Technology and business trends for 2018 - what to expect, what to be prepared for.

1. by Anthony DeLima | Principal | Cartenia Group Inc. | adelima@cartenia.com
If you thought 2017 was a wild ride, then brace
yourself for 2018. The year is likely to bring about a
whole new generation of technologies and capabilities
that will fundamentally reshape our universe. As it is,
our personal lives have already been changed by a total
and complete digital connection to devices, people, and
things. The so-called Digital mesh is no longer a future
trend - it's our reality. The way we work, play and live
is now synchronized into a digital continuum that cuts
across time, space, devices, and relationships that
blends real-time contextual information about our
behavior, needs, and wants into a personalized
experience and unique digital footprint.

2. WHAT 2017 MEANT
Looking back, 2017 will likely be remembered as the
year in which technologies that not so long ago seemed
too futuristic to be viable, became mainstream.
"More data, faster connectivity, better
insight, greater scalability, more
immersive customer experiences,
architectural innovation, and hyper
responsiveness are just some trends that
reshaped our views of the future."
But if these change drivers were not enough,
Blockchain is radically resetting our views on how we
interact, manage assets, control uncertainties, exchange
value, and the role traditional institutions will play in a
rapidly evolving economic system and global society.
These trends are dramatically altering core business
DNA and driving a rethinking of how movements and
brands are created. Hierarchical structures are out the
door and so are traditional management styles and
collaboration strategies. New jobs, new management
approaches, a growing millennial workforce, and new
digitally-enabled products and services are just some of

3. the areas that are driving companies to rethink their
very existence, recognizing that failure to rapidly adapt
and change will be fatal.
Disruption across all industry sectors is fueled by
innovative technology capabilities. But determining
how these capabilities can alter the organization's
thinking about what it is and what it can be, requires a
different level of thinking at the Business and Tech
leadership level. If you don't understand what it means
to be digitally driven, how to create new customer
experiences, transform your products and services to be
hypersensitive to the customer's behavior, and how
technologies such as AI, Cognitive computing, IoT,
and API management can enable new value creation,
you are in serious trouble. Your peers are moving fast
and are creating agile problem solving and
collaboration teams that are rapidly reshaping their
organization's view of tomorrow.
Then there is the fundamental question of value; how
does a business deliver value in a new social and
economic environment. What role should a business
play within their industry's value-chain? Are traditional
notions of products and services still valid, or should a
new services-based approach be adopted to redefine

4. the organization's strategy, purpose, and value to key
stakeholders? In response, many companies rushed to
create new digitally enabled products and services that
leverage an API ecosystem to provide easy
connectivity and leverage. Others aggressively
migrated to Cloud-based software as a service (SaaS)
platforms in an attempt to gain transformation
momentum. Others embraced the Cloud (public or
hybrid) as a platform for innovation and disruption.
While these tactics seemed on target, the implications
to the organization, the underlying Tech ecosystem,
data and back-office processes have proven to be ill-
defined or understood resulting in disappointing
outcomes in terms of capability, cost, speed, resiliency,
and alignment with what the customer really wants.
2018 RETHINKING TOMORROW
The theme for this year's insights for 2018, "Rethinking
Tomorrow," is based on the belief that companies can
no longer afford a transformative approach to
redefining their future mission and value. Rather they
must be prepared to fundamentally rethink the future
role of their businesses across vertical and horizontal
value chains, recognizing that this should be based on a
deep-rooted commitment to adopt innovative

5. technology capabilities that customers and partners
have come to expect. Anything less will disappoint and
likely yield a fatal outcome.
"Several favorable drivers are set to fuel
greater economic expansion and corporate
growth."
A global upswing in economic activity, increased
productivity and lower inflationary rates all indicate a
favorable future. In the U.S., assuming that new fiscal
policies yield a positive effect on corporate spending,
businesses will likely improve productivity in line with
a moderate increase in consumer spending. Improved

6. economic conditions also fuel investments in startups
and disruptors who will place immense pressures on
traditional companies to rethink their value
proposition, or, create new partnerships with lucrative
startups that can help fuel innovation.
As the economy powers ahead, corporations will have
to figure out how to manage a new global workforce
that increasingly consists of millennials who demand
new more flexible work models and more advanced
digital capabilities to allow them to work and
collaborate globally in ways never before envisioned.
The impact of this on Tech spending and resulting
innovation will be significant.
Considering projected consumer growth and a general
demand for better engagement models, companies will
need to invest heavily in new capabilities to a enable a
new customer engagement approach - an improved
Omni-channel experience, augmented reality, natural
language processing, and a fundamental rethinking of
the entire digital marketing strategy are just some areas
that will undergo significant change.
2018 TECH LANDSCAPE
Our list of 2018 opportunities is by no means all-
inclusive. Rather it is meant to highlight the most
significant trends that in our opinion are mutually

