along with higher densities than
its predecessor.
Issues
Various regions around the world
are currently competing to lead 5G
standardization activities.
5G must accommodate a wide range
of use cases from diverse verticals,
each with advanced requirements
around latency, resilience, coverage and
bandwidth.
These use cases need to be considered
in the early phases of the standardization
process and, as such, non-Telco
companies (automotive, IT services,
consumer goods, health and others) need
to be included too.
5G is a combination of diverse
technologies, the maturity of which will be
varied when 5G is first deployed.
A Data visualization could evolve
Advanced Data Visualization
Concept
Definition
As the volume of data grows, we need
ways to easily grasp its implication. Visual
representations (data visualization
technologies or dataviz) are one of the
162 #AscentLookOut
more natural ways to understand patterns
and relationships in complex data sets.
Many solutions also enable interaction with
these data sets (manipulating the data and
changing viewpoints, for example), allowing
us to explore them in more depth, reveal
hidden relationships, find relevance among
a large number of variables and more.
We also need a means to explore the
massive volumes of near instantaneous
data provided by our increasingly
connected world. With a growing number
of data sets no longer static, advanced
dataviz solutions enable the visualization
and exploration of rapidly-evolving real-time
data sets.
In some cases, visualization can go
beyond the 2D screen, providing a 3D
representation within augmented and/or
reality environments or even immersive
'caves'.
Applications
Scientific computing
Engineering
Finance
Health
Pharmaceuticals
Big Data projects
Social network diagrams
Geographical diagrams
Trajectory
Impact
Improves decision-making, particularly in
enterprises
Extends the work done by the Data
Scientist
Evolution
Initially, visualizations were limited to
specific types of business charts provided
by productivity and Business Intelligence
(BI) solutions.
Big Data increased the need for intuitive,
visual ways of traversing content. As such,
many of today's BI products now include
advanced data visualization capabilities.
Open source data visualization tools are
progressing quickly, but often basic and
less user-friendly.
significantly with advances in human-
computer interfaces. Immersive systems
that include advanced 3D graphics, for
instance, are already being employed
in the astronomy and health science
fields as well as for analysis of complex
economic data, such as on the stock
market.
In time, advanced data visualization tools
will be democratized through mainstream
solutions.
Data sets are no longer static and, as
such, being able to visualize and explore
real-time (or quickly evolving) data sets is
useful and sometimes necessary.
The paradigm of the data warehouse
is progressively becoming obsolete: as
the volume of available data increases,
rather than digging into three years, three
months or even three days of historical
data, we will need to explore massive
amounts of nearly instantaneous data.
Issues
High interactivity visualization can be
quite complex, demanding very specific
knowledge.
Even as tooling improves, data
visualization is still relatively low-level and
often requires some degree of coding.
Badly used or understood, visualization
can provide incorrect outcomes and
misdirection.
Advanced Robotics
Concept
Definition
The field of robotics is gathering a lot
of momentum, thanks to advances in
artificial intelligence (AI) and computer
vision (artificial vision computer systems
implemented in software and/or hardware
that are able to perceive, process and
understand visual data such as images and
videos).
Today's advanced intelligent robots are
autonomous and able to make informed
decisions around their own actions. They're
also increasingly connected, able to interact
with their environment and other smart
machines as part of the Internet of Things.
Not necessarily humanoid, today's robots
are mostly machines or even vehicles, such
as autonomous cars.
Applications
Industrial processes such as for
repetitive tasks or precise guidance
Services and knowledge workers
including at work, in public or in
hazardous environments
Surveillance particularly in harsh or
dangerous environments
Fire prevention including detection and
extinguishing
Industrial inspection such as network
repairs
Cleaning, sorting and delivery of mail,
for example
Robotic doctors allowing doctors to

diagnose, and even operate on patients
from a remote location
Care including of elderly people
Autonomous vehicles such as self-
driving cars
Spacecraft including planetary
navigation
Agriculture including sheep-shearing
Social, entertainment, sports or even
teaching
Trajectory
Impact
Improve safety by replacing workers
in dangerous activities, such as fires or
nuclear power plant accidents
Increase efficiency with AI systems
recognizing, learning and optimizing
otherwise imperceptible mathematical
patterns to maximize efficiency and
minimize cost
Maximize productivity as robots do
not tire and can, therefore, maintain
a consistent level of performance
indefinitely
Reduce cost as the only outlays required
are the initial purchase price and
subsequent maintenance
Enhance flexibility by rapidly adapting to
constantly changing work environments
Improve customizability by taking the
form factor most suited to the job
Evolution
Robotics has a long history, mainly
related to factory automation.
Advances in AI, improved connectivity
and distributed computing models (cloud)
brought new life into the field.
Robots are becoming smarter, moving
beyond doing repetitive tasks in factory
scenarios to making informed decisions
around their actions.
Many large planes are now essentially
robots, flying themselves with pilots only
really needed to reassure passengers.
Japan has historically pushed robotics to
compensate for both a lack of workforce
and increasing dependence as its
population ages.
New entrants, including Google with its
expertise in AI, are betting on advanced
robotics.
New use cases, military drones for
instance, are becoming increasingly
important and their profile is rising.
We may one day see a war fought by
robot armies.
The future will likely see robots gain social
intelligence, artificial emotions and more
natural interaction.
Issues
The media's portrayal of robots often
presents a distorted view of the truth.
"Moravec's Paradox" is still true: robots
are very good at complex tasks, but fail
(sometimes quite miserably) in day-to-day
tasks, such as climbing stairs or opening
doors.
Staff may resist as robots' role moves
from facilitating human labor to
supplanting it.
Connected robots, like other connected
devices, are raising concerns around
privacy.
In personal scenarios, such as situations
relating to health and finances, people
prefer a human touch.
Badly designed smart machines that
don't function as expected could
potential bring about serious unwanted
consequences.
Industry experts and scientists are
concerned about the consequences of
reaching the Technological Singularity
the point where machines would be more
intelligent than humans.
Autonomous Vehicles
Concept
Definition
Autonomous vehicles is an emerging
field arising from the interaction of
transportation vehicles and robotic
capabilities that include environmental
sensors, context awareness and
autonomous decision-making using
artificial intelligence. These self-driving
vehicles rely on these technologies to
enable them to drive themselves while
recognizing and responding to their
surrounding environment.
Major players in this space include both
automotive and technology companies,
who are both competing and/or
collaborating.
Applications
Personal transport including the
autonomous (and semi-autonomous) cars
created by Google and Tesla
Industrial surveillance and transport
especially in harsh, wide or difficult to
access environments such as mines,
pipelines or traffic jams
Urgent, specialized transport including
aerial drones for search and rescue
Unmanned parcel delivery drones such
as those created by Amazon and Google
High-volume logistics including
autonomous lorry platoons with just one
driver controlling several vehicles
Tech trends
Agricultural transport such as for crop
monitoring and cattle control
Military transportation and surveillance
especially in dangerous environments
Trajectory
Impact
Reduces the number of accidents caused
by human error
Optimizes the number of vehicles on the
road
Accelerates point-to-point logistics
Minimizes risk in military and other
dangerous scenarios
Extends transport to those unable to
drive, including children, seniors and
individuals with disabilities
Makes expensive services, such as aerial
photography, affordable
Offers alternative to current means of
transportation
Opens up new opportunities for novel
services based on collaborative uses
Expected to have transformational
impact in automotive, insurance, energy,
health, defense and city planning
Projected to have greatest impact
once vehicles are fully automated as
mutualization will be much easier
Evolution
The long-term goal is for fleets of
autonomous vehicles to complement or
even replace traditional, human-manned
vehicles.
Though still very active in their R&D
phase, these companies are already
testing autonomous vehicles.
The main R&D focus is around helping
drivers reach their designated destination
effortlessly, though they also want to
ensure drivers feel satisfied and safe.
Governments are beginning to play a
more active role, crafting regulations and
providing funding for R&D.
Wide adoption is predicted to be around
2020, but that may be a bit optimistic.
Issues
Cost: Sensors used in autonomous
vehicles, such as the LIDARs that
illuminate the surroundings with a laser
and analyze the reflected light, are still
expensive.
Complex environments: The variability
of conditions (weather, environment and
other actors) is extraordinarily complex.
Testing: Tests are very promising, but
have mostly been carried out under
controlled conditions.
Safety: Safety requirements are very high
since human lives are at risk.
Regulations: Regulations for autonomous
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Tech trends
vehicles are almost non-existent. Creating
them will be a complicated process.
Ethics: As with all fields related to artificial
intelligence and robotics, ethics play an
important role where machines make
tricky decisions that may put lives in
danger.
B biochips.
Biocomputers
Concept
Definition
Biocomputers are computers that use
biological materials such as DNA and
proteins to perform computational
calculations that involve the storage,
retrieving and processing of data. They
leverage the capabilities of living beings,
relying on nanobiotechnology to engineer
biomolecular systems that provide the
computational functionality.
Applications
Performing living processes based
on complex biomolecular interactions
involving biomolecules coded by our
DNA
Providing advanced bio-templates for
bacterial and viral analysis sparking
other biomechanical technologies since
it's currently the only self-replicating
computing technology we know of
Executing calculations that require
extreme parallelism which can be
achieved by billions of molecules
interacting simultaneously with each
other
Solving problems that cannot be
deterministically solved in polynomial
time
DNA shows promise as a mechanism for
long-term storage of information
Trajectory
Impact
May offer an alternative to silicon-based
systems potentially faster, smaller
and more energy efficient for some
specialized problems
Potentially offering massive parallelism,
massive storage and high levels of
artificial intelligence alongside low waste
and low energy usage
May also provide a whole new field of
innovation in healthcare and life sciences
such as detecting cancerous activity
within a cell and releasing an anti-cancer
drug upon diagnosis
164 #AscentLookOut
Evolution
Less than a decade ago, the California
Institute of Technology invented a basic
logic gate inside living yeast cells using
RNA molecules (molecules that, like DNA,
carry genetic information).
The IMEC world-renowned
nanoelectronics research center in
Leuven, Belgium, is directing research into
A few years ago, Stanford University
made the final component needed
to build biocomputers available by
developing the first biological transistor,
called transcriptor, using DNA and RNA.
In February 2016, parallel computation
was achieved in protein filaments with
biological agents.
Biocomputers may offer some interesting
applications in the future.
Issues
Today, biocomputers are still a very
prospective field of research.
Despite being able to execute a high
number of multiple parallel computations,
the DNA-computer biocomputing
approach has a slow processing speed
with a response time that may be hours
or days, rather than milliseconds.
Biocomputing results are much harder
to analyze than results from a digital
computer.
There is growing public concern around
biocomputers' relationship with genomics
and, as such, the potential for biological
catastrophes.
Biometrics
Concept
Definition
Biometrics refers to the detection and
measurement of specific measurable
human characteristics. These can be
used, with a certain degree of certainty, to
differentiate individuals. Accuracy can be
further improved by combining several
different biometric mechanisms into
multimodal biometric systems.
Well-known examples include fingerprints,
retinal blood vessels, iris recognition and
voice recognition, though there are many
other human characteristics that can be
used to identify an individual and may be
useful in certain situations. These include
heart rate and walking pace. And while
DNA provides the ultimate biometric, DNA
analysis currently takes too long to make it
a viable option at this moment in time.
Applications
Identifying and authenticating individuals
since biometrics are unique
Enabling multi-factor authentication
when combined with other security
mechanisms such as smart cards
Offering an alternative or complementary
security mechanisms such as
fingerprint recognizers in smartphones
Enhancing consumer device security
particularly for smartphones
Providing strong security in defense or
homeland security scenarios including
detecting suspects at borders and crowd
control
Trajectory
Impact
Enables strong authentication since
biometrics are unique and difficult to
reproduce
Provides advantages over passwords
for access control and security systems
since biometrics dont require any
memorization
Evolution
Some biometric systems, including
fingerprint scanners, have a long history
behind them.
Advances in both sensors and
recognition software meaning false
non-match rates (that disturb legal users)
and false match rates (that are a security
risk) are improving though there's a
trade-off between cost, response time,
convenience and reliability.
Local use of biometric systems in trusted
personal devices is now more acceptable.
Also driven by the reducing cost of
biometric systems combined with their
integration with authentication and
authorization standards in software,
biometrics are gaining popularity in end
consumer devices.
Advances in artificial vision are improving
biometrics based on pictures or video
including facial recognition.
Behavioral or passive biometrics exploits
dynamic characteristics including
keystrokes, mouse moves and even
complex body movements such as gait
enabling continuous authentication.
Future trust and compliance models
will likely leverage a combination of
biometric-based security and new smart
phones capabilities in the never-ending
quest to ease access control.
Issues
Biometrics requires specialized
equipment for capturing the biometric
characteristics.

