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
##
About
the Author
Anne Hecht, Senior Director
of Product Marketing, GPU Virtualization Software at NVIDIA
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.