7. reinforcing and have similar disruptive characteristics.
1. CONVERGED EXPERIENCE
While Blockchain, cognitive computing, AI and other
technologies are enjoying massive media attention, a
continued push to redefine and recreate the customer
experience will likely be a top priority for 2018.
Augmented and virtual reality, video chats, and
enhanced mobility will without a doubt enhance the
user interface layer and customer experience. However,

8. the impact of delivering these capabilities transcends
every aspect of a company's ecosystem, including the
basic understanding of what the corporate culture is or
should be.
Delighting customers across every engagement point
has proven to be difficult. Notwithstanding, it's the
customer's experience that increasingly differentiates
one brand from another. It's less about the logo,
messaging and product and more about transaction
efficiency, a seamless experience across all touchpoints
and a feedback system that is open, transparent, and
shows how the company pre-emptively meets "my
needs." The feeling of being connected to a community
of like-minded customers makes a difference. Having
easy access to content that helps in product evaluation
is a plus. Too, fostering a personalized connection
helps set the brand apart. But no aspect of the
customer engagement will prove to be more
powerful than enabling a smooth, efficient and
consistent experience across all touchpoints.
To achieve this goal, companies will increasingly focus
on creating a converged digital roadmap and operating
model that ensures a consistent experience across all
channels including the Web, Email, Mobile Apps,
Video chat, Social networks, Chatbots, and others.

9. Too, as augmented and virtual reality continues to push
the innovation edge and serving up near real-life
experiences, companies will need to focus on ensuring
a similar in-store experience.
Arguably, in 2018, virtual reality technologies that
redefine and enhance the customer experience may
start to provide a fully immersive and realistic
representation of the real-world that may turn out to
provide a better experience than visiting a real store.
2. AI ASSISTED WORKFORCE

10. AI-based solutions will continue to help transform and
personalize the customer experience. Chatbots and
virtual shopping assistants that leverage Big data will
continue to deliver an efficient and rapid support
experience that exceeds a human’s ability to react.
Delivering predictive product recommendations,
tailored content (including Video), personalized ads
based on a customer buying trends or search history,
optimized pricing and dynamic structuring of Web and
Mobile experience should be table stakes for 2018.
In 2018 we will see further proliferation of AI into
every aspect of the workplace. AI coupled with deep
learning, predictive analytics, and big data will
dramatically reshape how companies react and
respond. More than delivering a personalized, dynamic
experience, businesses will leverage AI to rethink core
processes such as supply-chain, financial management,
sales, and operations planning (S&OP), materials
requirements planning (MRP) and others. Too, AI is
poised to play a significant role in reshaping the IT
organization as a whole. AI will eventually take over
mundane tasks such as predictive monitoring and
incident management, configuration management, and
controlling the scaling of computing capacity (storage

11. and processor capacity).
We will also witness significant AI disruption at the
workforce level. AI capabilities such as deep learning,
advanced semantics, Cognitive and other capabilities
will drive the creation of a hybrid workplace, where
workers become increasingly reliant on AI to achieve
massive productivity gains. This will also result in a
significant push to scale-up the workforce to leverage
these new tools and capabilities.
By adopting new AI technologies, companies will
undoubtedly impact their workforce. Whatever
displacement may result, proper planning and training
should help transform these employees to conduct
newer, higher-level tasks. Nevertheless, the transition
will be highly disruptive as traditional work models are
reshaped.

12. 3. DATA MANAGEMENT
Structured and unstructured data originating from
traditional transactional systems, IoT sensors, social
media, sophisticated customer-facing end-points and
other sources will continue to proliferate at exponential
speeds. This combined with powerful AI capabilities is
set to create a perfect storm unless a comprehensive
data management approach is adopted.
As discussed throughout this article, AI will play a
crucial role in predicting human behavior and relaying
this knowledge to every aspect of a company’s
ecosystem – whether this is how content is served,
supply-chain is structured or critical MRP decisions are