Accuracy rates vary substantially
among different biometric mechanisms
and performance varies among large
populations. A small proportion of users
face recurrent difficulties.
As such, biometrics is best suited
as a complement to conventional
authentication methods.
Applicability for identification is more
limited since determining who a person is
and checking that it is one given person is
difficult because of the tolerances needed.
Mistrust is still strong because it's very
personal and you can't change it like you
can a password.
In addition, privacy concerns may lead to
user acceptance or regulatory issues.
Biometrics may raise ethical and
social implications for Corporate Social
Responsibility imperatives.
Biometric systems can be tricked. Facial
recognition systems can be fooled by
using 2D or 3D masks, for instance. Anti-
spoofing technologies are emerging to
address this problem.
Blockchain
Concept
Definition
Blockchain is a form of distributed database
that uses cryptographic techniques to
ensure records are stored sequentially and
tamper-proof.
Public, private or community, blockchains
provide an alternative to a centralized
ledger maintained and controlled by a
single entity. In doing so, they enable a new
model that allows trust to be established in
a peer-to-peer network without needing a
trusted third party.
Applications
Financial applications including book-
keeping, cryptocurrencies and securing
transactions
Non-financial applications including
(to some degree) managing intellectual
property (anteriority), digital identities,
electronic health records, along with
voting, supply chain authentication and
smart contracts
Trajectory
Impact
Changes the value chain by removing
gateways and intermediary processes
in favor of direct trusted transactions
between users including merchants,
services providers and customers
Challenges industries where a central
ledger was mandatory such as banking
or insurance
Disrupts domains where a trusted third
party was required
Enables the emergence of industries
where a central ledger was needed but
impossible to put in place
Evolution
Blockchain became well-known for
its use as a public ledger for Bitcoin
transactions and supporting various other
cryptocurrencies.
Its application has now widened to
include diverse applications in almost all
domains.
Organizations, mostly industry but also
some governments, are investing heavily
in building proofs of concept for specific
use cases.
Ethereum, a platform that enables
the creation and automation of smart
contacts, is an example of one of the
more sophisticated implementations.
Blockchain technology company R3
is leading a consortium of 40 banks in
testing the use of blockchain solutions to
facilitate the trading of debt instruments.
The Hyperledger Project, a collaborative
effort created to advance blockchain
technology, aims to identify and address
important features for a cross-industry
open standard for distributed ledgers.
Blockchain protocols are evolving to
extend functionality, address security risks
and increase capacity.
Issues
Blockchains, including Bitcoin, still
remain widely experimental and lack a
retrospective view.
Blockchain cryptography is currently
not post-quantic and could therefore be
threatened by quantum computing.
Security depends on the diversity and
independence of a blockchain's nodes. As
such, a single player controlling a majority
of nodes could theoretically circumvent
some security mechanisms.
The 'proof of work' uses a considerable
amount of computing power and energy,
though more energy-efficient alternatives,
such as 'proof of stake' or 'proof of burn',
are being sought and explored.
Improvements are needed to ensure
the volume of transactions required
for mainstream applications can be
effectively handled.
Different blockchains may be required for
different use cases.
Tech trends
Brain-Computer Interface
Concept
Definition
The brain-computer interface (BCI) is a
direct communication pathway between
the brain and an external device based
on neural activity generated by the brain.
While the majority of approaches use
invasive devices, the most promising
initiatives are based on non-invasive
approaches. Here, electroencephalogram
or EEG devices record the brain activity.
EEG's fine temporal resolution, ease of use,
portability and low set-up cost has made it
the most widely studied potential candidate
for a non-invasive interface.
Applications
Initially, simple detection of specific
external signals and very basic interaction
with objects
Today, mainly used for assisting,
augmenting or repairing human cognitive
or sensory-motor functions for
controlling prosthetics, for instance
Also gaming where crude EEG devices
are already available as gaming controls
Later, providing more advanced
communications including speech
recognition focused on basic phonemes
and language patterns
In the future, enabling communication,
interactions with computing devices and
more
Trajectory
Impact
Allows people to interact with computers
and devices without actions or
movements
Offering a completely new
communications channel especially
non-invasive technologies and
more advanced interactions (mainly
communication)
Impacting almost all aspects of man-
machine interfaces in both our personal
and professional lives
Evolution
First invented in 1924, research labs have
since pursued EEG-based BCI extensively.
During the 1970s, research used
primates while invasive methods allowed
prosthetics mechanisms to be controlled.
Advances in neuroimaging resolution and
EEG capabilities have allowed devices to
be controlled more precisely.
Initial consumer devices were crude
and mainly used for gaming and stress
control.
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Recent advancements showed that
EEG-based BCI can accomplish tasks on a
similar level to invasive BCI.
It could eventually become one of the
most advanced method for interacting
with computers and devices.
Issues
Invasive methods require complex
medical procedures and may have
undesired side-effects. Ensuring a
permanent connection with specific areas
of the brain is difficult as the connection
may decay, for example.
Non-invasive EEG is still at the early
stages of research.
Brain activity is permanent and, as such,
it's not easy to isolate significant signals.
Non-invasive techniques will require
additional effort.
The brain is incredibly complex (more
than 100 billion of neurons) and analyzing
patterns based on electric signals is
really challenging and compounded with
individual differences.
Longer term, there may be ethical risks
such as the potential for mind-reading
and mind-control.
C additional capacity as and when needed
Cloud Services Integration
Concept
Definition
The new computing continuum will be
a heterogeneous environment based on
the decentralization and federation of
diverse computing entities and resource
typologies. These will include multi-cloud
(and cloud federation) models with their
diverse, decentralized and autonomic
management and hybrid cloud models
that cross boundaries between internal and
external cloud services or between public,
private and community providers.
Cloud Service Integration (CSI) provides
a flexible means for assembling these
various cloud-based elements in support
of business process that transverse IT
domains. Compute workloads are deployed
across multiple cloud environments to
provide an optimal delivery model.
Applications
Global business enabling the dynamic
coordination of computing loads across
geographies
Integrated manufacturing supporting
information transparency and
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collaboration between MES/MOM, ERP
and PLM systems
Industry helping gas companies,
for instance, optimize extraction by
enabling tight integration between the
gas turbine manufacturers PLM cloud
service, the companys own private asset
management cloud service and a sub-
surface analysis cloud service
Enhancing information services
allowing organizations to augment their
own services with public third-party
services, such as weather or traffic
Business continuity reducing the cost
of disaster recovery while enhancing
flexibility and the agility
Trajectory
Impact
Helps companies balance functionality,
flexibility and investment protection
Reduces cost by eliminating the need
for hardware to absorb peak demands,
reducing overall management cost and
energy consumption
Accelerates computing resource delivery
while improving resource availability and
optimizing resource utilization
Helps small and medium cloud
companies handle peak-loads, acquiring
Brings workloads closer to where
demand is, eliminating unnecessary
latency
Ensures compliance with national
regulations when customers have specific
restrictions about the legal boundaries in
which their data and application can be
hosted
Evolution
Simple multi-cloud capabilities were first
made available through APIs.
These are now evolving into a global-
scale service-based architecture.
ServiceNow played a key role in showing
industry how the various service
providers can be brought onto a single
platform.
With private cloud now becoming
mainstream, companies are looking at
hybrid cloud models.
In the longer term, the majority of
companies are likely to adopt a multi-
cloud strategy with services from multiple
providers.
The future will see a wider variety of
service delivery venues available, allowing
users to schedule and automate delivery
of their workloads to the most suitable
clouds.
Trusted Information Brokers the
evolution of todays cloud-ready identity
federation services will ensure
seamless authentication and access
control for information and services.
They will use characteristics belonging
to the information requester such as
age, organization or citizenship while
ensuring that proprietary or personal
information is not spread unnecessarily.
Issues
Compatibility across services is
still an open issue, compromising
further advance of inter-cloud service
provisioning. Cloud market leaders are
yet to widely adopt any standardization
efforts, but multi-cloud may be the market
force that pushes that adoption, breaking
down current vendor lock-in.
Multi-cloud environments increase the
complexity of service level agreements
since providers rely on diverse services
from a more complex cloud ecosystem.
Existing contracts will need to be
analyzed and extended so chains of
contractual relationships can be
automatically established across multiple
and heterogeneous cloud providers.
Multi-cloud environments will need virtual
networks to be set up across multiple
cloud providers. Yet poor network
performance is a roadblock for wider
cloud adoption, while cloud federation
requires extensions to the concept,
techniques and primitives of cloud
networking.
The constant changes in security
parameters enabled by dynamic multi-
cloud management models is amplifying
current security concerns.
Cognitive Computing
Concept
Definition
Cognitive computing can be seen as an
integration of algorithms and methods
from diverse fields such as artificial
intelligence, machine learning, natural
language processing and knowledge
representation that enhances human
performance on cognitive tasks. Breaking
traditional boundary between neuroscience
and computer science, cognitive
computing is able to learn, to understand
natural language, as well of reasoning up
to interacting more naturally with human
beings than traditional programmable
systems.
Cognitive computing systems have three
main types of capability:
Systems with engagement capabilities
change the way humans and systems

interact, extending human capabilities by
providing expert assistance.
Systems with evidence-based, decision-
making capabilities continually evolve
through new information, outcomes and
actions.
Systems with discovery capabilities
uncover insights that even the most
brilliant human beings might not discover,
finding connections by understanding
the vast amounts of information available
around the world.
Applications
Applications of Cognitive Computing are
multiple and will continue to expand:
Expert assistance solving tasks or
long-term projects, answering questions,
making suggestions, revealing patterns.
Examples include personal assistants.
Intuitive communication understanding
a person's real intent, attitude, meaning,
emotions and mood to suggest effective
communication strategies in digital
experiences. Examples include marketing
and sales campaigns, TV advertising,
political campaigns and matching the
call agent to the caller's personality in call
centers.
Accessibility for the impaired
specialized devices with embedded
software responding to simple intuitive
gestures such as finger pointing and
reading signs, papers, books, labels and
products.
Intelligent narratives providing
automated, yet natural language,
insightful summaries out of complex
information. Examples include natural
language explanations of analytical
conclusions.
Predictive customer engagement
leveraging knowledge bases linked to
CRM systems to understand customers'
data, discover patterns, infer relationships,
anticipate customer needs and actions
and, thereby, predict the optimal
engagement strategy.
Trajectory
Impact
Redefines the nature of the relationship
between people and their increasingly
pervasive digital environment
May allow machines to take over
mundane activities, transforming jobs,
companies, industries, markets and
economies
May open the door for new opportunities
and business models around cognitive
modelling, human touch interpretation
and more
Paves the way for smart machines with
reasoning abilities analogous to the
human brain
Evolution
Computers using artificial intelligence
have been a field of academia and
research labs since the 1960s.
But the world lacked the digital
infrastructure, algorithms and knowledge
bases to underpin such systems until
recently:
-- The scale of computing power and
storage has now reached critical scale.
-- Huge new sources of structured and
unstructured digital data are available
for algorithms to ingest, analyze, and
compare.
-- Artificial intelligence improvements
in voice, text and vision can all be
leveraged by new sensors that create
even more context and data that can
be symbolically processed and acted
upon.
-- Software is everywhere and mobility
opens opportunities for highly
contextual software.
The full scope of the processes and
domains that will be impacted by
cognitive computing is still elastic and
emergent.
As an expert assistant, cognitive
computing may one day act virtually
autonomously in various problem-solving
scenarios.
Issues
Cognitive computing requires unique
skills, such as natural language processing
and machine learning.
Systems will be limited to the expertise
and data they are exposed to.
Concerns have been raised around
privacy breaches and machines replacing
the human workforce.
Enterprises are not yet ready for
computer systems as partners.
Business and the end user must be
trained on what to expect from the world
of cognitive computing where failure is
accepted and learnt from, for instance.
Containers
Concept
Definition
Containers are a lightweight virtualization
technology that provides applications
with an isolated environment inside
a single operating system instance.
Containers provide users and applications
running inside them with the illusion
and experience of running on their own
dedicated machine.
Tech trends
Applications
Offering end-to-end application
management, from prototyping and
development to production
Porting workloads across service
providers
Encapsulating solutions
Enabling software-defined everything
solutions
Delivering adaptive applications or
Infrastructure-as-Code where workloads
react and reconfigure themselves to
accommodate changes in the underlying
infrastructure
Enabling software componentization for
solution architectures, including micro-
services
Trajectory
Impact
Allows applications to be pre-packaged
in ready-to-use and easy-to-deploy
containers
Improves service delivery (greater
flexibility, maintainability, reliability, fault
tolerance and security), opening the door
to concepts such 'Zero Downtime' and
'100% SLAs'
Reduces cost and enhances capacity
management through workload
consolidation and improved resource
utilization
Facilitates interoperability among cloud
offerings
Plays a key role in enabling the
cloud-native approach for deploying
applications on cloud
Integrates well with emerging
architecture (micro-services) and
development (DevOps) models
Cuts the cost of testing and quality
assurance processes
Improves troubleshooting capabilities
Evolution
The base technology has existed for
many years in Unix-based operating
systems, such as Linux or Solaris.
Containers gained visibility in the
market through Docker, which provides
a lightweight alternative to virtualization
technology that is very well integrated
with development tools and cloud
deployments.
Containers are becoming the preferred
model for software packaging and
distribution.
The container market is gaining a
certain degree of standardization and
interoperability.
Ascent Look Out 167
Tech trends
There are many innovation activities in
the field, including:
-- Advanced workload scheduling
-- Trusted containerized computing
-- Native support in embedded devices
-- Optimized base operating system for
containers
-- Integration with other cloud
technologies
Issues
The technology ecosystem is still young
and experiencing extreme volatility in its
evolution:
-- (Too) many tools with diverse and
questionable maturity degrees
-- Standardization and interoperability
activities are still limited
-- Support for some legacy technologies
is limited
-- Stronger security models needed
The transition and transformation from
virtualization to containerization will
require changes in processes, practices,
skills, culture and organizational
boundaries.
Context Broker
Concept
Definition
Context brokers collect and store diverse
data, then leverage analytics to deduce
context from the interactions among
the data before triggering actions based
on that contextual information. In doing
so they effectively empower data by
extracting its meaning in relation to other
pieces of data, bringing the full potential to
data that might otherwise be leveraged in
isolation.
Context brokers play a critical role in the
delivery of context-enriched services, which
use information about a person or object
to proactively anticipate the users needs
and serve up the most appropriate content,
product or service.
Applications
Acquiring context-related information
from multiple sources including
smartphones, sensors, the connected car
and objects in your home and office
Reasoning-based actions analyzing
context and acting based on the results,
such as a map inside an electric vehicle
prioritizing gas stations that have electric
charging points
Marketing serving up relevant offers
based around the customer's current
context
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Administrative functions such as
privacy and user preference management
Business support including
transactions, metering and payments
Trajectory
Impact
Increases the agility, relevance and
precision of IT services
Drives revenue generation and
increases customer loyalty through
IT-enabled business models that include
subscriptions, advertising and more
Enhances user experiences by ensuring
personalized services are more
relevant, particularly when combined
with advanced analytics such as
recommendation algorithms
Enables the introduction of context-
enriched services in mobility and the
Internet of Things (IoT) where information
push is favored over pull and end-device
processing might be limited
Increases the potential for economic
growth in domains such as smart cities,
smart manufacturing, smart agrifood,
smart energy and domotics
Evolution
Context brokers are expected to play
a key role in the future IoT landscape,
assisting enterprises looking to enter the
mobility space, in particular providing the
answer to complexities around sourcing
and federating content.
Their central position and access to
diverse information creates significant
potential for combining with leading-edge
analytics algorithms.
Investment in accelerator programs such
as FIWARE is expected to boost potential
for the creation of many of the key
technologies needed to support a broad
context broker uptake.
Issues
Users may have different needs in a
similar situation according to their state
of mind and, as such, determining what
is most relevant to them is extremely
difficult.
Acceptance and usage will depend on
assurances around personal privacy and
protection against information leakage.
Distributed yet correlated events can
be difficult to associate, such as those
coming from multiple devices controlled
by the same person for instance.
The quality and complexity of the data
analyzed may vary since it comes from
multiple data sources and in diverse
formats.
Current solutions lack real-time
aggregation and filtering.
D
Deep Learning
Concept
Definition
Deep Learning is a branch of machine
learning with its roots in neural networks
where multi-layered neural network
algorithms attempt to model high-level
abstractions in data.
Currently most applications use supervised
learning, where a network is trained with a
large set of labeled data examples for each
category (for example, an image of a cat is
labelled cat) to produce a model that can
then be used for mapping new samples.
Unsupervised learning, on the other hand,
is where machines identify objects, text or
images without having been specifically
trained on a related dataset.
Some Deep Learning models build multi-
dimensional spaces from texts. Here the
network discovers hidden semantic
relations between words and places them
according to their proximity. For example,
in a word space created from historical
books it would determine that King -
Male + Female = Queen. Other models
follow patterns learned from examples to
generate text or optimize a sequence of
actions to achieve a goal.
Applications
Image and speech recognition such as
voice commanded systems, self-driving
cars, face recognition, video surveillance,
image tagging and visual diagnosis
Text recognition including automatic
translation, sentiment analysis, keyword
extraction, summarizing text, automatic
question-answering machines and
information retrieval
Action planning including generating
marketing planning
Gaming such as chess or Go
Robotics helping robots learn about
objects without human assistance, for
instance
Fraud and security primarily detecting
anomalous behaviors
Trajectory
Impact
Has enabled significant progress in
challenges such as large-scale image
processing and automatic speech
recognition
Outperforms all previous techniques for
image and speech recognition, allowing

