2021 was a strong year for digital trends on the global market, and many companies continued to move forward with adopting various new solutions. Certain clear trends have emerged from all this, while others have stabilized even further. The prospects for 2022 are looking quite good so far – and there are several areas in particular that have received a lot of attention from multiple sides. Between IoT, cloud services, and the rise of VR in some sectors, we’re on the way to some major transformations on the market over the next year.
A Stronger Focus on Process Optimization
Process optimization is more important than ever, and this applies to pretty much every industry. With global shortages affecting supply chains in unpredictable ways, many companies have started to realize that they need to pay more attention to improving their resource utilization and boosting the performance of each process involved in their operations. This leverages various modern technological solutions heavily. At the forefront of these developments, we have artificial intelligence – especially machine learning – and IoT.
IoT in particular has proven instrumental in the whole picture. It’s allowed companies to gather data more accurately and in larger volumes, while AI-driven solutions are being utilized to analyze that data, identify patterns and opportunities for optimization. And the best part is that some of these trends are just getting started. It will take a while to see them stabilizing properly, and those who take advantage of them early on stand to gain a lot in the long run.
Companies like ScienceSoft have been very active in adopting these trends, particularly when it comes to integrating IoT into their products. Indium Software is another example of a company with an active market presence that’s leveraged IoT strongly and has developed advanced solutions for data processing and process optimization.
MetaQuotes is another positive example in the field. The company has frequently been commended for leveraging modern technological trends and attempting to bridge the gap on the analytical front. The package remains one of the most prominently featured solutions on the financial market, especially through its integration of MQL5. Backed by a unique MQL5 Cloud Network capable of running backtests on 34 000+ cores, they have continued to push the boundaries of performance in the sector.
The Shift to the Cloud Continues
More and more companies have been shifting their services and products to the cloud as well. The impact of this transition is noticeable in many areas, and while it was initially a controversial topic, it’s clear at this point that it’s played a positive role in the evolution of the global market. Local services are quickly becoming obsolete in some sectors, replaced with constantly updated solutions that run in the cloud.
This brings many benefits to companies and their users alike. Access to critical information can happen from anywhere, while at the same time system requirements for important products have gone down significantly. All of this has created a situation where more companies than ever before can take advantage of the opportunities created by the market.
Low-code and No-code Solutions
The popularity of low-code approaches for various technical problems has already been a hot trend for a few years, and it’s no surprise that AI is now at the forefront of adopting it. The biggest obstacle in implementing AI-driven solutions in many organizations has traditionally been the strong fundamental requirement for technical knowledge, particularly in programming and statistics. We’re already seeing solutions that attempt to bridge that gap by enabling organizations to leverage the power of artificial intelligence without the need for advanced programming.
However, it will likely take a while for that trend to fully stabilize. There is no “unified” solution to the problem at the moment, and we’re rather seeing different industries adopting products designed for their own specific needs. While some experts predict that these unified solutions are on the horizon already, there is some skepticism regarding the idea so far.
The Rise of VR
Virtual reality is no longer a niche field – it’s a mainstream trend adopted by some of the biggest companies on the market at the moment. Facebook’s Metaverse was, without doubt, a major point in the history of this technology, and many are excited to see how the company’s new platform will fare once it becomes mainstream.
VR has also proven very useful for various purposes outside of entertainment and is already being explored actively by various industries for training purposes. Artificial intelligence plays a central role in that, enabling companies to produce and adapt their VR content at much faster rates. At the same time, organizations have been taking solutions like automated chatbots and attempting to integrate them into the new VR-driven world. So far, the results are looking promising – but it will likely take a while before we see just how much potential this has.
Taking Automation Even Further
Another field that’s been heavily impacted by developments in artificial intelligence has been automation. Automation is already a major trend in different industries, especially those with thin margins where a lot of tedious manual labor is involved. Automation also goes hand in hand with optimizing certain processes. Some companies have been making attempts to automate entire parts of their operations, and while it will likely take a while to see this trend becoming more stable, it’s definitely already happening. The concept of lights-out factories seemed like something out of a sci-fi novel just a few decades ago, but it’s already an established trend in some industries.
Proper automation generally relies on analyzing large volumes of data on an ongoing basis, something which AI has proven perfect for. Some companies have already been putting a lot of effort into gathering operational data from their daily production, and the transition to having that data analyzed by AI-driven systems was the next logical step. This is a trend that will continue with full force over the next few years, as progress in AI picks up even further, opening up even more opportunities for working with the data sets that companies already have.
Some of these solutions create new synergy with old ones as well, allowing users to realize their full potential on the current market with regards to advanced analytics, automation, and trend prediction. Running these services in the cloud has been beneficial for their developers, freeing them up from the resource constraints they traditionally had to deal with when deploying their solutions on user machines, and giving them more freedom to deliver outstanding results.