13. made. Too, increasingly data is used to create new
monetization opportunities and deliver new value.
Controls around data ingestion and quality
management will be key. And so will the underlying
architecture that enables access to core data across
enterprise systems and beyond corporate boundaries.
However, companies are faced with two critical
strategic imperatives: data governance & stewardship
and master data management (MDM).
Traditional data management no longer meets the need
of businesses that are focused on extracting the highest
value of knowledge by evaluating data relationships
and deriving analytics that can help steer critical
management decisions and the company's critical
operations. In response, companies will continue to
hire chief data officers (CDO) and data scientists who
have cross enterprise responsibility and accountability
to ensure data is properly curated, managed and
accessed.
Master data management is by no means a new topic.
MDM comprises the processes, governance,
policies, standards, and tools that consistently
define and manage the critical data of an
organization to provide a single point of reference.
MDM combines elements of data governance, data

14. quality, and data integration to ensure that the right
master data is presented to the right system at the right
time. Companies have tackled the subject of master
data management in a number of different ways.
Various approaches exist including pub-sub, federated
and others. However, most approaches require some
level of human intervention to reconcile master data
across various source systems – a process that is often
time-consuming and prone to errors.
In 2018, we will likely see greater MDM automation
and data discovery. Rather than creating static MDM
structures, AI and deep learning will provide dynamic
data management that can discover and correct data
mistakes before these are proliferated across the
enterprise. AI will also help in establishing data
relationships and context which will further automate
the process of managing data and establishing virtual
golden records.

15. 4. API INTEGRATION
At the heart of any company's, digital strategy lies an
API integration layer. In a previous article, we
examined the strategies for successfully managing
APIs to deliver an integrated customer journey and
creating new value-added services by exposing data
assets and services beyond the corporate boundary. In
2018, businesses will continue to pursue strategies to
create and monetize market facing APIs and deliver
new value. More than a strategy to reuse programming
objects, the development of RESTful APIs will deliver
on the promise to integrate and connect systems and
services both within and beyond corporate boundaries.
In fact, most modern-day end-points (i.e., Mobile
APPs, Web-based portals) and core systems (i.e., ERP,
and legacy) should rely on an API integration layer to
interconnect.
In contrast to previous integration patterns that were

16. based on a complex web of enterprise service buses
(ESB) and SOAP protocols to enable the exchange of
structured information, companies will increasingly
rely on integration platform as a service (iPaaS) API
management platforms to facilitate process
orchestration across multiple software systems.
Fast forward to 2018, organizations will likely face a
critical challenge in changing the organization's
thinking about how it can effectively and securely
expose and provide access to digital assets and
transactional data that can reshape its products and
services vision. Traditional silo approaches to protect
and control departmental systems will represent a
major constraint.
"In the end, API management will not be a
technology problem to be solved but a
business challenge to be addressed that
requires board level discussion about what
the company's long-term business strategy
is or should be."
The view should be that everything the company does,
whether it's a product, a service, a piece of content,
structured or unstructured data should be represented
through an API management layer. Increasingly
businesses and software development organizations

17. will shift their attention more towards process
orchestration than development. By exposing assets
and their characteristics through an API
management layer, new business process
interactions can be dynamically defined.
5. INTERNET OF THINGS
The adoption of IoT as a critical component of an
overall digital strategy has steadily increased. In 2018,
IoT will become even more widely adopted as
businesses pursue capabilities that go beyond
enhancing the customer experience, enabling better
data collection or creating new revenue streams.
Businesses will increase their adoption of IoT as a
critical component of core operational processes.
While the trend around smart home products will
continue to expand, a significant focus will be placed
on leveraging IoT in areas such as manufacturing,
logistics and transportation management – the goal will

18. be to adopt IoT capabilities in areas where a significant
improvement in operational efficiency and cost
reduction can be attained.
New connectivity options such as low-power wide area
networks (LPWAN), Cat-M1, and 5G will deliver
more efficient and cost-effective network coverage
thus enabling connectivity to all types of devices even
in hard-to-reach places.
"The greatest challenge will be in defining
an IoT platform and architecture strategy
for the enterprise."
As IoT becomes an integral part of a company's Tech
ecosystem, the challenge to establish a cost-effective
integration fabric that ties together devices,
applications and big data platforms will become
significant. Businesses will no longer be able to afford
siloed IoT solutions. Nor, can one-off integration
patterns be applied as these eventually constrain
integration and become significant long-term tech debt.
Security will continue to be a concern as IoT takes on
critical operational tasks across devices and machines.
Maintaining devices up to date with the latest software
and controls to minimize the risk of security breaches

19. will be paramount. The risks are real as attackers will
likely disrupt and paralyze IoT driven systems on a
large scale.
6. BLOCKCHAIN
While the meteoric rise in the price of Bitcoin and
other cryptocurrencies that leverage Blockchain, has
triggered massive media attention, traditional and
startups are aggressively pursuing opportunities to
launch new solutions that use the technology. These
new solutions leverage encrypted, distributed ledgers
that are managed across a peer network to validate
trust, transparency, and accountability of transactions.