thousands of categories to be recognized
quickly with unprecedented accuracy
Provides very efficient approach for
Natural Language Processing and text
mining such that it is likely to replace
other rules-based techniques
Offers a breakthrough approach to
understanding and planning
Evolution
A breakthrough in neural network
algorithms in the mid-2000s made
building and training very large and
multi-layered networks in a massively
parallelized form possible.
Neural networks were then combined
with other machine learning and artificial
intelligence techniques to perform
complex tasks.
Deep learning models were pre-trained
to reduce initial investment in terms of
sample and setup times for initial models
for new applications.
Computer architectures were then
optimized based on single precision
graphics processing units and field-
programmable gate arrays.
A Google Deep Learning program beat a
human champion at the game of Go.
Issues
Demand very specialized and scarce
resources.
Black boxes that provide answers but
don't give hints about the reasoning
behind the result.
Different problems need different
algorithms, so it is not always easy to
reuse them.
Over reliance may give a false sense
of security, and create problems with
incorrect results.
Results may lead to undesirable social
outcomes: encouraging discrimination
against specific populations, for instance.
Digital Workplace
Concept
Definition
The digital workplace is a combination of
asynchronous messaging, real-time voice
and video communications, screen shares,
content and context. Those elements of
content and context are provided through
documents, pictures, URLs, sound and
video.
At its very simplest, the digital workplace
can be seen as the merge of three areas
into a single workplace experience:
Unified communication (UC) around
voice and video
Modern team collaboration around
documents and projects
Events coming from existing business
or office applications such as scheduled
meetings, incoming orders or new sales
leads
It may also include enterprise social
networking, shared drives, conferencing,
note taking, presentations, task
management and content management.
Though there are, in actual fact, many
different capabilities and functionalities
available in such collaboration and
communication environments. Every day
new relevant technologies and solutions
appear.
Applications
Fields of application are broad, but
include the examples below
Connecting internal employees to solve
a specific problem, managing specific
internal projects, documents and
workflows and converging knowledge
across functional areas
Building communities for partners,
customers or on-demand workers and
simplifying collaboration with peers,
customers and partners
Improving customer experience
within customer support, marketing
engagement and partner enablement
and driving insights from customer-facing
teams
Handling time-critical team working
tasks effectively including emergency
calls within next generation 112 and 911
solutions
Helping to save lives and rebuild
communities in severe disaster scenarios
Making Homeland Security more
effective
Providing intelligent assistance
Enhancing virtual reality applications
Enabling the practical application of
sensing devices
Trajectory
Impact
Provides a single tool for collaboration
and communications, bringing
conversations and content together in
one place
Improves productivity and enables
contextual communications
Significantly reduces the burden of email
by moving email out of workflows
Drives deeper customer insight, seamless
interaction and innovation across the
entire customer experience ecosystem
Tech trends
Evolution
Traditional tools were purely focused on
the internal or external collaboration while
unified communications (UC) tools did
not address team collaboration around
documents and vice versa.
Established messaging and UC
applications evolved while new native
digital workplace products began to
emerge.
UC solutions and team collaboration
solutions converged, driven by increasing
frustration with email.
Some UC vendors are already offering
digital workplace solutions.
Digital workplace solutions could benefit
from other emerging technological areas
such as:
-- Exascale computing sharing real-
time simulations, for instance
-- Big Data analytics analyzing existing
data and sharing dashboards among
the team, for instance
-- Deep Learning and artificial intelligence
finding related data, images and text
similar to features or problems defined
by the team, for instance
The architecture of the digital workplace
is still evolving, moving from centralized
systems with light clients toward more
intelligence at the workplace itself.
The development of cloud and mobility
has led to the new architecture evolving
once more.
Issues
Change management is vital in new
collaboration initiatives, to ensure the
adoption needed to deliver return on
investment.
Knowledge workers have a tendency to
resist change for change's sake, but will
happily embrace change that makes their
jobs easier and their results better.
External collaboration and communication,
along with the massive number of
collaborator tasks, may need personalities
and shared data to be validated.
Standards need to be defined to address
issues such as privacy and ethics,
particularly for emergency applications.
Digital Signage
Concept
Definition
Digital signage uses electronic technologies
to display information or deliver content.
Content can be adapted to context, such as
whether there are people watching or just
passing, and the signage can interact with
users, through a touch interface or a motion
detection system, for example.
Ascent Look Out 169
Tech trends
Applications
Advertising including offering
promotions and encouraging return visits
Entertainment at theme parks,
museums, cinemas and more
Displaying information such as news,
weather, directions, traffic, pricing,
menus, programs and even emergency
information
Improving visibility including offering
the shopper all variants of an article in the
virtual store
Enhancing the retail experience
allowing the user to try new garments
virtually (when combined with
augmented reality)
Providing information in kiosks and
vending-machines
Trajectory
Impact
Offers a more flexible alternative to signs
and posters
Increases the effectiveness of signage
Improves the user experience through
the interactivity it provides
Makes an entertainment experience
more exciting
Can be updated easily and instantly, and
managed remotely and centrally
Allows content to be dynamically adapted
to the context and the audience
Enables richer, immersive user
experiences through advanced multi-
touch, 3D rendering engines and
responsive designs
Evolution
Early digital signage used video
projection or LED walls to deliver digital
content but was costly and there were
issues with visual quality.
Digital signage moved from simple
information displays to interactive and
immersive devices.
Large flat, high-definition screens (plasma,
LCD) have boosted use of digital signage.
Kiosks and digital signage are converging
and quickly becoming an integral part
of the omni-channel digital experience,
particularly within retail.
Convergence with mobile applications
and augmented reality will provide an
even more interactive and personalized
user experience as rich and interactive
content becomes increasingly important.
Analytic capabilities are being
incorporated. These measure the clicks,
navigation and interactions that help
retailers maximize impact and improve
the user journey.
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Digital signage is moving into the cloud
and the Internet of Things (IoT). It will
soon be able to interact with beacons,
sensors and wearables.
Artificial intelligence and Deep Learning
are being explored to allow digital signage
to help and interact with users better.
Transparent screens that include LCD
displays are emerging. When the screen
is turned off, the glass looks like a window;
turn on, the image appears.
Glasses-free 3D and holographic images
are emerging, but with limited traction so
far.
Screens that are bendable and can, to a
certain degree, be adapted to different
shapes are a subject of intense research.
These flexible screens rely largely on
existing OLED (organic light emitting
diode) or AMOLED (active matrix light
emitting diode) technologies.
Issues
The domain is still young. What effective
digital content looks like and what the
key success factors are is not yet fully
understood.
Equipment is more expensive than
conventional displays; although cost has
to be balanced with benefits.
Delivering a multi-channel experience
increases implementation and integration
risk and complexity.
Rich content and rich immersive and
responsive user experiences add
additional complexity and cost.
The growing variety of devices and
their diverse form-factors and operating
systems is also increasing complexity.
Distributed Social Networks
Concept
Definition
Distributed social networks (DSNs) refer to
social networking platforms developed by
social network initiatives and operated in a
federated and distributed mode. Many such
projects are federated under the federated
social web banner.
Critical social networks functions (such as
personal information sharing, messaging,
relationship management and content
sharing) are enabled by emerging open
standards and protocols.
Although DSNs may have similar use
cases to centralized social networks, they
have a stronger emphasis on privacy and
control of personal data. Many try to ensure
(personal) data is owned by the end-user
rather than under control of the system/
server administrator. Their peer-to-peer
operating model and focus in privacy
means they tend to be focused in specific
scenarios.
Applications
Privacy-oriented communities of interest
Ephemeral or temporal communities
Inter-organizational communities
Trajectory
Impact
Eliminate the risk of being locked into an
integrated solution
Provide better control on the data
exposed through social networks,
enhancing data security and privacy
Make creating business revenue difficult
since personal data is owned by the end-
user
Evolution
Domination of integrated social networks
such as Facebook led to worries about the
control of personal data and the monetary
interest of social networking companies.
Startups, such as Diaspora, proposed
distributed models, standards and
protocols to guarantee data ownership
to users, evolving established standards
in the digital identity, instant messaging,
telecommunications and web worlds.
However, these initiatives struggled to
grow significantly to compete with the
established giants.
Diaspora, for instance, still exists as a not-
for-profit, open source project.
Issues
DSNs are still heavily influenced by their
background and lacking in maturity and
standards.
Knowledge sharing and the sense of
discovery, the most important elements of
social networking, have been exchanged
for privacy.
The censorial workload users encounter
doesn't facilitate inclusion.
Where large communities do exist,
migration from existing networks is likely
to be slow.
There is additional competition coming
from emergent communication
technologies, such as messaging
platforms.
Legislation around consumer privacy
might make existing social networks
adjust their attitude, eliminating the need
for DSN.
Finding a healthy DSN business model is
not easy since personal data cannot easily
be harvested and used to make money.

