2020 was an uneventful year for most businesses. Many businesses were forced to shut down or close for some time at least. However, one business that flourished and enhanced its presence in the global market, despite pandemics was internet technology. Software developers were found creating revolutionary versions of apps and software that enabled smoother life for people forced to stay indoors during the spread of Coronavirus. Certain development buzzwords that loomed within the IT industry in 2019-2020 were cloud migration and microservices. Most of the enterprises in the IT industry have already made these functions a must-have option in most of their projects.
The software industry is already experiencing and will continue to experience maturing and spreading across functions in industries. Now that everything is getting virtual and almost all industries depend upon software development companies and their developers, embarking on learning the subject could come with plethora of benefits. Several technologies in the software world are delivering outstanding features. This blog tries to look at 4 of the latest technologies that are going to influence the IT world by 2021 and beyond.
#1. Artificial Intelligence
Gartner predicts, organizations with minimum 4 AI projects developed by 2021 would be able to take the count up to 35 projects in 2022. The newest trend in AI isn’t much related to AI integration but more of engineering the AI-first version of the software, where AI is the initial point for designing the software. Supported by technologies such as machine learning (ML), speech recognition and deep learning, it can help businesses in more ways than imagined:
To assist in the critical process of decision-making: In sectors like medicine, AI works in analyzing medical records, lab results and genetic findings so that they can foresee future diseases or even divulge highly promising treatments.
Higher service levels: There are several virtual assistants, like scheduling appointments of the doctors, to software recognizing faces and identifying emotions that can better efforts in sales and marketing – with AI your customer satisfaction index is enhanced.
How to control quality and avoid risk: In the manufacturing sector, advanced technology functions like IoT can send data to programs that are AI-based. These programs increase the efficiency of production and can readily predict machine dysfunctions and failures. AI is also used in agriculture to analyze plant types their diseases and to detect weeds.
#2. Blockchain in Finance and further
Blockchain enables transferring information and money without keeping any intermediary. It also helps keep records transparent and unchangeable. There is an inbuilt mechanism behind this: data gets encrypted and chained with other entries of data in chronological order and spread throughout the computer systems within a network rather than storing in a server that is centralized.
Owing to the innovative mode of working for blockchain, it is getting adopted by many industries beyond the boundaries of finance industry where it first marked its presence. It has moved to public sector, healthcare, manufacturing, and distribution. Industry predicts that by 2024, the blockchain industry will grow to almost $20 billion industry. The advantages that attract investors to this IT function are:
Data safety: Decentralized storage of data can prevent fraud plus security attacks for all businesses that handle sensitive data like credit records, medical history, industrial IoT, etc. The entire process is encrypted and then copied to each of the computers within a system, so that there is no possibility of altering the info without permission from system administrators.
Automatic contracts: Blockchain enables creating contracts that get automatically executed after the system finds that all terms have been satisfied. For instance, all goods get shipped after payment verification happen using blockchain. You cannot possibly tamper with the contract execution.
Transparency: Businesses now are in a position to replace processes that were paper based with the distributed ledger of blockchain. This helps provide ultimate transactional transparency and ultimately increase accountability within all the parties involved.
#3. Low- code development using visual interfaces
With low code development, software development companies build applications via visual interfaces simply, without using coding. The process is to drag and then drop the components that are prebuilt, while the code gets automatically created and you could also modify it as per your need.
In the beginning, low-code development found its use in platform-as-a-service that was specializing in certain specific software like CRM. But the current scenario has low-code development platforms allowing building almost any kind of applications in low-code. They have gathered popularity as there have been huge improvements in functionality. The unit of microservices enables support to vast AI/ML and integration works.
Gartner states in its forecast that low-code platforms could be applied in almost 65% and more software development units by 2025. All this will be made possible due to opportunities opened by low-code development by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and startups:
Gets deployed faster: Low-code development takes virtually lesser time to build when compared with applications hand-coded. This allows you to stick to strict timelines this competitive market brings forth.
Validate you business ideas involving fewer risks: Low-code development brings down he costs compared to software development that is customized. If you need to build cheaper minimum value product (MVP) for investigation and to find out if the business plan is worth further investigation.
Back up for the UX resources lacking: There are integrated UI platforms offered by low-code development that also comes with widgets and ready-made blocks. You wouldn’t need high end UX background to build a UI/UX friendly app.
Progressive web applications (PWAs)
There’s a huge similarity between PWAs and mobiles apps. The former functions much like the mobile apps without you needing to download. There has been a huge adoption of PWAs either getting deployed or in the process. This trend is popular attributing to mainly two benefits:
Seamless UX: PWAs working time is twice as fast as the responsive and mobile websites. It can also display content offline, and it is resistant to crashes even when there is intense server load.
Development cost and time both can be less: PWA can be a good alternative to native apps; as it can be highly reflexive and adapt to all kinds of screen size plus mobile interface. It can be highly cost effective as you have both app and a website within the cost of website.
In case of businesses like ecommerce, social networks, news sources, and hospitality, where UX factor is critical, PWAs have proven impressive results.
2021 is a promising year in terms of harvesting early benefits with the software trends that seem promising. Several software development companies are buckled up to provide the best of experience to industries offering advanced features and excellent maneuvers.
