The analysts at Gartner traditionally focus on the question of which technology trends will particularly shape the business world in the coming year. When looking at the strategic trends for 2023, the experts took into account, among other things, the challenging economic situation in which many companies currently find themselves. To improve the financial situation, Gartner recommends not only realizing cost savings, but also improving operational excellence and driving digital transformation.
The top ten strategic technology trends for 2023 are clustered into four themes. Trends #1 to #3 optimize enterprise IT systems, provide greater reliability, and streamline data-driven decision making. Trends #4 to #6 are about scaling vertical solutions and product delivery, while trends #7 to #9 pay attention to customer engagement, shorter response times and new opportunities for business. The fourth cluster includes only trend #10: the pursuit of sustainable technology solutions.
The digital immune system combines multiple software development strategies to protect against risks. This ensures an optimized customer experience. Observability (see trend #2), automation, and extensive testing create resilient systems that reduce operational and security risks.
Applied Observability uses artificial intelligence to analyze an organization’s data and derive recommendations that should lead to faster and more accurate decisions. Used systematically, Applied Observability is accompanied by a significant reduction in response times, allowing business operations to be optimized in real time.
Artificial intelligence brings many benefits to businesses when the associated risks are managed. Actively managing AI risk, privacy and security issues requires implementing appropriate functionalities. These increase the reliability and trustworthiness of existing AI models and promote the rapid deployment of new ones.
Cloud platforms that are specifically tailored to the requirements of a particular industry combine software, platform and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) with customized functionalities. Companies benefit in the form of increased agility, more innovation, and shorter time-to-market, laying the foundation for business initiatives that set them apart from the competition.
The term Platform Engineering refers to the building and operation of internal self-service developer platforms for software delivery and lifecycle management. Various tools, functionalities and processes are available that developers and users can easily use. This brings two benefits: The workload of development teams is reduced and user productivity is increased.
Wireless technologies play a significant role in enterprises. A wide variety of wireless connections are used there – from WLAN and services for mobile devices to low-power services and radio links. The focus is no longer on pure connectivity; wireless networks also provide location and other real-time information, as well as integrated analytics capabilities.
Gartner defines a superapp as an application that bundles the functions of an app, a platform and an ecosystem. At the same time, it provides a platform for third parties to develop and publish their own miniapps.
Adaptive AI systems aim to have models constantly trained and learning within runtime and development environments based on updated data and adjusted goals. This enables AI systems to quickly adapt to changes in the real world that were not yet foreseeable when the systems were initially developed and therefore could not be taken into account.
Metaverse is a digital, interactive environment that unites the real and the virtual world. It enables people to replicate or enhance their physical activities – by moving them to the virtual world or by transforming the physical world. In Metaverse, various technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) play a role.
Sustainability and technology are inextricably linked for Gartner in the coming year. Key elements in this set of themes include increasing the energy efficiency of IT services, measuring and documenting corporate sustainability through analytics capabilities, emissions management software and artificial intelligence, and helping customers achieve their own sustainability goals. In addition, investments in sustainable technologies also offer the opportunity to increase resilience and financial performance, as well as unlock new growth potential.