B2B Tech Tuesday is our weekly check-in here at Spreckley, where we share all the most interesting and useful B2B and enterprise technology news, innovations and trends.
This week, we look at Gartner’s predictions for the top B2B tech trends for 2021, Cambridge superchip architect Arm’s latest game-changer for AI and machine learning and the huge boost that COVID-19 has given to business tech spending, with many businesses apparently spending a year’s worth of budget in a single quarter.
Gartner: Nine top tech trends for 2021
Firstly, TechRepublic reports on industry analyst Gartner’s predictions for top tech trends in 2021, with hyperautomation, AI and ‘the Internet of Behaviors’ amongst the nine top trends cited as ones to watch over the next 12 months.
“Operational resiliency is key as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to change how companies will do business next year,” the report notes, following the virtual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Americas conference earlier this month.
“When we talk about the strategic technology trends, we actually have them grouped into three different themes, which is people centricity, location independence, and resilient delivery,” explained Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner. “What we’re talking about with the trends is how do you leverage technology to gain the organizational plasticity that you need to form and reform into whatever’s going to be required as we emerge from this pandemic?
“We don’t prioritize these. So we don’t say that one is more important than the other,” Burke explained. “Different organizations in different industries will prioritize the impact of the trends on them as being higher or lower, but when we look really across industries and across geographies and across these trends, we think that these are the most impactful trends that organizations generally are going to face over the next five years.”
Check TechRepublic for the in-depth read on the nine tech trends to watch, as identified by Gartner.
Arm pushes the AI envelope
Next up, following its widely-publicised acquisition by Nvidia earlier this year, Cambridge superchip architect Arm is apparently powering the ‘new wave of edge AI’ according to Business Weekly.
“Arm has rolled out yet another game-changing technology in its relentless drive to transform products at the bleeding edge of AI and Machine Learning advancement,” reads the latest news report.
The game-changing AI tech in question is Arm’s new Ethos-U65 – with Arm’s Dennis Laudick, vice-president of marketing in the Machine Learning group, explaining how their latest AI tech will offer their customers “more on-device intelligence for smarter, more powerful devices that benefit from high efficiency, greater privacy, and reliability.”
Laudick describes AI and ML as representing a “once-in-a-generation paradigm shift in capability.”
COVID-19 boosts B2B tech spending
Finally, it’s been clear to many that business technology spending has had an unforeseen boost over the lockdown period of the last 7 months, although the extent of this is possibly higher than many realised.
According to a recent report on ITProPortal some businesses spent a year’s worth of budget in a single quarter in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
That’s according to a new Harvey Nash/KPMG report, “based on a poll of more than 4,200 IT leaders, which states that businesses around the world spent an extra $15 billion per week on technology as they looked to facilitate and secure remote workers.
“In just three months, businesses spent more than their total annual IT budget rise, which the report describes as “one of the biggest surges in technology investment in history”.