Top Tech Trends 2022

Key facts: More and more services are being provided more and more comprehensively by cloud service providers. The development of digital tools is no longer reserved for experts only. "Working from anywhere" replaces the classic home office. Technology determines our life. It networks our world, changing the way we work, communicate and consume. With technological innovations, we have the potential to tackle social challenges more efficiently and to make our lives a little fairer and better equipped to deal with future crises. From discussions with customers and experts, we know which trends will have a significant impact on our everyday life, both professionally and privately, in the coming year. We describe the ten most important ones here: #1 Hyperscaler: Large cloud service providers dominate the market for software and IT services Hyperscalers, large cloud service providers, offer infrastructures, platforms, "Software as a Service" (SaaS) and other IT solutions from a single source, enabling companies to build holistic cloud-based IT worlds. The market for this is already dominated by just a few large providers. This market concentration will continue to increase in 2022, despite new competitors as well as regional players and niche providers. This is due to the ever shorter innovation cycles of hyperscalers, which have shrunk from several years to just a few months or even weeks. A result of enormous research and development expenditure. These investments also enable the hyperscalers to advance into more and more IT fields that have not yet been cloud-based. In the medium term, they will become an integral part of the digital transformation of every company. It can be assumed that the cloud infrastructure and platform service providers will also have a decisive influence on the data strategy of their customers and the majority of future IT ecosystems in this way. Low-threshold services such as software services in combination with current trends such as ESG could serve as a door opener. In the long term, it can be assumed that cloud service providers will dominate all IT megatrends such as artificial intelligence (AI) or quantum computing - either themselves or with the help of partner ecosystems. #2 Industry Clouds: Tailored platforms as the next step in development Industry clouds are cloud and data platforms tailored to the needs of each industry. They represent the next evolutionary step for hyperscalers, away from an unspecific technology operation towards a tailor-made platform that also provides all aspects of macro and micro applications as well as data management. Industry clouds go beyond platform as a service (PaaS), SaaS and vertically integrated industry solutions, enterprise resource planning, CRM, workflows and related services. Industry clouds are likely to further strengthen the trend towards standardized and preconfigured cloud solutions and help many industries to undergo comprehensive digital transformation. Companies could become more agile and reduce their complexity with seamlessly coordinated cloud environments. In addition, the speed and costs of IT modernization could be positively influenced, since innovations, upgrades and maintenance are automated on the platforms. With these models, hyperscalers are giving their ecosystem of systems integration and software vendors the reach they need to establish de facto industry standards. #3 Quantum computing: Short-term applications promise the optimization of complex processes While quantum computers may still be at least a decade away from widespread use, technologies that harness the principles of quantum mechanics are emerging on the market. These have the potential to change computing-powerful industries in the long term. An example is support for optimization problems, which are often difficult to fix using traditional methods. For this purpose, current optimization algorithms are revised and accelerated using quantum mechanical principles. In particular, the financial services, biotech and pharmaceutical industries could benefit from quantum computing as they require highly scalable computing power. #4 Metaverse: Business models shift from physical to virtual worlds Future-oriented companies are already working on their appearance in the Metaverse - virtual worlds in which users come together with the help of avatars and interact with each other and their environment. Some of these worlds already make it possible to own digital property based on the blockchain and to trade it publicly in the form of non-fungible tokens (NTFs).