Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Jonathan Fries, VP Engineering and Digital Transformation, Exadel

Tech Trends Emerging for 2019

As 2018 draws to a close, we've seen yet another incredible year of growth and change in the technology space. As we enter the new year, we're taking a step back to look at some predictions for what we think are going to be a couple big trends in 2019 so you can stay ahead of the game.

Artificial Intelligence for the Rest of Us

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML) are certainly hot topics for companies of all sizes and verticals. Figuring out ways to leverage AI to deliver better products, improved customer experiences and operate more efficiently is top of mind for many organizational leaders. The challenge, however, is finding the talent to execute on these sorts of initiatives. Indeed, to use many AI solutions you need data scientists and machine learning experts. Finding, acquiring and retaining the right person can be a big challenge.

So, what we see being a big trend in 2019 is "AI for the rest of us." Essentially, we expect to see an emergence of new artificial intelligence and machine learning tools that produce some of the benefits of AI without necessarily having to have all the AI skill sets in your organization.

One early example of this comes from Google, who has put together a product for job postings and job searches that's basically a packaged AI solution. In this tool, Google is applying artificial intelligence to match job seekers and what they're looking for with the job postings and doing so in an effective way. Google gives us access to the ML models that they have trained on large amounts of data.  We get access to the learning and AI capabilities they produced without needing big volumes of data or ML experts of our own.

Amazon is offering a couple of tools along the same lines, they have just announced Forecast, Textract, and Prsonalize at re:Invent, all of which provide specific machine learning models pre-built for specific technology problems.

In 2019, we expect to see more and more tools that take AI out of the hands of data scientists and put it into the control of developers and business leaders to find real value from big data insights.

Infrastructure as Code for Cloud Flexibility

Cloud has obviously been a big part of many organization IT strategies in 2018. But one of the challenges organizations face - or at least a concern moving forward - is how your application's dependence on a cloud solution will work long term.

Imagine building an application that is depending on one specific cloud provider - and that provider, drastically raises prices, or changes their tech in a major way. It could leave you in a tough spot.

First and foremost, there is value in Infrastructure as Code (IaC), whether you are trying to be cloud agnostic or not.  By defining an environment in a way that makes it easy to deploy, redeploy, or duplicate saves a lot of man hours in the long-run.  When infrastructure becomes part of your code, it can also be huge cost savings for your organization.

Secondly, and specifically as a trend in 2019, we see more organizations leveraging the idea of IaC that will allow them to operate in amore cloud agnostic way.

This can give them the flexibility to use best cloud provider available - whether it's Azure or AWS or Google Cloud -- at any given time and for any given product.  Using tools like Terraform enables organizations to even use different cloud solutions without a lot of duplicated effort or wasted code.  Though it does have up-front costs to make it versatile enough to work with multiple providers.

We live in exciting times where technology is changing and adapting at breakneck speeds - and 2019 is shaping up to be no different. With AI and machine learning leading the way, and cloud delivering big value, we can't wait to see what the new year holds.

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About the Author 

Jonathan Fries is VP Engineering and Digital Transformation at Exadel (www.exadel.com). Jonathan has 20 years of experience in software development and technology management. He brings a wealth of experience from product companies and consulting firms. This experience includes day-to-day development, product and project leadership, and strategic guidance of technology projects from conception to launch. Jonathan works with clients to guide their technology vision. In his project interactions, he oversees the planning and execution of all aspects of software development.