Page 15 - Issue 1 2023

COMMENT

Top tech predictions for 2023

By Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and co-COO of Dell Technologies, explains how
technology will rise to meet new expectations in the data era.

022 has been a rollercoaster. I don’t think any of us could have predicted what
was coming. The constant through it all has been the importance of technology to
2overcome our near-term obstacles and to realise our long-term opportunities.
The technological innovation that drives human progress is accelerating. With
hyperconnectivity spanning multiple cloud environments and the edge, we now have
data everywhere. Simply put, it’s growing not only in quantity, but in value every day.
At the forefront of this advancement and growth, we will experience new
expectations. We will expect technology to make our lives easier, and our businesses
more successful. We will expect that technology to help us advance forward in big areas
from education to healthcare to government services and beyond. As a result, we will
see our essential technologies and their corresponding user experiences rise to meet
the challenge.

As we look ahead to 2023, I see four themes rising to the top of the CIO agenda:

Jeff Clarke
Technology will define the work experience
In the do-anything-from-anywhere economy, the future of work is evolving, and as we
design for a hybrid world, technology rather than physical workspace, will increasingly public, private, edge and even telecom
define the employee experience. This is a blue-sky opportunity to design what works clouds to power their business. This
best for you, your company and your culture. “multiple cloud” stage creates huge
Version one of work-from-anywhere during the early stages of the COVID pandemic access to innovation within each
was all about the “anywhere” part. We used the mobility of modern clients to take cloud but inevitably creates silos and
our work, school and life to wherever we needed it. The next phase of this journey is duplication of data. The siloed clouds
about making the “work” part better. We need the right tools and devices, the right look like walled gardens.
workspaces for collaboration, and the right culture to make work, well, work. In 2022, we started to see an
Being a student is different than being a doctor, teacher, engineer or data scientist. industry shift to true “multicloud”
We now realise that having the right client capability, form factor and most importantly, architectures. These use the compute
ecosystem of peripherals, creates the complete environment needed to excel. We services of whatever clouds you
have seen investments in advanced display technology dramatically improve the embrace but also focus on turning
effectiveness of developing software remotely. We have also seen better audio and important capabilities ”horizontal”
video capability create a dramatic difference in remote learning. A personalised and across the multicloud environment. A
optimised environment can be a path to real differentiation for users. good example of this is storage and data
As a result, there will be a rising end-user expectation to seamlessly connect people as a common service all your clouds can
to people, as well as to the data, applications and services they care about. After all, access. Multicloud edge capabilities are
from building culture to driving innovation to serving customers, technology is the being launched, and cyber resiliency
fulcrum of progress. So, no matter how organisations approach the future of work, the and cyber vault technologies are already
modern work experience will be defined by technology. horizontal capabilities across clouds.
Even the focus on Zero Trust security is
Walled gardens will crumble into tech ecosystems really all about making sure the security
The global technology industry is massive and growing every day. The good news is that architecture of multicloud is a common
there is no shortage of innovation to address the breadth of business opportunities. The horizontal service, not a collection of
tradeoff is that with each new facet of innovation, organisations are left with sprawl and silos.
complexity. One other interesting area is the
For example, in the early days of cloud, most companies ended up adopting multiple digital transformation of our telecom

EngineerIT | Issue 1 2023 | 15