E Impact
Edge Computing
Concept
Definition
The growth of the Internet of Things
(IoT) and the emergence of ever-richer
cloud services together call for data to
be process at the edge of the network.
Edge computing is also referred to as
fog computing, mesh computing, dew
computing and remote cloud. It moves
applications, data and services away from
the centralized model of cloud computing
to a more decentralized model that lies at
the extremes of the network.
Ubiquitous (and sometimes autonomous)
devices including the laptops,
smartphones, tablets and sensors that
may not be continuously connected to the
network communicate and cooperate
among themselves and with the network
to perform storage and processing tasks
without the intervention of third-parties.
Edge computing covers a wide range
of technologies: from wireless sensor
networks and mobile data acquisition to
distributed peer-to-peer ad-hoc networking
and processing and more.
Applications
Connected vehicles with their wide
variety of interactions and connections
(including car-to-car, car-to-infrastructure
and wireless and mobile networks)
Industry 4.0 ensuring smart factory
initiatives are scalable
Smart cities allowing cities to scale
data-driven citizen services
Smart home releasing the burden on
internet bandwidth as a growing number
of smart devices share more and more
information
Online shopping manipulating the
frequently changing shopping cart closer
to the consumer
Mobile commerce such as mobile
business models for finance, advertising
and retail, bringing affordable scale to
potentially computationally-intensive
analytics
Mobile healthcare including health
monitoring services and patients records
management systems
Resource-intensive end-user applications
including augmented reality, mobile
gaming, media streaming, home
multimedia sharing
Trajectory
Brings computation and storage closer
to the source of the data, ensuring the
results of analytics and other processing
are rapidly available and highly accessible
to the systems that need most them
Addresses latency issues detected in
large Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios
Conserves bandwidth and reduces
privacy and security risks by eliminating
unnecessary network transmission as
an increasing number of 'things' and
connected devices generate growing
volumes of data
Lightens the load of centralized cloud
servers
Expected to enable a broad spectrum
of use cases and applications for which
traditional cloud computing is not
sufficient
Evolution
Networks were combined with typical
cloud principles to create decentralized
and dispersed cloud platforms.
Growing volumes of IoT-created data
are increasingly being stored, processed,
analyzed and acted upon close to, or at
the edge, of the network.
Edge currently relies on specific vendor
solutions.
Issues
Applications written for an edge scenario
will often need to work on heterogeneous
environments.
Data reported from different things
may come in a variety of formats.
Standardization is needed to enable
interoperability among devices and
sensors within both edge and traditional
cloud environments.
The potentially thousands, or even
millions of small devices and sensors,
in edge computing set-ups will require
a new style of device management.
This may potentially need to be
decentralized and able to scale to degrees
unprecedented in today's existing cloud
architectures.
Envisaged as multi-tenant, edge
computing set-ups will require specific
isolation mechanisms to avoid security
and privacy concerns.
Exascale
Concept
Definition
Exascale supercomputers refer to high
performance computing (HPC) systems
that are capable of at least one billion billion
calculations per second (one exaFLOPS)
Tech trends
a thousand-fold increase over today's
petascale supercomputers. It provides a
major step forward in addressing the new
challenges of the 21st century at a time
when all sectors (but particularly industry,
academia and science) are demanding
increasingly powerful computing systems
that may leverage cognitive computing for
resolving problems involving ever-growing
volumes of data.
Exascale is believed to be the order of
processing power of a neural network as
big as the human brain and, as such, is the
target power of the Human Brain Project.
Applications
Smart cities with high-quality urban
services managing city-level traffic,
monitoring the motion of citizens around
city, providing data-driven real-estate
valuations, monitoring disease spread and
more
Climatology delivering finer-grained
and more reliable predictions and
understanding the exact location and
time of severe weather phenomena
Environment-friendly engines
simulating combustion chamber
performance with more precision
during the design phase to reduce CO2
emissions, fuel consumption and noise
levels
Genomics including enabling predictive
diagnosis, more efficient treatments and
customized dosing
Oil and gas exploration using
simulations to predict whether oil wells
will fulfill expectations more accurately
before drilling begins, for instance
Agriculture reinventing to meet 21st
century demand by developing precision
agriculture and reducing pesticide use
while taking into account climate change,
ground quality alteration and plant
behavior
Astrophysics such as gaining a better
understanding of our solar system and
universe and calculations for future space
missions
Trajectory
Impact
Helps resolve challenges brought about
by demands for intensive computing and
analysis of massive datastreams
Enables the resolution of complex
problems that are currently impossible to
solve within a reasonable time
Increases productivity and
competitiveness by easing time-
constrained processes and speeding up
decision-making
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Tech trends
Allows products to be designed faster
and more efficiently
Helps with anticipating multi-dimensional
phenomena such as climate change by
allowing them to be simulated to a finer
level of detail
Will also advance consumer electronics
and business information technologies
through its innovations in power
efficiency and reliability
Evolution
Exascale is vital for helping to resolve
challenges in research, applied science,
industry and society.
Large countries have set ambitious goals
to become leaders in exascale, building
large dedicated research programs and
associating high performance computing
(HPC) vendors
In Europe, the European Commission
is supporting several exascale projects
under its Horizon 2020 program.
These are aligned with the Strategic
Research Agenda proposed by the
European Technology Platform for High
Performance Computing (ETP4HPC) and
pioneered by Bull, the technology brand
from Atos. Bull announced the first open
exascale-class supercomputer range (Bull
sequana x1000) at the end of 2015.
In the US, exascale research is supported
by a National Strategic Computing
Initiative (NSCI).
In Japan, the RIKEN Advanced Institute
for Computational Science is planning an
exascale system for 2020.
China has also strong ambitions in
exascale
Issues
Exascale is dependent upon a new
generation of supercomputers for tackling
its four main challenges:
-- Power consumption needs to be
reduced.
-- Compute will need to be able to cope
with massive data pools, rising from
petabytes to exabytes.
-- Application performance, with a tens
of millions-way parallelism, needs to
be accelerated.
-- Systems will experience various kinds
of faults several times a day because
of their massive number of critical
hardware and software components.
Self-healing system (resiliency) are
required.
A new generation of massively parallel
software is also needed to extract more
parallelism, handle increasingly hybrid
configurations and support greater
heterogeneity.
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F Fabric-based computing is initially
Fabric-Based Computing
Concept
Definition
As the server landscape becomes
more software-defined, the fabric-based
computing model comprises a mesh of
interconnected nodes that work together
to form a fabric that appears unified when
viewed from a distance.
The nodes consist of loosely-coupled
virtualized storage, networking, processing
and memory functions alongside
peripherals, each of which can scale
independently of all other nodes. These
resources can be repurposed easily or even
automatically. Datacenter infrastructure
management (DCIM) layers, and potentially
applications, dynamically negotiate their
resource requirements with the datacenter
services provisioning layer.
In contrast to grid computing, fabric
solutions are not aimed at a specific
scenario.
Applications
Enabling the fully software-defined data
center with its improved agility and
reduced time-to-execution
Addressing the sometimes near-real-time
demands of Big Data and contextual
smart mobility
Trajectory
Impact
Provides a fully-meshed physical network
upon which the software-defined data
center can define its services
Provides the high levels of granularity
needed to adjust resources to perfectly
match requirements
Aims to address problems that inhibit
full-scale virtualization of the entire data
center
Reduces the number of physical changes
required and decouples them from
service provisioning
Allows deployments and configuration
changes to be executed in near real time
Means IT resources can be rapidly
aligned to changing business demands
Optimizes performance and power
consumption
Expected to increase overall resource
utilization to over 80 percent on average
Reduces cost through better resource
utilization and automation
Evolution
being developed alongside specific
architectures to address performance or
point issues.
The Open Compute Project, which
aims to generate cost-effective generic
hardware for large users, is leveraging
fabric-based approaches.
Issues
Fabric-based computing requires radical
architectural changes to the data center
including higher switching speeds on
the physical level and networks defined
by software.
Operating systems and hypervisors need
to be able to fully leverage the scalability
and the granularity of fabric-based data
centers.
Application development frameworks will
need to be fabric-aware.
Current solutions are largely proprietary,
with limited hardware interoperability and
customized management interfaces.
Standards are required to prevent fabrics
from becoming the new mainframes,
with vertical silos and a significant cost of
change.
I
Immersive Experience
Concept
Definition
An immersive experience is one that is
totally absorbing, that allows users to
disconnect from the real world and lose
themselves in a simulated dimension.
Immersive experience technologies
encompass a wide range of devices that
assist in making the experience more
absorbing and, by doing so, make the
technologies more invisible to the user.
These include:
3D displays display devices that create
the perception of depth
Haptic devices which add the sensation
of touch
Holographic user interfaces laser-based
volumetric displays where users interact
with holographic images
Virtual reality (VR) digital simulations of
real world environments
Applications
Entertainment including movies, TV
and gaming
Health used by surgeons and
radiologist and to ease remote operations

Maintenance assisting engineers in
their diagnosis
Marketing for demonstrations
GUI 3D applications and websites
Natural interfaces for user input and
feedback
Visualizing data
Conferencing
Trajectory
Impact
Enables a more natural interaction with
computing devices
Transforms computing devices into
information appliances, which give the
user a more positive feeling
Evolution
The first haptic input devices were
created a while ago, but with no true
purpose.
The first generation of consumer virtual
reality products are now available, but
it will take a little time for these to be
integrated into work activities.
As information appliances, solutions will
become more invisible over time.
Next-generation haptic feedback systems
will make VR more realistic (and thus
immersive).
The display (VR) and input (haptics) will
become increasingly attached to the
human body.
Eventually these may be superseded by
cybernetic implants.
Issues
Immersion levels will be limited by the
quality of the information available.
New conceptual thinking is needed to
identify fitting immersive experiences.
High levels of computing power
are required to drive high-definition
immersive displays.
In-Memory Computing
Concept
Definition
In-memory computing is a computing style
where the central memory of the computer
or networked computers running
applications acts as the primary data store
for the potentially multi-terabyte data
sets used by those applications. These
applications then use traditional hard-disk
drives to persistently store in-memory data
to enable recovery, manage overflows
situations and transport data to other
locations.
Applications
Providing near real-time access to
information (not only data) in seconds
instead of hours/days such as connected
living, e-commerce, CRM and ERP
Providing intensive analytics in
domains such as Business Intelligence,
Big Data and insight platforms for CRM,
Industry 4.0, smart cities, supply chain
planning and security intelligence
Providing complex event processing in
domains such as High Frequency Trading,
predictive monitoring, intelligent metering
and fraud and risk management
Edge computing leverages in-memory
computing platforms to enable local IoT
data to be analyzed in real time, which in
turn allows decisions to be made in the
moment.
Trajectory
Impact
Drives business transformation and
opens up new opportunities
Provides faster processing for ever-
increasing data volumes
Boosts performance by enabling low
latency application messaging, mixing
transactions and analytics on same data
set, shortening batch processing and
delivering real-time contextual event
correlation and processing
Frees organizations from non-productive
activities such as data consolidation and
reconciliation
Enhances agility, enabling companies to
operate in real time
Simplifies next generation digital
processes including unified data
analysis
Accelerates processes, up to 1000x faster
with deeper analytics for immediate
insights to actions
Boosts strategic decision-making, making
it easier to leverage predictive tools that
can detect trends and simulate outcomes
Evolution
SAP has taken the strategic decision to
move all its applications to its SAP HANA
in-memory platform.
Others are progressively following suit for
strategic, time-sensitive applications.
Open source solutions are emerging in
this space, Alluxio for instance.
Issues
In-memory computing enabled
applications are hardware intensive,
requiring new generation ultra-high
memory capacity servers to handle
massive data volumes with perfect quality
of service and security.
Leading servers vendors are innovating
to support this move, leveraging
technologies often derived from high
Tech trends
performance computing.
Among them, bullion servers from
Atos are recognized today as the most
powerful x86 servers in the world in terms
of speed and memory.
Insight Platforms
Concept
Definition
Insight platforms are the third generation
of business analytics platforms, following
the first generation (Business Intelligence),
which focused on performance-tracking,
and the second generation (Big Data
analytics), which focused on behavioral
analysis.
This combination of new and existing
technologies collects and analyses massive
data sets from connected environments in
real time, rapidly transforming that data into
actionable (prescriptive) insights. Examples
include:
Streaming analytics analyzing data in
motion in real time to accelerate time-to-
insight
Distributed analytics analyzing data in
situ within a distributed architecture
Prescriptive analytics which makes
predictions based on its Big Data analysis
and then suggests decision options
Applications
Industry 4.0, smart cities, smart utilities,
connected healthcare and smart grid
collecting and analyzing data from billions
of sensors to proactively improve user
experience, optimize assets value and life,
create new services and reduce risks
Secure operations collecting and
analyzing data from all IT and security
components to detect threats and attacks
and execute defensive measures on the
fly
Defense and homeland security
collecting and analyzing data from
diverse sources to make and execute the
optimal tactical and strategic decisions
Retail and marketing collecting and
analyzing data about customer needs,
desires and behaviors to proactively
improve user experience and create new
services
Trajectory
Impact
Enables intelligent automation that is able
to sense, predict and adapt to people,
business and things in real time
Allows analytics to be linked to business
outcomes
Are expected to be the cornerstone of
the Internet of Things (IoT) and at
Ascent Look Out 173
Tech trends
the heart of future digital strategies, as
organizations' digital nervous systems
Evolution
At an early stage of their development,
insight platforms are considered a critical
technology for the future.
For prescriptive analytics in particular
they will increasingly leverage the
learning capabilities of cognitive
computing.
These platforms are expected to be
embedded within large-scale solutions,
such as IoT and Industry 4.0, while also
available as customizable platforms.
Both independent software vendors and
Open Source communities will provide
components, while integrated solutions
will come from integrators and SaaS
providers.
Issues
A broad set of capabilities are needed for
building these platforms:
-- Advanced ability to collect, aggregate
and clean data from billions of sensors
in real time
-- Extreme computing power to analyze
and create meaning from Exabytes
of information on the fly or for rapid
simulation
-- Advanced algorithms for automated
or human decision-making
-- Real-time orchestration of prescriptive
insight to action, strong embedded
security
Large enterprise platforms will often
need to be customized for corporate and
government specific processes.
Internet of Everything
Concept
Definition
The Internet of Everything (IoE) is a
ubiquitous communication network
that effectively captures, manages and
leverages data from billions of real-life
objects and physical activities. It extends
the Internet of Things (IoT) by also
including people, processes, locations and
more.
Networks of spatially distributed
sensors and actuators (nodes), each
with a transceiver and a controller for
communicating within a networked
environment, detect and monitor events
(sensors) or trigger actions (actuators).
Each has a unique identifier and the ability
to transfer data over a network without
human-to-human or human-to-computer
interaction.
174 #AscentLookOut
Sensors and actuators vary in size and
price, with some available on a microscopic
scale. As such, they can be embedded into
many different objects and deployed in
many different environments including
adverse environments in remote locations.
Sensors may include capabilities such
as GPS, RFID, Wi-Fi or internet access.
Some are even capable of detecting the
approximate location of other nodes.
Examples include heart monitoring
implants, biochip transponders on farm
animals, electric clams in coastal waters,
automobiles with built-in sensors or field
operation devices that assist fire-fighters in
search and rescue.
Applications
Automating operations
Monitoring asset health, wear and location,
traffic or the environment
Enhancing healthcare
Providing surveillance and security,
including early warning systems
Acquiring information about movements
and/or terrain parameters
Managing energy or water usage
Trajectory
Impact
Provides large amounts of data for analysis,
enabling businesses to make better-
informed decisions.
Ensures data availability by automatically
rerouting data in the event of a node failure
to optimize availability.
Enables numerous value-adding services
across healthcare, retail, city management
and more.
Evolution
The concept of the IoT first became
popular in the late 1990s as a follow-up of
ubiquitous computing.
The development and cost reduction
of wireless and mobile networks and
low-power micro-controllers, which
progressively made it possible to connect
anything to the internet, brought the IoT
to life.
While it was initially most closely associated
with machine-to-machine in manufacturing,
energy and utility industries, its now covers
a much broader, nearly universal scope.
Projections predict 100 trillion connected
devices in the world by 2030. As such,
broader adoption of IPv6 is required to
overcome the IPv4 addresses scarcity.
Issues
Security, privacy and trust must be
considered in developing IoT/IoE
solutions.
Companies must decide what data to
store and how to store it, ensuring they
have sufficient storage for both personal
data (consumer-driven) and Big Data
(enterprise-driven).
IoE will significantly increase demand
on datacenter resources and may
even mean data processing, network
connectivity and network bandwidth
need to be re-architected.
IPv6
Concept
Definition
IP (Internet Protocol) is the main
communication protocol underlying
networks such as the Internet. IPv6 (version
6) was designed in the 1990s as the
successor to IPv4.
IPv6 includes adjacent features, such as
address assignment, network renumbering
and auto configuration. It addresses some
of the shortcomings of IPv4 by providing
support for multicast, manages of mobile
data traffic more efficiently. Additionally,
IPv6 embeds several configuration and
discovery mechanisms that were added to
IPv4 after its standardization.
Applications
Real-time networking as required by
autonomous vehicles, remote tele-surgery,
industry automation, video-streaming and
voice over IP, overcoming the artificial
bottleneck imposed by IPv4on many of
these use cases
Mobility providing unlimited scaling at
routing level, with 5G mandating IPv6 as
critical
Internet of Everything providing nearly
unlimited addressing
A platform for innovation since it
performs better, is simpler and easier to
deploy than IPv4
Trajectory
Impact
Allows more connected objects to
connect to one another outside the span
of a local area network
Is vital for the sustainability of the internet,
mobile internet and IoT-related business:
-- A 128-bit address space means the
number of possible IP addresses
increases from a few billion with IPv4
to 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses
(36 trailing zeros).
-- Addressing is basically free, which
is particularly important for IoT
deployments where the number of
objects to address may be very large.