20. The broad adoption of Blockchain, whilst still in its
early stages, will significantly redefine how business is
conducted and how transactions are managed and
validated globally, thereby dramatically disrupting
traditional market structures and relationships.
Opportunities for disruption can be found in Financial
services, healthcare, supply-chain management,
payments processing, insurance management and
others. The impact of Blockchain technology on
traditional transaction-based business models will be
significant as the cost of ensuring transaction integrity
is challenged. Businesses that depend on brokering
transactions worldwide as their main revenue source
will be forced to rethink their business models.
We will witness major investments and capital inflows
from private equity and institutional investors into
startups that focus on creating Blockchain-enabled
solutions. Blockchain should be one of the primary
agenda items for executive management for 2018. At a
minimum, there should be a clear understanding of the
impact of the technology and how it is likely to reshape
the relationship between stakeholders within, or across
an industry value-chain. Too, there should be an initial
roadmap that defines adoption and impact to the
company's existing business and technology

21. ecosystem.
7. SOFTWARE DEFINED SERVICES
Cloud computing combined with virtualization has
come a long way to modernize the tasks associated
with dynamic resource allocation and storage

22. management. However, software defined services
(SDS) will go much further to enable elasticity across
all core technology components. In 2018 we are likely
to see an even greater push for Software-defined wide
area networks (WAN), data centers, security services
even configuration of entire virtual private cloud
(VPC) instances. Considering the dynamic nature of a
business and the resulting unpredictability of
computing capacity demands, companies will require
SDS as a core component of their overall Tech
strategy.
AI will take center stage in enabling SDS automation
by predictively assessing and configuring services.
Dynamic resource allocation and network routing will
be key to meeting the needs of the business as it scales
to meet customer and core operational demands.

23. 8. ERP
The trend to migrate to SaaS ERP systems as a strategy
to retire traditional on-premise monolithic back-office
systems will continue. However, companies will
increasingly face major application integration
challenges. Whether on-premise or Cloud-based, single
monolithic systems that are tightly coupled will
represent a major hurdle and constraint for businesses
that seek to achieve a seamless and converged
customer experience across various end-points and
channels. This combined with the need to integrate AI,
IoT and other technologies that will help create a new,
differentiating value proposition will likely be one of

24. the major challenges to be tackled during 2018.
Historically, many ERP projects are still compromised
in time, cost and expected business outcomes.
Inevitably business will find out that migrating to a
SaaS solution does not relieve the organization of
making critical decisions about how new processes and
structure will have to be implemented to enable a
seamless and dynamic customer experience. There is
no avoiding the crucial process of envisioning new
end-to-end processes such as order-to-cash and plan-to-
manufacture (that leverage industry-specific best
practices) while injecting critical thinking around how
predictive analytics and cognitive can and should
impact these processes.
Aside from the natural language capabilities that AI-
Enabled ERP systems will provide to simplify
traditional data input tasks, the greatest value of
incorporating and linking AI to core ERP back-office
systems is leveraging big data to dynamically alter
supply-chain, MRP and distribution processes and
structures.

25. 9. CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Creating and consistently publishing original and
creative content will continue to be a key strategy to
build customer trust and brand loyalty. Content will
also continue to be one of the most critical components
of a company's digital marketing strategy - customers
tend to attach a deeper value to a brand due to visually-
rich and interactive messaging which consequently
results in higher conversions.
Having a clear content management (CMS) platform
strategy and plan should also be table stakes for the
next year. Having a clear roadmap that defines how AI

26. will transform the company's content management
strategy will be key. AI combined with deep learning
and predictive analytics to interpret and dynamically
serve customer-specific content will be a key
differentiator - predicting customer choices and
dynamically serving pertinent content will continue to
create significant brand loyalty.
Considering the need to embed content across multiple
end-points and channels, companies will need to
develop and/or integrate an open content management
platform that provides powerful content management
functionality combined with an open API layer that
allows for cross-platform connections and dynamic
content creation - the goal should be to minimize the
number of instances of disparate CMS platforms across
the enterprise.

