2019 was a year of rapid innovation and disruption for both the IT industry and the broader business community. With the widespread adoption of hybrid multi-cloud as the de-facto architecture for enterprise customers, organisations everywhere are under tremendous pressure to modernise their infrastructure and deliver tangible business value around data-intensive applications and workloads.

As a result, organisations are shifting from on-premises to leverage public cloud services, building private clouds, and moving from disk to flash in data centres - sometimes concurrently.

These transformations open the door to enormous potential, but also introduce the unintended consequence of rising IT complexity.

We predict that demand for simplicity and customisability will be the number-one factor driving IT purchasing decisions in 2020. Vendors will need to provide customers with modern, flexible technologies with the choice of how to use and consume these technologies to meet evolving business models.

As IT departments look to de-emphasise maintenance and hardware, reduce overhead, and adopt pay-as-you-go models, simplicity and choice will be key.

Achieving this simplicity will serve as the foundation for companies as they navigate the exciting technological trends we've identified below.

1) AS THE ADVENT OF 5G MAKES AI-DRIVEN IOT A REALITY, EDGE COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS ARE PRIMES TO BECOME EVEN MORE DISRUPTIVE THAN CLOUD WAS

In preparation for the widespread emergence of 5G, lower-cost sensors and maturing AI applications will be leveraged to build compute-intensive edge environments, laying the groundwork for high bandwidth, low latency AI-driven IoT environments with the potential for huge innovation - and disruption

The advent of 5G is what AI-driven IoT has been waiting for. 2020 will see many players in the technology industry and business community invest in building edge-computing environments to support the reality of AI-driven IoT.

These environments will make possible new use-cases that rely on intelligent, instantaneous and autonomous decision-making, with low latency, high bandwidth capabilities bringing us to a world where the internet will work on your behalf - without even having to ask.

The AI-driven IoT revolution, however, will be dependent on massive prioritisation of edge computing, further disrupting IT infrastructures and data management priorities.

As edge devices move beyond home devices (like connected thermostats and speakers) and become more far-reaching (such as connected solar farms), more data centres will be placed at the edge, and software such as AIOps will be necessary to help monitor complex environments across edge-to-core-to-cloud.

2) THE IMPACT OF BLOCKCHAIN WILL BE UNDENIABLE AS INDELIBLE LEDGERS RAPIDLY ENABLE GAME-CHANGING USE CASES OUTSIDE CRYPTOCURRENCY

The world is quickly moving beyond Bitcoin to adopt enterprise-distributed indelible ledgers, setting the stage for a transformation exponentially bigger than the impact cryptocurrency has had on blockchain in finance

While the crypto frenzy continues to steal the limelight when it comes to blockchain, most in the industry understand the bigger picture of the technology and its potential. Going into 2020, we'll see a tipping point for larger implementations as enterprises go a step further to adopt indelible ledgers or "Hyperledgers", which represent the maturation of blockchain for broader use-cases. 

Indeed, we'll start to see blockchain go "mainstream" as it enables industries such as healthcare to create universal patient records, improve chain-of-custody pharmaceutical processes and more.

With use cases such as the above validating blockchain and hyper ledgers, further widespread adoption of the technology will drive transformation across society on a larger scale, building on the disruption cryptocurrency has brought to finance to touch nearly every industry.

As a result, new data management and compute capabilities will encourage companies to invest in indelible ledgers to build differentiated applications and collaborate on critical, sensitive data sets.

3) HARDWARE-BSED COMPOSABLE ARCHITECTURE WILL HAVE LESS SHORT-TERM POTENTIAL AGAINST COMMODITY HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE BASED INFRASTRUCTURE VIRTUALISATION

Continued improvements in commodity hardware performance, software-based virtualisation, and micro-service software architectures will eliminate much of the performance advantage of proprietary hardware-based composable architectures, relegating them to niche datacenter roles in the near future

Hardware-based composable architecture is being hyped as the next evolution of hyper-converged infrastructure, allowing CPUs, networking cards, workload accelerators, and storage resources to be distributed across a rack-scale architecture and connected with low-latency PCIe-based switching. And while there is potential, standardisation has been slow, and adoption even slower.

Meanwhile, software-based virtualisation of storage, combined with software-based (but hardware accelerated) compute and networking virtualisation solutions, offer much of the flexibility of hardware-based composable architectures today with lower cost and consistently increasing performance.

Next year, attempts to build a true hardware-based rack-scale computing model will no doubt continue, and the space will continue to evolve quickly.

Still, the majority of organisations that need to transform within 2020 will be best served by the combination of modern HCI architectures (including disaggregated HCI) and software-based virtualisation and containerisation.

This article was first published in Singapore Business Owners.