Includes hierarchical addressing, IPsec
authentication and security, and improved
ability to carry multimedia data.
Simplifies administration and eliminates
the need for workarounds such as
Network Address Translation (NAT).
Evolution
IPv4 was deployed in 1981 and IPv6 in
1999.
The IPv4 address space became
completely allocated in February 2011.
Tunneling mechanisms and gateways
were standardized by the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) to bypass
IPv4 limitations and deal with the IP
address shortage.
Migration to IPv6 has started in many
different areas, mainly on central
infrastructures, though the uptake of pure
IPv6 is taking longer than expected.
The fraction of IP traffic using IPv6 is still
significantly lower than IPv4: around 26
percent of US applications are IPv6 native
and 10 percent of Facebook's global traffic
uses IPv6, for instance.
Some of the networking community are
advocating a global switch.
The number of applications is growing,
increasing the need for the IPv6 protocol.
Issues
The transition, which was announced
in 1995 and supposed to last until year
2000, has been much slower than
expected.
Although support for IPv6 in major
operating systems facilitates this
transition, many legacy devices cannot be
updated to support IPv6 and will not be
replaced overnight.
Technologies such as Carrier-Grade
NAT and recent regulatory moves are
helping IPv4 survive, thus harming the
deployment of IPv6.
L with location-based context simpler.
Location-Based Services NG
Concept
Definition
Geographical information systems
(GIS) capture, store, analyze and display
information referenced according to its
geographical location. The next generation
takes the third dimension into account. This
3D (spatial) representation provides a much
more realistic representation of the world.
Spatial data can be gathered from a
wide array of sources, including global
positioning satellites, beacons, Wi-Fi
hotspots, remote sensors and visible light
communication (VLC) sources such as Li-Fi.
Visualization technologies allow companies
to extract insights from this spatial data.
The most basic use cases push content
or activate or deactivate functionality
based on geofences or address lists. More
advanced spacial (3D) analytics uses a
users or an objects exact geographical
position to deliver contextualized
information and services
Applications
Identifying and understanding assets and
customers anything from simple store
locators to real-time displays of delivery
driver locations or dense pipe networks
Securing sensitive data through
geofences
Enabling local experiences such as
triggering an offer when a customer
enters a store
Studying sound propagation, lighting
(shades) or rain flow
Trajectory
Impact
Improves customer intimacy as
customers come to expect contextual
products and services based on their
current location
Drives innovation beyond the industries
that have traditionally used GIS
Increases brand preference by delivering
personalized customer experiences
Increases revenue by enabling more
effective marketing that influences
purchasing decisions
Evolution
Big Data technologies have made the
storage and processing of large spatial
data sets economically feasible and
scalable.
Cloud has made augmenting solutions
New tools are making spatial analytics
more widely available.
The popularization of smartphones, as
well as glasses and other wearables, will
strengthen this market.
Issues
Location technologies in general, and
beacons in particular, are immature.
Traditional location technologies only
provide a sufficient level of accuracy
on the third dimension when they are
combined.
GPS is generally unusable within
Tech trends
buildings. Integration with indoor
positioning is required to ensure
continuous positioning.
Accurate indoor positioning requires
specific equipment.
Spatial analytics consume a vast amount
of computing resources.
When it comes to targeted marketing,
insights such as past behaviors,
preferences, needs and situations are
needed to deliver relevant messages to
individual customers, however, the more
accurate the technology, the lower its
reach.
In addition, smart contextual messages
can be difficult to deliver at scale.
Proximity-based marketing and in-store
location tracking are already raising
privacy concerns.
LPWAN
Concept
Definition
Also referred to as ultra-narrowband,
Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN)
wireless communication technology has a
low power requirement and a long range,
but a low data rate.
LPWAN was designed to enable objects
that don't have a powerful source of energy
to be connected, primarily to the Internet
of Things (IoT). After all, most objects
connected to the IoT only need to transfer
small amounts of data, such as commands
and statuses, and that operation only
requires a small amount of power.
Applications
Metering gas and water in particular
Monitoring including waste, parking,
land, livestock, forests and pipelines
Tracking items such as containers,
bicycles, pets, indoor assets
Fault signaling such as with smart
home appliances and alarms
Control street lighting and plant
machinery for instance
Trajectory
Impact
Allows millions of objects to be
connected at low cost
Are a simpler and more effective
solution for IoT than traditional cellular
networks, which were designed for high
performance data transfer
Evolution
Early LPWAN adopters first appeared in
2014.
Country and global-sized networks are
already being deployed.
Ascent Look Out 175
Tech trends
Waste monitoring and telemetry systems,
whose refresh period is between one
and four measures per day, are already
working with LPWAN solutions from LoRa
or Sigfox.
Remote surveillance operators have
started using LPWAN to monitor alarm
systems as a more reliable alternative to
GSM.
Although expanding quickly, geographical
coverage is still limited.
LPWAN is expected to become
mainstream around 2017.
Issues
There are currently multiple LPWAN
standards and this is impacting
interoperability.
For the IoT to really take off, LPWAN
modem cost needs to drop below $1,
provisioning below $2 and data cost to
zero.
M Concept
Memristors
Concept
Definition
Memristors are non-linear, passive electric
components that have a resistance that
varies according to the history of the
flow of electric charge through them. The
component's resistance reflects this history,
hence its name combining "memory" and
"resistor".
Memristor-based memory is non-volatile,
with a density higher than 100 terabytes
per cubic centimeter, high speeds and low
power requirements.
Applications
Providing advanced memory technology
such as non-volatile random access
memory
Delivering fast, compact and low-power
neuromimetic elements since memristors
function using a continuous range while
transistor-based logic only knows zeros
and ones
Implementing neuroplasticity by forming
neuromemristive systems, a variant of
neuromorphic computers
Trajectory
Impact
Allow neural networks to move from
computer simulations and onto their own
physical implementations
Have a longer term potential in
neuromorphic systems
176 #AscentLookOut
Could outperform traditional computers
at a fraction of the energy cost as
compact neuromemristive systems
Evolution
First coined in 1971 as a name for a
theoretical passive electrical component
to supplement the resistor, capacitor and
inductor.
The first physical example was created
in 2008, paving the way for concrete
applications.
Experimental organic neural networks
based on polymeric memristors are being
created.
Issues
Memristors are still experimental.
N Physical controls where physical inputs
Natural User Interfaces
Definition
Natural user interfaces (UI) are systems
designed to make human-computer
interaction feel as natural as possible.
This wide range of technologies allows
the user to leverage everyday behaviors,
intuitive actions and their natural abilities
to control interactive applications. These
might include touch, vision, voice, motion
and higher cognitive functions such as
expression, perception and recall.
Some natural user interfaces rely on
intermediary devices while other more
advanced systems are either unobtrusive
or even invisible to the user. The ultimate
goal is to make the human-computer
interface seem to disappear. Examples
include:
Augmented reality adding an additional
intelligence layer on top of natural life
Virtual reality providing an immersive
digital representation of a real or
imaginary environment
Mixed reality merging of real and virtual
worlds to produce environments where
physical and digital objects co-exist and
interact in real time
Neuro interfaces enabling a direct
communication pathway between the
brain and an external device based on
neural activity generated by the brain
Virtual retinal displays images
broadcast directly onto the retina,
effectively augmenting the real world
Body monitoring reading body
language with gestures beyond the hand
and finger
Haptics digital feedback mimicking
physical sensations
Adaptive interfaces/emotion tracking
changing layouts and elements in
response to the changing context or
needs of the user
Relational awareness devices that, as
an agent for the user, are aware of where
the user is in relation to other people
Affordances providing a digital
representation of a physical object that
allows the user to take advantage of all
the things they already knows about how
to use that object
3D displays display devices that create
the perception of depth
Holographic user interfaces laser-based
volumetric displays where users interact
with holographic images
are translated into digital outputs
Applications
Voice control using language to access
a large set of commands
Conversational agents allowing users
to interact without prior knowledge of a
systems commands
Audio channels opening up novel
channels for data transmission
Collaboration allowing multiple users to
controlling the interface simultaneously
Utilizing three dimensions providing
a more direct connection to content by
taking advantage of depth in movement
Monitoring physical movements
helping systems (and users) understand
more about themselves in order to learn
and adapt
Audio security providing identification
and authentication through voice
signatures
Visual security providing identification
and authentication through visual images
Biometric security providing
identification and authentication through
other biometrics
Trajectory
Impact
Reduces complexity for users with user
interface design incorporating more and
more of the components needed to make
user interfaces as natural as possible
Decreases the level of user training
needed, with training mainly focused
on domain knowledge rather than
interacting with the interface
Allows computers and human beings
to interact in diverse and robust ways,
tailored to the abilities and needs of an
individual user

