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Gartner Identifies Key Emerging Technologies Spurring Innovation

Engineering trust, accelerating growth and sculpting change are the three overarching trends on the Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2021 that will drive organizations to explore emerging technologies such as nonfungible tokens (NFT), sovereign cloud, data fabric, generative AI and composable networks to help secure competitive advantage.

"Technology innovation is a key enabler of competitive differentiation and is the catalyst for transforming many industries. Breakthrough technologies are continually appearing, challenging even the most innovative organizations to keep up," said Brian Burke, Research VP at Gartner. "Leading organizations will lean on the emerging technologies in this year's Hype Cycle to build trust and new growth opportunities against a background of continued strategic change and economic uncertainty."

The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies is unique among most Gartner Hype Cycles because it distils insights from more than 1,500 technologies into a succinct set of "must know" emerging technologies and trends that show promise in delivering a high degree of competitive advantage over the next five to 10 years.

"As organizations continue their focus on digital business transformation, they must accelerate change and cut through the hype surrounding emerging technologies," said Melissa Davis, Research VP at Gartner.

"This Hype Cycle provides a high-level view of important emerging trends that organizations must track, as well as the specific technologies that must be monitored through the themes of Trust, Growth and Change," said Philip Dawson, Research VP at Gartner.

Three Themes of Emerging Technology Trends

Engineering Trust: Trust demands security and reliability. However, it can also extend to building innovations as a resilient core and foundation for IT to deliver business value. This foundation must consist of engineered, repeatable, trusted, proven and scalable working practices and innovations.

For example, the market for digital and cloud technology and services is currently dominated by US and Asian providers. As a result, many European companies store their data in these regions, creating political uneasiness as well as concerns about retaining data control and complying with local regulations. Countries can engage a sovereign cloud to achieve digital and data sovereignty, which will in turn provide legal requirements to apply data protection controls, residency requirements, protectionism and intelligence gathering.

The technologies to watch to engineer trust are sovereign cloud, NFT, machine-readable legislation, decentralized identity, decentralized finance, homomorphic encryption, active metadata management, data fabric, real-time incident center and employee communications applications.

Accelerating Growth: After the trusted core business is established, recovery and growth can happen. Organizations should balance technology risk with the appetite for business risk to ensure near-term objectives are attainable. Once the innovation-led core is scaling, accelerated growth extends delivery and value.

For example, generative AI is an emerging technology that the pharmaceutical industry is using to help reduce costs and time in drug discovery. Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than 30% of new drugs and materials will be systematically discovered using generative AI techniques. Generative AI will not only augment and accelerate design in many fields; it also has the potential to "invent" novel designs that humans may have otherwise missed.

To accelerate growth, the following technologies should be explored: multiexperience, industry cloud, AI-driven innovation, quantum machine learning (ML), generative AI and digital humans.

Sculpting Change: Change is traditionally disruptive and often is tied to chaos, but organizations can use innovations to sculpt change and bring order to chaos. The art is to anticipate and auto-tune to the needs of change.

For example, composable business applications enable a better match of application experiences to a changing, operational business context. Composable business, founded on composable application technology and built with composable thinking, positions organizations to recognize and exploit business opportunities, respond to unexpected disruptions, and meet customers' changing demands at their pace, retaining their loyalty.

Organizations looking to sculpt change should consider composable applications, composable networks, AI-augmented design, AI-augmented software engineering, physics-informed AI, influence engineering, digital platform conductor tools, named data networking and self-integrating applications.

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Gartner Identifies Key Emerging Technologies Spurring Innovation

Engineering trust, accelerating growth and sculpting change are the three overarching trends on the Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2021 that will drive organizations to explore emerging technologies such as nonfungible tokens (NFT), sovereign cloud, data fabric, generative AI and composable networks to help secure competitive advantage.

"Technology innovation is a key enabler of competitive differentiation and is the catalyst for transforming many industries. Breakthrough technologies are continually appearing, challenging even the most innovative organizations to keep up," said Brian Burke, Research VP at Gartner. "Leading organizations will lean on the emerging technologies in this year's Hype Cycle to build trust and new growth opportunities against a background of continued strategic change and economic uncertainty."

The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies is unique among most Gartner Hype Cycles because it distils insights from more than 1,500 technologies into a succinct set of "must know" emerging technologies and trends that show promise in delivering a high degree of competitive advantage over the next five to 10 years.

"As organizations continue their focus on digital business transformation, they must accelerate change and cut through the hype surrounding emerging technologies," said Melissa Davis, Research VP at Gartner.

"This Hype Cycle provides a high-level view of important emerging trends that organizations must track, as well as the specific technologies that must be monitored through the themes of Trust, Growth and Change," said Philip Dawson, Research VP at Gartner.

Three Themes of Emerging Technology Trends

Engineering Trust: Trust demands security and reliability. However, it can also extend to building innovations as a resilient core and foundation for IT to deliver business value. This foundation must consist of engineered, repeatable, trusted, proven and scalable working practices and innovations.

For example, the market for digital and cloud technology and services is currently dominated by US and Asian providers. As a result, many European companies store their data in these regions, creating political uneasiness as well as concerns about retaining data control and complying with local regulations. Countries can engage a sovereign cloud to achieve digital and data sovereignty, which will in turn provide legal requirements to apply data protection controls, residency requirements, protectionism and intelligence gathering.

The technologies to watch to engineer trust are sovereign cloud, NFT, machine-readable legislation, decentralized identity, decentralized finance, homomorphic encryption, active metadata management, data fabric, real-time incident center and employee communications applications.

Accelerating Growth: After the trusted core business is established, recovery and growth can happen. Organizations should balance technology risk with the appetite for business risk to ensure near-term objectives are attainable. Once the innovation-led core is scaling, accelerated growth extends delivery and value.

For example, generative AI is an emerging technology that the pharmaceutical industry is using to help reduce costs and time in drug discovery. Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than 30% of new drugs and materials will be systematically discovered using generative AI techniques. Generative AI will not only augment and accelerate design in many fields; it also has the potential to "invent" novel designs that humans may have otherwise missed.

To accelerate growth, the following technologies should be explored: multiexperience, industry cloud, AI-driven innovation, quantum machine learning (ML), generative AI and digital humans.

Sculpting Change: Change is traditionally disruptive and often is tied to chaos, but organizations can use innovations to sculpt change and bring order to chaos. The art is to anticipate and auto-tune to the needs of change.

For example, composable business applications enable a better match of application experiences to a changing, operational business context. Composable business, founded on composable application technology and built with composable thinking, positions organizations to recognize and exploit business opportunities, respond to unexpected disruptions, and meet customers' changing demands at their pace, retaining their loyalty.

Organizations looking to sculpt change should consider composable applications, composable networks, AI-augmented design, AI-augmented software engineering, physics-informed AI, influence engineering, digital platform conductor tools, named data networking and self-integrating applications.

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According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
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From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...