27. 10. CYBERSECURITY
Considering the continued trend in digital integration
across platforms and organizational boundaries,
businesses will face an increased proliferation of
Cyberattacks. New approaches to access and expose
sensitive data will continue to rise while hackers will
pursue new sophisticated Ransomware tactics that
could cripple a business. Social engineering threats that
exploit human errors will continue to rise.
To respond to these threats and address a growing
shortage of Cybersecurity talent, business will
increasingly rely on managed security service
providers (MSSP) to provide oversight and
preemptively manage and mitigate security risks.

28. However, this approach will only be successful if a true
partnership exists between internal security teams and
MSSPs. MSSPs can provide valuable insight into
security threats and offer a rapid response. On the other
hand, understanding the vulnerabilities and impact of
business process disruption will be a task better suited
for internal security teams.
Leveraging AI and predictive analytics will become
increasingly useful in user and event behavior analytics
(UEBA) solutions. We will witness a further
proliferation of solutions and products that aim at
analyzing Big data on human behavior to uncover
suspicious activity and preemptively trigger alerts.
While technology and sophisticated detection and
prevention techniques will reduce the risk of
Cybersecurity attacks, increased focus on education
and awareness training will further minimize the risk of
security breaches. Security awareness should focus on
educating users on security threats, vulnerabilities, and
techniques employed by attackers.

29. 11. CLOUD SERVICES
Cloud services are now a key component of every
company’s technology ecosystem. Driven by the
increased need for data storage, a shift to SaaS
solutions and the need for a more elastic computing
capacity that can scale on demand, IT organizations are
rapidly transforming traditional company owned and
operated data centers to virtual private cloud (VPC)
infrastructures.
"In 2018 companies will accelerate the
transformation of their core computing
environment to leverage Cloud services."
Traditional corporate MPLS network backbones will
be quickly transformed into software-defined WAN

30. solutions that are tuned to deliver global, consistent
and reliable access to corporate systems and third-party
SaaS solutions. Datacenter-centric networking
infrastructures that were initially designed to backhaul
traffic to corporate hubs will be retired and replaced by
connections to service providers that can intelligently
route traffic to Cloud-based corporate infrastructures
across global regions while providing secured internet
access with guaranteed quality of service to SaaS
platforms.
Localized infrastructures that enable access to
corporate domains will be migrated to hyper-converged
computing infrastructures (HCI) that provide a higher
level of operational integrity. Companies will continue
to leverage Cloud-based infrastructure services such as
single sign-on (SSO), to provide uniform access to the
corporate ecosystem. The trend to reduce the level of
internal “utility services” will continue, thereby
transforming the services that the IT organization
delivers to be less focused on "keeping the lights on"
and more on delivering value-added solution
engineering and integration services.
Considering the growth in the Mobile workforce,
companies will continue to invest in Cloud-based
collaboration services that provide seamless video and

31. messaging capability that enable efficient and effective
workforce collaboration.
With the continued proliferation of data (gathered
through IoT or social listening) and the need for
complex analytics, companies will increasingly rely on
Cloud service providers to host sophisticated data lakes
that enable real-time and cost-effective analytics and
mining. Businesses will need to implement improved
processes to manage and control the costs associated
with the rapid surge of departmental data lakes.
Cloud services will also play a significant role in
enabling new and complex IoT interactions - enabling
rapid scaling of both computing and storage capacity
will be key.

32. CONCLUSIONS
Next year's opportunities will be significant and
impactful. Executive leadership will be faced with
having to make tough choices in setting priorities and
investment levels. At the same time, businesses will be
operating in an environment that is fast-paced, highly
competitive, disruptive and unpredictable.
Customers will continue to increase their expectations
for connecting and interacting with businesses. To
reshape core value, companies will have to invest in
technology architectures that will be crucial to
delivering innovative capabilities - justifying and
quantifying the initial benefits of these investments
will be challenging. Yet, companies should resist
taking short-cuts and implementing window-dressing
solutions that ultimately restrict and constrain the
company from reaping the benefits that new
technologies provide.
Maximizing and optimizing the connection and
relationship between people, processes, technology,
devices, and systems should be a primary goal for
all businesses. However, achieving this goal and
creating a dramatic and differentiating impact on how
customers interact with the brand will equally prove to

33. be a complex undertaking mostly because this is not
solely a technology problem to be solved. Changing
the organization's thinking about how it works,
collaborates, creates value while at the same time
instilling a relentless passion for delighting customers
will prove to be far more difficult.
Ultimately, attracting and retaining innovative talent
combined with the need to drive massive cultural
change that crosses traditional organizational
boundaries will prove to be one of the biggest
challenges for 2018.
Anthony DeLima | Principal | Cartenia Group Inc. |
adelima@cartenia.com