Some things that will happen in 2020
Accusations that suppliers are selling smart factory Snake Oil: There will continue to be articles with quotes from exasperated manufacturers where a technology or technologies did not live up to the hype and the factory’s operations are no better off; once again, technology suppliers will be accused of promising the world and falling way short. Often, staff at manufacturing plants still collect data on paper, which are manually input and stored either in Excel or siloed applications. These types of environments should provide rich pickings for technology suppliers. However, Industry 4.0 investments will come to nothing if solutions are fed incomplete or inaccurate data.
Suppliers will need to work harder with manufacturers to instill a data culture, deciding what data are relevant, the best ways to collect them, and, most important of all, how to organize them before considering anything else.
AI to benefit from Heterogeneous Computing: Existing Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications and networks are currently serviced by different processing architectures, such as Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), CPUs, Digital Signal Processors (DSPs), or hardware accelerators for specific use cases. However, next generation and AI and Machine Learning (ML) frameworks will be multimodal by their nature and may require heterogeneous computing resources for their operations.
The leading chip makers will introduce new chipset types topped by hardware accelerators to address the new use cases. Vendors of these chips will move away from offering proprietary software stacks and will start to adopt open Software Development Kits (SDKs) and Application Programming Interface (API) approaches to their tools in order to simplify the technology complexity for their developers and help them focus on building efficient algorithms for the new AI and ML applications.
This year will be another time for AI chipsets. Several stealth startups are likely to launch programmable chipsets for data centers, while the emergence of new AI applications in edge devices will give rise to more Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) dedicated for edge AI inference workloads.
The physical payment card will remain as relevant as ever: The use of popular mobile payment platforms, including Apple, Samsung, and Google Pay, as well as popular QR code platforms, most notably WeChat and Alipay, continues to increase and the vendors behind the platforms are looking to aggressively expand these platforms across new countries, as well as looking to access new markets, such as ticketing. Despite this, the payment card market continues to grow, as banks and financial institutions place further emphasis on the payment card, using it as a physical form factor in order to differentiate through innovative card portfolios and related services, including contactless, metal, sustainable card bodies, biometric, Dynamic Card Verification Value (DCVV), and instant issuance.
In 2020, mobile payment platforms will continue to be viewed as a companion to the traditional payment card, as banks and financial institutions place personalization and tailoring at the heart of their respective payment card strategies.
5G rollouts worldwide: The promising tech will present different challenges for the commercial and enterprise sectors, in terms of future-proofing, 5G edge and private networks proof-of-concept; the US-China squabble over Huawei’s 5G innovations; the timely launch of Release 16 and critical features such as Ultra-Reliable, Low-Latency Communication (URLLC), Massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC), and enhanced positioning capabilities.
DigiconAsia readers can brace yourselves for an interesting decade ahead.
