Oracle : Don't Sleep on These Top 5 Enterprise IT Trends for 2019

This year might be more about laying groundwork than historical breakthroughs, but don't let that lull you into sleeping through these top five enterprise IT trends. It should be an exciting and busy year as new technologies find their way into enterprise applications, and some existing ones are refined and redeployed to better protect and connect our rapidly digitizing world.

1. Running the public cloud behind your firewall.

With an explosion of massive, high-profile business data breaches in the past few years, no one can blame organizations for wanting a more private cloud. Private clouds provide the cost efficiency and agility of the public cloud in an on-premise deployment that increases security and decreases latency. For companies that are heavily regulated and fearful of moving data to a public cloud, this makes sense. However, some businesses struggle to justify the organizational changes and expense needed to implement private clouds.

That's why 2019 will be the year organizations go private but in a very public way. More companies will take advantage of private cloud services that offer public-cloud scalability and OPEX friendly subscription models, like Oracle Cloud at Customer. This will enable businesses to keep their data safely behind their firewalls and enjoy the benefits of the public cloud-but without the DIY hassle of management, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

2. Autonomous enterprise software will gain more trust and traction.

As the world gears up for self-driving vehicles, it's a reminder of the true potential of machine-learning and artificial intelligence technologies. In 2019, expect these automated technologies to bring real benefit to enterprise software.

How? By making systems easier and smarter, autonomous enterprise software will spur increases in productivity, while faster data analysis will drive improved business decisions and predictive insights for organizations. Many business applications already come with built-in machine-learning models that improve over time, laying the foundation for a truly autonomous experience. We will soon see disparate enterprise applications talk to and learn from each other, which will help information flow much faster.

As more companies begin to see firsthand the transformation of their own processes through intelligent enterprise software, trust in autonomous technologies, like Oracle's adaptive intelligence apps, will continue to gain traction.

3. Chatter around enterprise-grade AI-powered assistants will grow louder.

TechCrunch reports that about 43 million people in the US have at least one smart speaker that can tell them tomorrow's weather or the give them the latest sports scores. That's a big buy-in by consumers of AI-powered voice-control technologies. Still, adoption of digital assistants by enterprises has lagged.

That's set to change in 2019, when voice-enabled technology will progress beyond enterprise-grade chatbots and spur a shift in how businesses operate and customers are served.

That's because a new generation of conversational interactions and interfaces powered by AI and the cloud now have the increased ability to 'know' a user and learn his or her preferences, actions, and even behaviors. Then they can predict or act on behalf of the user. At the same time, digital assistants-AI used for natural language processing and understanding-can automate engagements with conversational interfaces that respond instantly and better understand customer intent while increasing business efficiencies.

4. Edge computing will explode.

According to Forrester, 27% of global telecom decision-makers said that their firms were either implementing or expanding edge computing in 2019. With edge computing, data gets processed as close to the collection source as possible, rather than in a centralized cloud location.

What's driving this trend? The growth in Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data analysis and aggregation is one factor, along with real-time customer interactions being driven through mobile applications and edge video and audio equipment-for example, when a consumer obtains location-specific information through a smart watch. Edge computing accelerates the gathering and sharing of data, and faster access to data means that companies can make continuous informed decisions.

The desire to get closer to the customer will also see an uptick in microservices, in which a cloud application is structured as smaller, connected services, as well as containers, which houses the application's code so the application runs smoothly in different computing environments. These are two edge computing technologies that significantly enhance the speed and agility of an application when implemented effectively.

5. A surge in DBAs finding a sweet spot with autonomous database.

Data warehouses can be the bane of the C-suite's existence. Given that data warehouses have to be continually built, maintained, and expanded by a team of data engineers and administrators, it's a costly, albeit crucial part of any enterprise. However, getting DBAs to trust robots to do the work was a big challenge.

Look for that to change in 2019 as AI-fueled autonomous database platforms gain steam like the Oracle Autonomous Database. These self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing data systems mean less tedious work for DBAs, while delivering high-performance data warehousing right out of the box. This allows DBAs to head more innovative projects in the future.

Best-in-class autonomous technology, especially those powered by Oracle engineered systems, will allow companies to scale on demand so they can raise or lower compute resources at any time with no downtime. These systems will also help manage costs by switching off compute resources when the data warehouse isn't being used. This is the year that smart businesses invest more in smart data warehousing.

Help Your Organization Rise and Shine

For enterprises still hesitant to tap these emerging technology trends, it's time to wake up to the rich opportunities they offer. Oracle helps customers explore these emerging technologies, thoughtfully and with consideration to your current IT infrastructure, through powerful yet flexible cloud-ready solutions such as Oracle Engineered Systems, including Oracle Exadata and Cloud at Customer.