International Data Corporation (IDC) has made some predictions for the New Zealand IT industry for 2018 and beyond. In a statement, the market watcher said its predictions reflect the maturity and growth of New Zealand’s digital economy, ‘with many organisations accustomed to leveraging digital innovation platforms’.

Over the next two years, IDC said it expects this will manifest in expanding digital developer communities, open innovation ecosystems, hyper-agile application deployment technologies and a more diverse cloud services world.

“With 3rd Platform technologies [cloud, mobility, big data and social] now deeply embedded ino New Zealand organisations, CIOs and digital leadership teams are now ramping up investment in the digital economy opportunity,” said Louise Francis, Senior Research Manager, IDC New Zealand.

She said digital natives are here and companies must respond by themselves acting as digital natives by investing beyond 3rd Platform technologies. “It is no longer about piecemeal investment but largescale investment taking advantage of the foundations that have been laid down over the past five years.”

IDC’s predictions for this year, in no particular order, are:

1. DX Economy tipping point: by 2021, at least 50 percent of New Zealand’s GDP will be digitised, with growth in every industry driven by digitally enhanced offerings, operations, and relationships; by 2020, investors will use platform, data value, and customer engagement metrics as valuation factors for all enterprises.
2. DX platforms: By 2020, 60 percent of all NZ enterprises will have fully articulated an organisation-wide digital transformation (DX) platform strategy, and will be in the process of implementing that strategy as the new IT core for competing in the digital economy.
3. Cloud 2.0: Distributed and specialised: By 2021, enterprises’ spending on cloud services and cloud-enabling hardware, software, and services will more than double to over NZ$2.6-billion, leveraging the diversifying cloud environment that is 20 percent at the edge, over 15 percent specialised compute (non-X86 compute including GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and quantum computers), and over 85 percent multi-cloud.
4. AI everywhere: By 2019, 40 percent of digital transformation initiatives will use AI services; by 2021, 75 percent of commercial enterprise apps will use AI, over 75 percent of consumers will interact with customer support bots, and over 50 percent of new industrial robots will leverage AI.
5. Hyper-agile apps: By 2021, enterprise apps will shift toward hyper-agile architectures, with 90 percent of application development on cloud platforms (PaaS) using microservices and cloud functions (e.g., AWS Lambda and Azure Functions) and over 95 percent of new microservices will be deployed in containers (e.g. Docker).
6. Human digital interfaces: By 2020, human-digital interfaces will diversify, as 20 percent of field service techs and 20 percent of info workers use augmented reality, nearly 30 percent of new mobile apps use voice as a primary interface, and nearly 40 percent of the consumer-facing NZX50 use biometric sensors to personalise experiences.
7. Blockchain and digital trust: By 2021, at least 25 percent of NZX organisations will use blockchain services as a foundation for digital trust at scale.
8. Everyone’s a data provider: By 2020, 75 percent of large enterprises will generate revenue from data as a service — from the sale of raw data, derived metrics, insights, and recommendations — up from nearly 30 percent in 2017.
9. Everyone’s a developer: Improvements in simple, “Low Code/No Code”, development tools will dramatically expand the number of nontech developers over the next 36 months; by 2021, these nontraditional developers will build 15 percent of business applications and 25 percent of new application features.
10. Open API ecosystem: By 2021, more than half of NZX companies will see an average of one-third of their digital services interactions come through their open API ecosystems, up from virtually none in 2017 — amplifying their digital reach far beyond their own customer interactions.

“Many New Zealand organisations have already reached a level of technological maturity to advance to the next stage of digital evolution, becoming a true Digital Native,” said Francis.

“The only things that can hold them back will be an innovation impasse caused by legacy systems constraining transformation and a lack of business vision. However, 2018 will provide the opportunity for all organisations to unleash digital innovation’s power for digital-centric transformation altering business and society at scale.”

The original version of this article appeared here: https://istart.co.nz/nz-news-items/new-zealands-tech-industry-2018-predictions/