We are knee-deep in the year’s last quarter and right at the door welcoming 2020 – which is anticipated to be a highly accelerative year. This digital era comes accompanied with new, first-time kind of changes in technology, business, and society. Which needs today’s leaders to look beyond just managing business, focusing on implementing awareness, and adoption of deeply transformative enterprise models, practices and cultures within their teams.
For the past few years, most discussions on oncoming digital trends started to seem a tad monotonous. More like the same ingredients were rearranged to dish-up the same platter. 2020 will be a departure from that, reflecting upon some imminent technology facets.
By now, open source is well established as the place where software innovation happens. Reason why, we see it is further making its mark in some of the key trends we are already experiencing. Open source has retained its spot as a popular operating system in enterprise IT, with even more growth predicted. Besides, there is a mounting use of open-source platforms like Docker and Kubernetes.

Over 3.5 million applications have been placed in containers that use Docker technology, and over 37 billion containerized applications have been downloaded. Source*

Of companies with at least 60% of their DevOps portfolio as open source, a full 54% had reached the “fully deployed state”. In comparison, 20% of companies just managed to progress to DevOps due to lower levels of open-source usage. Source* 

And, while the industry is gearing for Cloud, open source is ripe in adoption. Like Bernard Golden, VP of Cloud Strat, Capital One says, “You couldn’t have cloud without open source.”
True that!
Jotting down some trends that are going to rock 2020 with open source playing a significant role in them:

1. Distributed and multi-cloud computing

Multi-Cloud is on the rise and open source will continue to disrupt the modern application stack. Newer studies reflect significant Y-O-Y growth in enterprise usage trends around multi-cloud adoption, Kubernetes, and AWS cloud-native services adoption.

An industry intelligence report, states 4 of the 6 tiers that make up the modern application stack have been disrupted by leading open source solutions – containers, orchestration, infrastructure and application services. Source*

Since no single cloud platform meets all enterprise workload requirements end-to-end, there is a growing need for different cloud platforms and settings. Hybrid cloud strategy, along with edge computing, will disrupt cloud strategy in 2020.

2. 5G Data

2020 will be the year of 5G. Giant telcos like AT&T, Verizon, Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei and more are pacing with global 5G deployments; while the world’s best Android handset makers are already releasing 5G phones. 5G will hit the ground running in 2020, bringing us faster broadband speeds, better mobile networks, also advancements in smart city, smart vehicle, smart manufacturing, and endless counts of IoT + AI-powered technologies. 5G and open source are by far two of the hottest topics in the telecom industry over the past few years. Many telcos will take advantage of open source principles in order to stay, or become, competitive in the marketplace.
In building the foundation for its US-wide 5G network, AT&T chose an innovative path. Instead of a proprietary solution, AT&T implemented an open source platform built on Kubernetes and OpenStack. “Open source provides the leverage to tackle really big problems. The scale of these projects requires a developer organization bigger than we have today. Open source lets us leverage each other,” said Van Wyk, AVP – Network Cloud SE of AT&T.

3. XR

XR (Extended Reality) may have been in its infancy, but 2020 will see the technology picking momentum to have a profound effect on business, learning and entertainment. Experts believe that XR could have a bigger impact on our day-to-day lives than the smartphones (gasp!). The industries to utilize XR technology the most in the upcoming years are education, healthcare, retail and architecture & design.
Monado is a free and open source XR platform, and the first OpenXR runtime for GNU/Linux. Monado aims to jump-start development of an open source XR ecosystem and provide the fundamental building blocks for device vendors to target the GNU/Linux platform.

4. Hyperautomation

Digitization of processes, improved connectivity with the help of the Internet (well, now 5G!), and smarter machines with AI is leading business processes for certain industries into an era of hyper-automation. It has taken the concept of automation to another level by enabling industries to do away with manual operations quite quickly, in a relatively short span of time. For instance, hyper automation in the automobile industry has a robotics arms being deployed in the assembly section. Companies like Amazon and FedEx are embracing automation at a great pace. They have used hyper automation to enhance CX and perform tasks related to logistics. Another interesting example is AT&T’s Common Machine Learning Platform, elements of which have now been released into an open source project, Acumos.

5. Voice UI

Another potential digital transformation trend is voice and conversational UI. They have been a major part of our smartphones, computers for the past few years. If you are an iPhone user you know Siri, or as an android user you know your google assistant.

HubSpot states that it’s likely that 40% of all Google search queries are made by voice and that the same number applies to people planning to buy smart speakers.

According to Statista, 39% of millennials use voice search. This audience is ready to be the early adopters of VUI systems.

Voice assistants had been released by major players like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Now, there are open source projects giving the choice to individuals to create their own personal assistants and implement it in their smart homes. Voice controls are now expanding across more platforms, connected TVs, cars, and wearables.
Open source has certainly come a long way; and now is headed towards being a core component in so many technology ingenuities. Largely, open source is witnessing a massive pull in the industry with developments that are expected to reform enterprise IT.
The future is open, and how!

Deepti tweets at @Techkween