Adoption of IoT platforms will be the Top IT trend in 2018

Smart object storage, analytics and AI, as well as the extension of agile methodologies across the enterprise, will all play key roles during the coming year in the Asia Pacific region.

These trends are jointly predicted by Hitachi Vantara’s Hubert Yoshida, chief technology officer, and Russell Skingsley, chief technology officer Asia Pacific. They believe, the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms will dominate enterprise IT strategies in 2018, alongside a number of other areas.

Together, they have identified ten key trends for the Asia Pacific technology market in 2018 to consider:

#1: IT will adopt IoT platforms to facilitate the application of IoT solutions

IoT solutions deliver valuable insight to support digital transformation and are rapidly becoming a strategic imperative in almost every industry and market sector. IT must work closely with the operations side of the business to focus on specific business needs and define the scope of an IoT project.

“Building IoT solutions that provide real value can be difficult without the right underlying architecture and a deep understanding of the business to properly simulate and digitalize operational entities and processes. This is where the choice of an IoT platform and the choice of an experienced service provider is important,” according to Yoshida.

“Enterprises should look for an IoT platform that offers an open, flexible architecture that simplifies integration with complementary technologies and provides an extensible ‘foundry’ on which to build a variety of industry applications that companies need to design, build, test, and deploy quickly and with minimal hassle,” added Skingsley.

#2: Object storage gets smart

Enterprises started their digital transformation this year but the first problem that they ran into was the ability to access their data. Data is often locked in isolated islands that make it costly to extract and use. These islands...