Enables complex interactions with digital
objects in our physical world
Evolution
The first attempts at natural user
interfaces aim to provide an alternative
to a command-line interfaces (CLI) and
graphical user interfaces (GUI).
Attention later turned to developing
user-interface strategies using natural
interactions with the real world.
Touch and voice recognition are now
increasingly appearing next to the more
traditional mouse and keyboard.
Interfaces have also begun to incorporate
gestures, handwriting and vision.
Issues
We don't yet have the complex
technologies needed to make truly natural
and seamless interfaces.
NFC
Concept
Definition
Near field communication (NFC) allows
devices, such as smartphones and
wearables, to communicate wirelessly with
tags, cards or other devices over a very
short distance. It provides a natural and
intuitive way for devices to interact with
objects from the real world. Smartphones
significantly increase the potential of NFC.
Applications
NFC devices:
NFC tags enabling access, providing
related information or initiating a
transaction, for instance
Smart posters offering a coupon or
opening a website, for instance
Contactless or dual-interface smart cards
delivering file/product updates
NFC electronic shelf labels which are
a key enabler of the connected store
NFC-enabled user devices, such as
smartphones or wearables:
Ticketing acting as a (wireless) badge,
coupon or ticket
Payments and micro-payments
through swipe to pay
Data exchange by tapping to exchange
data, such as electronic business cards
Loyalty such as picking up information
and rewards
Security enabling building access, for
instance
Printing such as transferring pictures to
a printer
Retail providing access to deals,
product information, inventory and more,
and enabling digital shopping carts and
check-out
Trajectory
Impact
Standardizes and facilitates the
integration of contactless communication
in end-user electronic devices:
-- Extending the functionality of those
products
-- Making them interoperable with
existing contactless infrastructure
Dematerializing tickets, coupons, badges
and cards
Making payment more convenient, with
NFC wristbands gaining popularity in
micro-payments and tap-to-pay travel
May allow technology companies to
disrupt the payment/transaction value
chain
Could enhance privacy in the future
smartphone applications
Evolution
Nokia introduced a NFC capable phone
in 2006.
Google produced its first Android NFC
phone in 2010.
Google Wallet, an app that used NFC to
make mobile payments, first appeared in
September 2011.
Google announced support of Host
Card Emulation (HCE) in Android in 2013,
enabling secure mobile payment and
access solutions.
Visa and MasterCard added their support
for HCE in 2014, leading to wider adoption
of NFC by banks.
Apple entered the market in 2014, with
Apple Pay appearing later that year.
NFC-enabled payments are gaining
increased traction, providing a solid
foundation for NFCs growth.
NFC technology has been integrated into
wearables, tablets, industrial handheld
computers and more.
Non-payment NFC applications are
expected to thrive, particularly in retail.
Issues
Industry-wide standards are only just
beginning to emerge.
Lack of consistency across device types
means a solution may not perform
consistently.
Two different security models (SE and
HCE) exist and devices may need to
support both.
Trusted Service Management (TSM)
is needed to ensure applications from
different issuers (including Telcos, banks,
transport companies, governments and
cities) coexist securely.
A lack of maturity and consistency,
Tech trends
coupled with short lifecycles, may lead
to infrastructure assets being refreshed
without NFC as the primary mobile
strategy.
O
Open Source Hardware
Concept
Definition
The open source hardware model extends
the ideas and methodologies popularized
in open source software development to
hardware development. Documentation
including schematics, diagrams, list of parts
and related specifications are published
with open source licenses so other teams
can modify and improve them, based on
specific needs.
These are sometimes combined with
more traditional open source software,
such as operating systems, firmware or
development tools. For instance, both Linux
and Android operating systems are being
used in embedded devices.
Applications
Prototyping new devices, such as
internet-connected sensor devices
Avoiding vendor lock-in
Maintaining systems long term, over
decades, through leveraging hardware
design availability
Providing server and network
infrastructures for internet-scale data
centers, mainly driven by the Open
Compute Project
Fostering the adoption of industrial
vendors' core technology standards while
attracting an ecosystem of partners
Accelerating innovation
Popularizing the distributed fab lab model
proposed by MIT
Trajectory
Impact
Supports hardware innovation and
standards development
Enhances long-term maintenance
capabilities
Enables the creation of low-cost devices
and infrastructures
Offers alternatives for commercial
data center server and networking
infrastructure
Allows enterprises to build materials
dedicated to their needs, while fostering
collaborative developments from an open
community of contributors
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Tech trends
Evolution
Initially primarily initiated by the open
source community.
Traction in the enterprise world from
both industrial users and hardware
vendors is increasing.
Interest is expanding across diverse
industries including processors, servers,
3D printing and prototyping, ambient
information devices, mobile phones,
notebooks and robotics.
There is a great deal of interest in
emerging countries.
Open source hardware is expected to
continue to evolve in three directions:
-- Supporting hardware innovation and
standards development
-- Guaranteeing long-term maintenance
capabilities
-- Creating low-cost devices and
infrastructures, including network
infrastructures
Issues
Business models are adapted to core
technologies, where users and vendors
have a mutual interest in sharing
innovation, fostering standards and
minimizing cost.
Certification, which beyond small project
communities, is required for many uses
security or radio electric interference
certification, for instance
Fabrication occurs in small batches
in small projects making for low cost-
efficiency.
Intellectual property issues could block
some developments.
P other emergent fabrication technologies,
Plastic Transistors
Concept
Definition
Plastic transistors reflect the advances
in material sciences that provide us with
alternatives to traditional electronics. Based
in organic polymers that have electronic
properties, these include OLED (organic
light-emitting diodes).
These materials are easily printed over
different types of substrates, allowing
complex circuitry to be printed on flexible
plastics something that is not possible
with traditional electronics.
Applications
Flexible displays
Conductive ink
178 #AscentLookOut
Printable computer circuits
Transparent circuits
Wearable computing
Smart bandages
RFID tags
Plastic solar cells
Trajectory
Impact
Provides the flexibility that allows
computing abilities to be added to
dynamic environments including clothes,
tight enclosures and organic tissues
Integrates easily with other additive
manufacturing methods, such as 3-D
printing
Enables the low-cost volume fabrication
that is essential for widely distributed
solutions such as RFID tags
Evolution
Basic R&D around organic electronics
began during the last quarter of the 20th
century.
OLED screens and printed RFID
tags are widely deployed today and
popular in consumer devices, including
smartphones and e-readers.
Other organic electronic technologies
look very promising for cheap and
durable solar energy panels.
Issues
Poor electronic efficiency, when
compared with traditional electronics,
may impact some use cases.
In some domains, including health-related
devices, safety issues may limit adoption.
For the technology to really take off it
needs to be properly integrated with
such as 3D printing in a print-your-own-
electronics model.
Privacy-Enhancing
Technologies
Concept
Definition
Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs)
refer to technologies involved in protecting
or masking personal data (whether
employees, customers or citizens) to
achieve compliance with data protection
legislation and sustain customers' trusted
relationships.
PETs not only protect very sensitive
data (such as credit card information,
financial data or health records), they
also shield the very personal information
(including purchasing habits, interest, social
connections and interactions) that digital
users are keen to allow some services to
leverage, but only provided some privacy is
respected.
As such, PETs reach beyond the
technologies traditionally dedicated to
preserving data confidentiality (such as
access control and encryption); they also
encompass technologies and techniques
for ensuring data usage is limited to the
purposes intended or protected, including
homomorphic encryption, data masking,
anonymization and pseudonymization.
Applications
Commerce, finance, Telco, public services
and healthcare any domains where
customers leave sensitive personal data
Social media and networks along with
collaborative services also domains
where customers share selected data to a
selected audience
Personal employee data
Trajectory
Impact
Gives individuals the confidence to share
or trade access to their personal data for
digital services
Enables new data monetization business
models while ensuring compliance to
various data protection legislations
Mitigates the financial and legal risk linked
to regulation violation
Supports Corporate Social Responsibility
Evolution
Early work started in the mid-1970s, with
the birth of the concepts of anonymity
and unlinkability.
Privacy homomorphism technologies
were introduced at that time, but had
many limitations and vulnerabilities.
A breakthrough fully homomorphic
encryption (FHE) scheme was proposed
in 2009.
More recently, business focus has been
on mechanisms for digital identity
management with privacy respect.
Today, simplified schemes (somewhat
homomorphic encryption-SHE) allow
efficient evaluation of some simple and
specific logic functions.
The domain is evolving along with the
concept of the personal data economy'.
Issues
The notion of privacy is a culturally
evolving one and boundaries are moving
between generations.
The notion of consent is essential, but
may not be sufficient over time since
the data you accept to share today may

reveal embarrassing in the long run.
As a result, the domain is evolving around
two contradictory trends:
-- Some players are arguing that the
very concept of privacy is dead in a
digital world.
-- Nevertheless, public authorities are
frequently pushing new regulations
to (such as the European 'right to be
forgotten') protect customers and
citizens.
Q
Quantum Computing
Concept
Definition
Quantum computers are computation
systems that use quantum-mechanical
phenomena (such as superposition
entanglement) to execute operations on
data. Built over the basic element of the
qubit (which is in a quantum superposition
of states, hence having multiple values
simultaneously), quantum computing's
main advantage is its ability to execute
some types of quantum algorithms
exponentially faster than the best possible
classical computing alternative.
These algorithms are currently undergoing
rapid development and could potentially
one day break significant aspects of
current technologies limitations in
combinatory analysis. Applications range
from decryption to operational research,
optimization, simulation (with quantic
models) and Big Data analysis (neural
networks).
Applications
Breaking cryptographic standards
emerging quantum safe cryptography
aims to overcome this threat, deriving
new cryptographic methods able to resist
attacks by quantum computers
Trading in the financial sector
Recognizing patterns in defense,
homeland security, Telco, utilities and
insurance
Speeding up lead compound discovery
in the pharmaceuticals industry
Accelerating simulations in the chemical
industry and quantum physics
Trajectory
Impact
Allows hugely enormous, complex
problems to be solved in a reasonable
amount of time
Accelerates machine learning and
prescriptive analysis
Threatens to break several existing
cryptography standards
May introduce a general uncertainty
around the safety of currently safe
encryption algorithms
Evolution
The theoretical basis of quantum
computing was established in the last
quarter of 20th century.
The first real quantum computing devices
were invented around the millennium.
The first commercial systems based on
quantum technology (D-Wave) reached
the market around 2010.
Though the current practical
implementation of quantum computers
is limited to a few dozens or hundreds of
qubits, rapid development is underway.
Big internet companies (such as Google)
recently began testing quantum-based
technology.
The U.S. National Security Agency, China
and other governments are ramping up
their quantum safe projects.
Quantum computing (and other
quantum technologies) is expected
to become a flagship project for the
European Union.
Atos is among the very few companies
in the world to work on quantum
computing, targeting both Big Data and
security applications.
Issues
Quantum computing poses a threat
to conventional information security
systems, requiring the development of
quantum safe cryptography before the
widespread use of quantum computers.
Kasperskys Labs has dubbed the
unpreparedness for quantum attacks as
the Cryptopocalypse.
Trained resources are scarce in this very
complex field and often unconcerned
about quantum computing's impact on
business or society.
Quantum programming languages are
still very basic and require a different way
of thinking.
Quantum logic is hampering
development on an engineering level.
The technology currently requires low
temperatures, physical isolation and other
technical complexities that are currently
more expensive than the computing itself.
There is uncertainty over the future
performance of the wide variety of
competing quantum computing
architectures.
Tech trends
S
SDx
Concept
Definition
Software-defined anything/everything
(SDx) is an approach that replaces legacy
and often specialized hardware
controlled by physical mechanisms with
software running on commodity hardware
platforms. The concept may be applied to
a wide variety of aspect of an IT system
including networking, compute, storage,
management, security and more.
Applications
Software-defined networking (SDN)
where a programmable remote controller,
which is decoupled from the physical
network devices, forwards the data
through the network.
Software-defined compute (SDC or
virtualization) decouples CPU and
memory resources from physical
hardware to create isolated software
containers (virtual machines) that can be
run simultaneously in the same physical
server.
Software-defined storage (SDS or
storage virtualization) decouples
storage functions (including backup and
recovery) from storage hardware with
software automating and optimizing the
provisioning of the storage resources.
Software-defined datacenter (SDDC)
has all resources (including CPU, memory,
storage and security) virtualized and
delivered as a service.
Network Function Virtualization (NFV)
combines SDC, SDS and SNS as a solution
found within the Telco industry.
Trajectory
Impact
Raises the level of automation possible in
infrastructure management.
Optimizes resource usage by making
resources easier to manage
Enhances performance by enabling
dynamic, on-demand (re)allocation of
resources
Allows spurious changes of the resources
state to be reacted to automatically,
improving availability
Reduces complexity and errors since
there is no need to understand details
around the underlying hardware
Improves visibility of the status of
resources, enabling the development
of more sophisticated control functions,
services and applications
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Allows traditional distributed control to
become logical and centralized
Cuts cost by improving resource
utilization, opening up commodity
hardware options and reducing system
maintenance time and effort
Reduces time-to-market for new products
and services
Evolution
Standardization efforts are already
widespread and expected to continue to
evolve.
The SDN evolution, for example,
is mainly being driven by the ONF
(Open Networking Foundation) while
being embraced by the IETF (Internet
Engineering Task Force) and the
ETSI (European Telecommunications
Standards Institute).
Related efforts are ongoing within
industry and the open source community
(OpenDaylight and OpenNFV for SDN, for
instance)
Companies are tending generally
deploying open implementations and
specifications that may then become
candidates for de facto standards.
Issues
The transition from legacy systems to
SDx can be complex.
The centralized logic has the potential to
become a single point of failure. However,
solutions that distribute this logically
centralized control do exist.
A change in a management policy might
result in temporary loops or errors that
then lead to failures. Ongoing research
aims to tackle this issue.
Self-Adaptive Security
Concept
Definition
With the growth of cloud, APIs and the
Internet of Things (IoT), cybercrime
is constantly increasing in volume,
sophistication and impact. As a result, the
paradigm of security must change. After
the perimeter security of the 90s (which
emphasized network defenses) and the
in-depth security of the 2000s (which
emphasized multiple protection layers),
cyber defense strategies now evolved
toward new self-adaptive security principles.
This pre-emptive approach to security
moves the emphasis from protection to
real-time detection and response that
adapts defenses immediately.
Technologies and processes incorporate
Security Operation Centers (SOC),
which rely on new generation Security
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Information and Event Management (SIEM)
technologies enhanced with machine
learning and prescriptive analytics.
Self-adaptive security also relies on new
generations of context-aware security
technologies (including Identity and Access
Management, network security, device and
smart machine security) that dynamically
adapt to threats.
Applications
Protecting information systems
belonging to boundaryless corporations
and open business ecosystems
Offering better protection against the
latest generations of threats, including
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)
Adapting security strategies to the
specific business challenges of individual
organizations within diverse industry
contexts
Trajectory
Impact
Mitigates attacks (including hacktivism,
cybercrime from mafias, fraud, industrial
espionage and cyberwar attacks) before
they significantly threaten the availability,
data integrity and confidentiality of
systems
Facilitates forensics by enabling effective
and accurate aggregation of evidence
Evolution
Experts estimate that detection and
response share will move from less than
30% of IT security budgets today to 75%
by 2020.
Open platforms are being developing
that will facilitate 2-way communication
among multi-vendor security products.
Self-adaptive security depends on the
convergence between security and
Big Data technologies, with the notable
addition of machine learning to traditional
SIEM technologies (see 'Insight Systems').
Solutions are rapidly increasing the
number of data sources (including the
Dark Net) they are leveraging well
beyond classical security sensors and
devices to analyze suspicious behaviors
and foresee or detect attacks.
Self-adaptive security is becoming
increasingly verticalized, taking into
account industry-specific risks in finance,
manufacturing, utilities and other
domains.
Issues
Self-adaptive security requires strong
and business-driven Governance,
Risk and Compliance analysis to help
systems understand what really must be
monitored and reacted to.
Seamless communication between
security devices is needed to ensure
contextual information is shared across
internal silos to enable the automated
configuration changes that strengthen
security and block attacks before they
happen.
Self-adaptive security often relies on
human intelligence for confirming
adaptive actions on the fly after
automated risk detection. This is vital for
avoiding any overreaction to false positive
signals, which may impact the business
in unexpected ways (see Amplified
Intelligence in the CxO agenda).
The increased focus on rapid detection
and response should not lead to
decreased protection levels. Protection
levels should, instead, be more targeted
and more reactive. As such, end-to-end
security, 'Zero trust' security architectures
and very high security zones for critical
applications (such as 'Application
Resource Islands') are often set up to
complement self-adaptive security.
Semantic Technologies
Concept
Definition
Semantic technologies encompasses
a diverse set of technologies aimed at
helping machines to make sense of large or
complex data sets without being supplied
any knowledge about that data. In essence,
they bring structure and meaning to
information, often by providing machine-
readable metadata that is associated with
humanly readable content specifying its
meaning.
Applications
Natural-language processing (NLP)
processing unstructured text content
Data mining technologies uncovering
patterns (trends and correlations) within
large sets of data
Artificial intelligence systems using
reasoning models to answer complex
questions
Classification technologies employing
heuristics and rules to categorize data
Semantic Web allowing programs to
fetch specific information and answer
non-obvious queries
Linked Data a subset of the Semantic
Web and way of publishing data so they
are interlinked and more useful, enabling
automatic reading by computers
Semantic data integration enhancing
analysis and decision making by
combining heterogeneous data sources

