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NVIDIA 2021 Predictions: The Modern Data Center Will Power New AI Business Models and Immersive Collaboration Tools for Remote Work

vmblog 2021 prediction series 

Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021.  Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

The Modern Data Center Will Power New AI Business Models and Immersive Collaboration Tools for Remote Work

By Anne Hecht, NVIDIA

As businesses respond to the COVID pandemic, they are reexamining their digital transformation strategies. In 2021, we expect to see increased adoption of the modern data center, which includes accelerated computing powered by GPUs to enable better business insights with AI and enhanced productivity through immersive, remote collaboration.

Desktop virtualization is going to play a key role as most of North America continues to work remote during the coronavirus pandemic. According to Gartner, 48 percent of employees will likely work remotely at least part of the time after the COVID-19 pandemic, compared to 30 percent pre-pandemic.*

In 2021, we're going to see enterprises adopting AI at a faster rate and utilizing virtual reality to collaborate in real time with globally dispersed teams. Below are key trends we can expect to see:

Enabling A New Paradigm for Remote Work

Millions of employees are continuing to work from home during the pandemic and that is expected to continue.

A survey from IDC in June 2020 found that fifty-two percent of global IT and business leader respondents said that their work at home employment models will likely be permanently changed.**

Companies will provide remote work options, providing more flexible working arrangements as this environment becomes the new normal. Just like healthcare and 401K plans are sought-after employee benefits, the flexibility to work from anywhere is quickly becoming a standard perk. 

Businesses will need to build the infrastructure that supports more people working remotely as digital workplaces extend. Even engineers, digital artists, and product designers will continue to require a flexible work environment. For many, they left physical workstations back at the office and have struggled to stay productive. With NVIDIA virtual GPU (vGPU) software, powerful virtual workstations are enabling everyone to stay productive at home so even movie production, car design, and researchers can work from home with the same performance they had at the office.   

Collaboration Tools Become Immersive

As more employees continue to work from home, new collaboration tools will enable an immersive, shared experience through virtual reality. 

For example, an automotive company can utilize virtual reality to bring their team of designers together and collaborate on drawings of the interior of a car. The team can develop the car's dashboard drawings in real time with designers scattered across the world using the NVIDIA Omniverse Platform.

Enterprises can use solutions like NVIDIA CloudXR SDK, which enables head-mounted displays (HMDs) and connected Windows or Android devices to become a high-fidelity augmented reality display. VMware vSphere uses NVIDIA CloudXR and NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Workstation software to provide streaming to standalone headsets.

Enterprises Adoption of AI Will Grow

More enterprises are going to turn to modern workloads like artificial intelligence to gain insights from their data that lead to better customer experiences, and more efficient and innovative businesses.

Companies like Domino's are using AI to more accurately predict when a pizza order will be ready and get the pizza to the customer quicker. Financial leaders like RBC are using AI to accelerate banking. And AI is helping to make us all become better writers in Microsoft Word.

Adopting AI is no longer for a small, specialized team or research-driven industries.  AI will help every type of business define and refine their competitive advantage. This means that the enterprise data center needs to be equipped to support AI and data science workloads for every department.  

Evolution of the Modern AI Data Center

To support the broad adoption of enterprise AI, the modern data center infrastructure will evolve. It will leverage its current use of virtualization which provides manageability, security and flexibility. But it will also add containers which ease adoption and management of AI frameworks.

In fact, NVIDIA and VMware engineering teams are working together to deliver an end-to-end enterprise platform for AI. This new platform will integrate AI software available on NVIDIA NGC, containers optimized for AI, into VMware vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Tanzu making it easier to deploy and manage AI. Every industry from financial services, healthcare and manufacturing will be able to deploy AI workloads using containers and virtual machines on the same platform.

*Gartner press release, "Nine Trends for HR Leaders That Will Impact the Future of Work After the Coronavirus Pandemic", May 2020.  Gartner, How to Build a Successful Business Case for Desktop Virtualization, ID G00722424, Jun 2020. Smarter with Gartner, Webinar Snap Poll of HR Leaders, March 3, 2020.

** Source: IDC, "From Rigid to Resilient Organizations: Enabling the Future of Work", Doc # US45799820, July 2020

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About the Author

Anne Hecht, Senior Director of Product Marketing, GPU Virtualization Software at NVIDIA

Anne Hecht 

Anne Hecht is the senior director of product marketing for GPU virtualization software at NVIDIA. Anne leads the product marketing team for virtual client computing and server virtualization solutions. Previously, Anne held senior positions in product marketing, solutions marketing and corporate marketing at enterprise technology firms Sun Microsystems, NComputing, ForgeRock, and Agari.

Anne has an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Published Monday, November 30, 2020 7:35 AM by David Marshall
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