Semantic search technologies allowing
people to locate information by concept
Trajectory
Impact
Enable semantics-based technology
automation by providing that meaning
explicitly, so machines don't need to
derive it from within the data
Help humans and machines understand
and communicate with each other at
the same level as people do among
themselves
Allow technology to automatically use
services on behalf of a user
Bring enterprise data integration to the
next level by integrating heterogeneous
sources and augmenting corporate data
with publicly available databases
Give computers a better way to represent,
exchange and manipulate knowledge
Increase agility by dealing with
knowledge instead of just data
Allow computers to learn by themselves
(machine learning)
Make data collected for a given purpose
usable in other contexts
Evolution
The RDF (which stores the semantic
metadata) and OWL (which defines
the ontologies which, in turn, specify
information meaning and relationships)
were introduced and later standardized.
The SPARQL semantic query language
was introduced and later standardized.
Tim Berners-Lee published his thoughts
on Linked Data on the W3C website
The Semantic Web at a global scale is
still a dream, but related ideas, concepts,
standards and technologies are being
used on smaller scale to provide
semantically-enriched services.
Companies are providing commercial
support for semantic solutions and using
them in production.
Existing and legacy SQL-based data
integration solutions are being turned into
a semantic data cloud.
Standardization efforts for
transformations (RDB2RDF) are enabling
more valuable information to be retrieved
out of the existing data maze by
combining it with other data sources.
Companies are increasingly providing
semantic search engines heavily based
on NLP.
Issues
Ontologies are not easy to design and
their relevance can always be debated.
Gaining consensus around ontologies is
difficult, even in very specific fields.
Discarding spurious information in
ontologies is difficult.
Data providers usually generate revenue
from advertisements that have to be seen
by human beings so may have no interest
in providing semantically-enriched
information.
A means for automatically establishing
correspondences between vocabularies
is needed for when different data sources
use different concept definitions.
The Semantic Web is still unrealized
due to the size and complexity of the
ambition.
Smart Machines
Concept
Definition
Smart machines refer to systems
embedded with cognitive computing
capabilities that are able to make decisions
and solve problems without human
intervention. They perform activities and
tasks traditionally conducted by humans,
boosting efficiency and productivity.
Applications
Autonomous robots or vehicles
reshaping transportation, logistics,
distribution and supply chain
management
Expert systems emulating the decision-
making capabilities of a human to solve
problems that typically require expert
input in sectors such as automotive,
consumer electronics, healthcare and
industrial
Intelligent virtual assistants such as
avatars, which provide information and
service assistance to customers
Sensors collecting data about our
physical environment without direct
human intervention
Trajectory
Impact
Increase efficiency and productivity
Raise earnings and profit margin potential
Offer a viable alternative to unskilled labor
while augmenting demand for skilled
labor
Complement tasks that cannot be
substituted by computerization
Evolution
Prototype autonomous vehicles,
advanced robots, virtual personal
assistants and smart advisers already
exist.
The explosive growth of sensor-based
data will provide them with more context
about the physical world.
They will evolve to work more
Tech trends
autonomously thanks to cognitive
computing, advanced algorithms and
artificial intelligence.
Over time, more machines will enter our
lives and they will become better, faster
and cheaper, according to Moores law.
Advances in artificial intelligence, speech
recognition and machine learning mean
knowledge work can now be automated.
Machines will make increasingly
significant business decisions over which
humans have decreasing control.
As such, smart machines have the
potential to significantly impact the
business dynamics of at least one-third of
the industries in the developed world in
the future.
Issues
CIOs must make the business aware
of the risks and opportunities as smart
machines work more autonomously in
support of business goals.
There are real concerns that smart
machines will replace both white and
blue collar jobs in industries ranging
from manufacturing and warehousing to
shipping.
The impact on society will need to be
understood and appropriate action
may need to be taken in areas such as
taxation.
Swarm Computing
Concept
Definition
Also known as swarm intelligence or hive
computing, swarm computing refers to
massively distributed, self-organizing
systems of agents that work collaboratively
towards a defined outcome. Each agent
within the system has a simple set of rules
to follow and only interacts with its local
environment. The aggregate behavior
of the agents leads to the emergence of
intelligent global behavior.
With the number of nodes comprising the
Internet of Everything (IoE) predicted to
rise and many individual nodes likely have
limited compute capabilities, each would
be complimented by connection to other
objects in a community thus creating an
IoE swarm.
Applications
Optimizing logistic chains and
transportation
Controlling driverless vehicles, optimizing
journey times and road usage
Coordinating the operation of complex
infrastructures such as smart cities and
distributed power grids
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Tech trends
Predicting the behavior of complex
systems, such as transport or logistic
networks
Providing surveillance in military
scenarios
Delivering sensor network security
Managing crowds
Enabling opportunistic collaboration
Managing the economics of participation
by helping to engage resources,
encourage contribution and optimize
services
Trajectory
Impact
Creates a dynamic eco-systems of cyber-
physical devices, each adding to the
collective capability and insight
Allows operations and interactions to
adapt according to context
Improves efficiency and reliability of
service provision through:
-- Enabling ad-hoc collaborations, which
help built service networks
-- Optimizing delivery schemes and
communication patterns, which allow
information and services to be shared
and exchanged
-- Creating reliability and dependability
from volatile resources, which help
manage uncertainty
Allows work to be distributed across
simpler devices (or robots)
Complements other forms of artificial
intelligence
Provides a significant step toward
massively distributed computing models
Evolution
The notion of swarm computing first
emerged in the 1990s.
Research into algorithms and simulations
began shortly afterwards.
Swarm computing was first use for
logistics and simulations.
In time, the miniaturization of mobile
hardware made swarms of micro-robots
feasible
Currently, swarm computing is closely
linked with robotics, the Internet of Things
(IoT) and distributed cloud models.
In the long-term, nano-robots swarms
may, for example, prove useful in
medicine.
Issues
Agent-based programming is complex
and skilled practitioners are not easy to
come by at this present time.
Integrating swarms with other centralized
control mechanisms is also complex.
Security is a huge concern, especially
if individual robots within a swarm are
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under the primary control of different
individuals or organizations.
Communication protocols need to be
standardized to enable flexible and
dynamic interaction.
There is a possibility that non-
deterministic behaviors, including
unexpected or out of control emergent
behaviors, may emerge.
-- Swarm viruses, where swarm behaviors
are influenced adversely by rogue
components, may also emerge. These
would have huge implications in use
cases such as driverless vehicles.
T connected world requires the successful
Trusted Devices
Concept
Definition
Trusted devices are terminals and software-
powered objects and machines that are
made secure and trustworthy in order
to protect data and process availability,
integrity and confidentiality. They include
human interaction devices such as
smartphones, payments terminals as well
as autonomous devices such as smart
homes and smart machines.
Trusted devices rely on high security
design, hardened software and hardware,
and intensive certification processes
provided by trusted third parties (notably
leveraging 'common criteria' norms).
Applications
Securing human communications and
interactions with digital systems
Ensuring the protection of critical
infrastructures and automated process
including smart grid, connected
healthcare, smart cities and transports
Trajectory
Impact
Provides trusted terminals and smart
machines secured by design and with a
trustworthiness level depending on risk
and process criticality that people can
rely on
Mitigates risk of hacking and fraud at
a time when cybercrime is becoming
commonplace
Evolution
Defense grade technologies have already
been introduced into civil terminals,
notably secure smartphones for
governments and CxOs.
The major trend today is the
strengthening of objects on the Internet
of Things (IoT) that are involved in critical
processes.
The next evolution is focusing on
securing smart, autonomous machines.
After all, as we become increasingly
reliant on robot surgeons, smart cars
and autonomous drones, absolute trust
becomes vital.
Issues
Most trusted devices require a
combination of hardware and software
security since software security alone
increases the risk of hijacking.
Establishing trust in today's increasingly
integration of secure elements (Secure
IoT) and management of huge numbers
of identities (Next Generation Identity &
Access Management and Big Data).
It may also require embedded contextual
intelligence so that hacking attempts can
be detected and appropriate counter
measures (such as the auto-destruction
of sensitive information) can be taken
automatically
U
Ubiquitous PIM
Concept
Definition
Currently most people use more than four
different information silos to store, manage
and transfer their personal information
including Google, Outlook, Facebook,
Twitter, WhatsApp, local drives, USB disks,
OneDrive, Dropbox and more.
Ubiquitous Personal Information
Management (PIM) is a new approach
to storing personal information where all
information is stored in a unified storage
system but still accessible and consumable
by multiple applications. The types of
information most suited to ubiquitous PIM
approaches include messages (email, social
network posts, public website responses),
contacts, documents (texts, pictures, video)
and calendars.
Applications
Enterprise Social Networks allowing
all applications to use the same storage
layer and exchange/share all information
needed
Collaboration providing diverse
collaboration tools access to the same
information, with each tool tailored to

the user's level of expertise and personal
preferences
Business communications unifying
communications so users only need to
focus on the dialog and not worry about
the technology
Trajectory
Impact
Reduces complexity and eliminates
vertical information silos
Increases usability by making information
more relevant and consistent across a
multitude of applications
Cuts energy consumption as information
no longer needs to be copied around and
kept in sync
Unlocks individuals from reliance on
multiple dedicated social networks,
collaboration and communication tools
Allows individuals to select the networks
and tools that suit them best
Opens the door to a broad range of novel
products and services
Is aligned with the Internet of Things (IoT)
Evolution
Local file systems with applications began
sharing more and more information.
Mixed local and cloud-based storage
solutions emerged, with some sharing
information, but more of them
exchanging it.
Mixed local, cloud and ubiquitous
PIM storage solutions then started to
appear, initially combining contacts,
communication, collaboration and
documents through adapters
Soon, applications will leverage global
ubiquitous storage, with information
exchange between ubiquitous PIMs
standardized
In the future, people will no longer need
to worry about their information and a
whole new domain of IT applications will
start to flourish.
Issues
An enormous amount of work that needs
to be done to realize ubiquitous PIM,
but only a few groups and individuals
are working on new ways to store
information.
In fact, there are huge gaps in the
theoretical know-how needed.
This current situation will remain
unchanged until the fragmentation of the
current data exchange systems become
more evident.
V the future
Virtual Assistants
Concept
Definition
Virtual assistants are software agents that
perform services or tasks on our behalf.
They understand queries and can answer
them in a natural language. They exploit
artificial intelligence, natural-language
processing, machine learning, voice
processing and reasoning, and knowledge
representation to make human-machine
interactions simpler, more natural and more
appealing.
The tasks and services they perform rely
on written or spoken user input, context
awareness and access to a variety of
online sources, such as weather or traffic
conditions, news, stock prices, schedules
and retail prices.
Applications
Administrative assistance such as
in-the-moment advice, querying and
reminding, supporting both personal and
business events
Ongoing expert assistance including
longer-term projects or expert work
where their learning capabilities mean
the more context they're exposed to, the
better their assistance becomes
Customer service assistance including
in retailing, banking, insurance and
telecommunications where they
supplement or supplant human
customer-service representatives
Data mining of large structured and
unstructured data sets discovering
patterns and anomalies, proactively
identifying problems, spotting
opportunities and supporting decision-
making
Predictive expert assistance
anticipating events and taking action
before events occur
Virtual personal shopping assistants
learning, predicting and serving
consumers' tastes, needs and desires to
help optimize their purchases
Trajectory
Impact
Decrease cost and increase efficiency
and customer satisfaction in customer
service desks while unifying corporate
image across different channels
Enhance application usability and
improves information access tasks
Are expected to manage more and more
Tech trends
of our increasingly complex digital lives in
May, in that case, transform customer
engagement models with organizations
needing to interact with customers
through their assistant rather than
directly; this would mean interactions
need to be clear and concise and
would be significantly less susceptible to
emotive advertising
Evolution
In the 2000s, search engines evolved to
include more context, refining results to
make them more relevant.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
systems evolved to allow users to interact
with a computer in conversational
language.
More computing power became
available, meaning natural language could
be processed cost-effectively.
The rise of virtual assistants such as
Siri signaled search evolving toward a
more personalized, interactive service
and a gradual shift to an ecosystem of
services mediated by a powerful software
assistant.
The virtual assistant will next be brought
into the cloud, making it present on
multiple devices: on users' bodies and in
their offices, homes and vehicles.
Future assistants will be able to detect
exactly where users are.
Advances in sensors (for example,
microphones, cameras, accelerometers
and GPS in smart phones) will provide
additional context for that assistant to
leverage.
Virtual assistants are also learning how
to detect emotions via voice analysis or
facial expressions, whether the user was
moving, stationary or in a vehicle.
Real-time learning capabilities will ensure
assistants remain current, as long as they
have access to relevant data sets, or allow
them to branch out into new fields.
Issues
The increasing fragmentation and
complexity of our personal data reduces
the level of assistance a virtual assistant
can currently provide.
Ubiquitous Personal Information
Management (PIM) will help them
interpret all our digital information, but
they currently need adapters to connect
to diverse data silos such as Outlook,
Gmail, Microsoft Live, Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn and even local file systems.
The user needs to feel in control (for
instance of where their data is used and
by whom) and to be able to trust the
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assistant to act in their best interest.
Virtual assistants that are helping users
purchasing things online will have the
power to boost certain firms and deprive
others.
The on-going obsolescence of the
human worker by computers and
artificial intelligence applications may
lead to society raising concerns about
virtual assistants as they become more
advanced.
W
Wearable Computing
Concept
Definition
Miniature electronic devices with integrated
sensing, computing and communication
capabilities that are worn on the body. They
leverage the wearers context detected
by embedded sensors to deliver either
general or specific services that enable
the wearer to act in real time based on the
information they provide.
Although most popular wearables today
are smart watches, wearables can be found
in different places of our body:
Attached to our wrist such as smart
watches, bracelets and wrist bands
Around the head including headbands
and helmets
In front of the eyes such as glasses,
contact lenses, bio-augmentation
Around the ears as earphones
Implanted or embedded chips
including hearing aids
On or in the hands such as gloves or
digital pens
Smart clothing and textiles including
bandages, t-shirts, jackets, socks, bras,
belts and shoes
Embedded in jewelry including rings
and earrings
On the skin as tattoos
Applications
Cross industry
-- Security enhancing authorization,
authentication and tracking
-- Field services and maintenance
integrated with SCADA to help with
trouble shooting, for instance
-- Payments and expenses improving
mobile capabilities
-- Training providing support and
recording and sharing activities
-- Condition monitoring collecting
health or environmental information
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-- Direct interaction with smart objects
initiating cloud-based services
-- Information simplifying access to
resources and sharing knowledge
Industry specific
-- Healthcare training doctors,
assisting surgery, monitoring patients'
and doctors' health, recording
treatment, supporting and monitoring
medication regimes
-- Retail sharing product information,
merchandising, warehousing and
stock management
-- Military and homeland security
monitoring activities, recording
operations, navigation and identity
recognition
-- Transport navigation, tracking,
measuring drivers' health
-- Sport monitoring vital signs,
comparing results, adjusting to
environment and recording activities
Trajectory
Impact
In combination with cognitive computing,
has the potential to enhance human
abilities
Allows customer service representatives
to understand individual's desires and
tastes
Enables the Body Area Network concept
enhancing the overall picture of the
wearers context while the wider IoT
amplifies the devices knowledge of the
wearer
Improves performance and cuts cost in
field service and assisted maintenance
Opens up new business opportunities: Concept
-- Delivering health insights for
marketers to tap into
-- Offering incentives in exchange for
wearable usage and data
-- Connecting mobile payments and
customer loyalty
-- Addressing novel customer problems
that were previously out of reach of
the brand
Evolution
Wearables were initially used in military,
healthcare and medicine.
They are now focused mainly on well-
being and activity monitoring for the B2C
market.
Interest is broadening to new domains
in the B2B market where smart watches,
digital badges and smart bands are likely
to be of most interest initially followed by
smart glasses, emerging intelligent textiles
and embedded accessories.
Shipments of wearables are expected to
reach more than 60 million by 2017.
Spending on wearable technology is
projected to reach nearly $20 billion in
2018.
Wearables may become a fully-integrated
part of our personal and professional
lives in the long term, providing a more
discrete alternative to mobile while also
enhances mobile with additional insight.
Some see wearables as the next step
toward ambient computing.
Issues
Interaction is tuned to the device's size,
purpose and ergonomics.
Devices would benefit from being able
to automatically account for wider
environmental surroundings.
But advances in wearables depends
on other technological advances
including in sensors, displays, batteries,
communications and augmented reality.
The effects of materials on the human
organism (allergic reactions, for instance)
and radiation must be manageable.
Power management and heat dissipation
is challenging in such small devices.
Energy along with a failover strategy
may need to be available during a
complete usage cycle in some use cases.
In critical situations, such as medical
tasks, wearables and their users must
abide by legal constraints.
Wearables need to be transparent on
information transmission, storage and
processing, particularly where data is
shared with a wider ecosystem.
Web-scale Computing
Definition
Also known as web-scale computing,
hyperscale is a large, distributed, grid
computing environment that can scale-
out efficiently as data volumes and
workload demands increase sometimes
exponentially. Compute, memory,
networking, and storage resources are
added quickly and cost-effectively.
Often built with stripped down commercial
hardware, hyperscale optimizes hardware.
Potentially millions of virtual servers may
work together to accommodate increased
computing demands without, however,
requiring additional physical space, cooling
or electrical power.
With hyperscale, total cost of ownership
(TCO) is then typically measured in terms
of high availability and the unit price for
delivering an application and/or data.

Applications
Enabling cloud, distributed storage
and more across the web giants' large
distributed sites
Supporting businesses that must handle
extremely high volumes of data and/
or process millions of transactions
with minimal downtime including
banks, retail, mining and oil exploration,
healthcare and pharmaceuticals
Supporting emerging technologies
such as cognitive computing and the
Internet of Everything
Trajectory
Impact
Provides the robust and agile
environment needed to support
tomorrow's intensive data processing,
allowing organizations to maximize the
value of their growing volumes of data
Offers a common, scalable platform that
easily adapts to the ever-shifting business
and technology landscape
Delivers space and power savings
through its containerized data center
units
Requires fewer commercial servers,
cutting hardware and administration cost
Has the potential to transform how
modern enterprises consume and
manage IT
Evolution
Public cloud giants such as Google,
Facebook and Amazon first developed
the technology to sustain their dramatic
growth rates and deliver the agility they
required without compromising service
availability or quality.
Soon other organizations also began
to take advantage of that open source
software.
Hyperscale is now being explored by
other types of businesses, including those
with smaller and traditional enterprise IT
environments.
Further technological advances are
paving the way for faster, cheaper and
bigger hyperscale systems.
It is anticipated that hyperscale may
eventually be adopted by around half
global enterprises.
Issues
Hyperscale modifies the IT roles and skills
needed by an organization.
Any serious growth in computing
including hyperscale may challenge
energy resources.
WebRTC
Concept
Definition
A collaborative effort by IETF and W3C,
WebRTC is a free, open web standard that
enables platform-independent, web-based,
plugin-free Real Time Communications
(RTC) through standard browsers and on
mobile devices.
In essence, the WebRTC standard defines
media processing software for voice and
video embedded in browsers. It's extensible
and provides a standard API that aligns
with HTML5 along with a mechanism for
passing session data between parties in
communications sessions.
Commercial implementations are available
and differentiate themselves through
defining signaling or collaboration models
and enabling multi-participant sessions.
Applications
Browser-to-browser communication
including voice, video chat, conferencing,
screen sharing, customer engagement,
entertainment, gaming and file transfer
and sharing
Enterprise communication such as
click-to-call, contact centers, unified
communications and modern team
collaboration
Education and training including virtual
classrooms and synchronous learning
Distributed messaging and coordination
allowing humans and machines can
interact in a more natural and transparent
way
Trajectory
Impact
Simplifies deployment and reduces
cost of browser-based communication
solutions by eliminating the need for
proprietary plug-ins and apps
Standardizes underlying transport
protocols and security mechanisms
Allows any connected device with a
WebRTC-enabled browser to become a
communication device
Makes voice and video more readily
available in browser-based applications
Enhances customer engagement and
increases revenues by opening the door
to rich interactions
Allows humans and machines to interact
in a more natural and transparent way
Opens the door to new services that
Telco carriers who are threatened by
over-the-top voice services can actively
participate in
Tech trends
Evolution
WebRTC was initially born in 2011 as a
free, open project sponsored by Google
for enabling RTC communications in
different browsers.
Firefox, Opera and other browsers began
to support WebRTC just over a year later.
WebRTC is supported by almost all
major desktop and mobile browsers
and used by a growing numbers of
consumer services, such as Facebook
Messenger, and modern enterprise
collaboration services (such as Unify's
Circuit) to implement voice and video
communications.
WebRTC is part of HTML5 and, as such,
it's expected to be widely supported
going forward.
Potentially five billion devices could
be WebRTC-enabled by 2018, with
embedded devices leading novel
WebRTC-based applications.
Peer-to-peer WebRTC-based video
services will commoditize quickly.
WebRTC is expected to replace existing
protocols in the long term.
Enterprise grade multi-participant
WebRTC and integrated collaboration
services will remain compelling for the
next five years.
Issues
The WebRTC 1.0 standard has not been
finalized yet with the community divided
over some aspects of it.
The lack of standards for some higher-
level services could lead to compatibility
and/or interoperability issues and
market fragmentation, while offering
differentiation for commercial products.
Adoption has been slowed by lack of
support from some major browsers.
Integration with other non-web based
RTC communication platforms requires
additional software.
WebRTC could lead to new kinds of
security threats that might require new
and innovative approaches.
Wireless Power
Concept
Definition
Wireless power describes the transmission
of electrical power without solid wires,
using electromagnetic fields instead. There
are two types of wireless power: near-field
charging that uses inductive or capacitative
charging and far-field or radiative charging
that uses beams from electromagnetic
devices.
Applications
Wearables including smart watches
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Health devices including hearing aids

and pacemakers
Electric transportation including cars
and buses
Customer gadgets including
smartphones and tablets
Industry including assets in factories
and warehouses

Trajectory
Impact
Allows electrical devices to be powered
where interconnecting wires are
inconvenient, hazardous or simply not
possible
Solves energy storage issues for the
electric car, while increasing its range and
reliability
Opens the door to a uninterrupted,
pervasive computing environment where
energy availability is critical

Evolution
Induction charging is not a new
technology, but its usage is restricted to
very few devices.
The technology has been evolving to
provide higher levels of charge, at greater
distances.
Standardization seems to be improving,
with the most important standards
converging in the AirFuel Alliance.
The explosion of wearables and
sensor networks, and their limited
energy capacities, has made wireless
power transmission a more interesting
proposition.
Increasing capacities are taking it to
wider domains, including transportation
(for electric vehicles) and healthcare (for
medical devices).
Tests are underway with special road
lanes wirelessly transferring power to
electric cars while they drive.

Issues
Energy efficiency needs to be optimized
further by eliminating potential energy
losses.
Energy management would benefit from
being simplified.
There are currently several standards,
limiting interoperability.
Security concerns are limiting its use in
certain environments.
Social fears are limiting its uptake, though
concerns about its impact on health have
no scientific base.

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