At Timspark, we strive to be one step ahead and see where to get a competitive edge. Our Chief Delivery Officer, Sergey Bondarev, has analyzed the most significant technology trends likely to shape the industry for the next few years. Read on to discover how to leverage and keep the balance between tech trends and business needs, and see how Timspark navigates this challenge.

Timspark’s approach to analyzing trends

As the digital landscape continues to evolve and many buzzwords are hitting the market, it is essential to maintain a clear understanding of the matter. How you perceive trends is always the question of your approach. I’ve turned to a range of trusted sources to comprehensively understand what trends to look out for. These included:

• leading consultants in the field (McKinsey, Deloitte, Gartner, Forrester, Mercer)
• popular expert development resources (GitHub, Stack Overflow, Technology Radar)
• leading business magazines (Forbes, Harvard Business Review)
• and, no less necessary, my colleagues’ valuable expertise.

Overall, Sergey managed to identify 65 trends. However, moving on to the specifics, you can only have some things on the plate and test hypotheses with all the trends simultaneously within your business model. Therefore, rather than go blindfolded, I took the next step of breaking down all the trends.

How you can analyze trends

When diving into the vast range of trends in the field, I applied the following criteria that helped me to highlight the most significant ones. 

1. Trend source and its credibility level (the source credibility expertise-wise)
For instance, I chose Gartner, Deloitte, and Mercer as the most reliable business consultants and Stackoverflow as the most well-known source of technical reviews.

2. Trend level

Here, I looked into how trends may affect different operation layers—whether they affect only the technical level, like applying new technologies, having a broader scope on the solution level, or concern processes with employees.

Depending on what area of development your business is focusing on at the particular moment, it may influence your choice—whether you consider it or not.

3. Potential durability level

Some trends may last, while some of them may go. Therefore, I prefer to conduct some analysis to see whether the trend will hold for a year, more than a couple of years, or probably will shape the decades of the digital and business realm.

For business, it is the factor that is the basis for feasibility and return on investment.

 4. Primary affected tech area

Here, we speak about the spheres affected by the trend.
Trends can be universal for several tech areas or have an impact on a specific area, for instance:  

1. 1. • Data
      • DevOps
      • Platforms
      • Architecture
      • Hardware
      • Management
      • Backend
      • Frontend
      • Mobile
      • Design
      • Security
      • QA,
        
        to name a few.

        The next step was to devise a formula for calculating the business’s trend perspective, taking all the factors into account.

Trend Perspective consists of Trend Popularity and Durability. Here Popularity means the overall number of mentions in the chosen resources multiplied by its credibility level.

As for Durability, one should consider it is a more weighty factor than Popularity, thus avoiding short-life trends that may lose ground in a year or two and, therefore, do not have long-term perspectives for your business.

Thus, I suggest such grades for Durability: 

Continual (<5 years)
Long Term (<3 years)
Medium Term (<2 years)
Short Term (<1 years)

If this seems feasible for you already, you can use this takeaway and focus on the possible directions for your business. Yet, you can go further by setting a rating for each trend, and it will help you be even more selective and focused.

I suggest that the gradation of “How it fits your company” goes from low to high and calculated in percentages, yet you are free to apply a shortened or extended scale: 

Low — 20%
Medium — 50%
Good — 70%
High — 100%

The approach described above can be applied to any trends you encounter if you want to analyze them deeper and weigh their relevance to your business objectives.

Global Business Trends and Correlation with Tech Trends

Overall, business trends define challenges and gaps, while tech trends describe a way of how these challenges can be solved with disruptive technologies, or needs in such technologies. Therefore, businesses should have a robust IT infrastructure that supports today’s business needs while innovating with an intention for the future.

The most perspective business trends go as follows:

Scalability and growth (95%)

To scale and grow seamlessly, it’s crucial to develop technology that can be easily adapted to different business models or scaled as needed in the future. If your company’s product or processes might require costly changes, investing in scalable technology solutions is essential.

For instance, BI allows you to gather and analyze valuable data about your business and customers. The data lets you spot trends, monitor performance, and make informed decisions based on data, helping you scale your business more effectively.

With the long-term perspective and popularity, this trend gets the top grade.

Advanced automation and decisions (78%)

Automation is the technology that is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but a ‘must-have,’ able to improve business and employee performance across every department: sales, service, marketing, commerce, IT, human resources, finance, and more. 

By saying ‘automation,’ we mostly imply processes with DevOps, RPA (Robotic process automation), AI, and data-driven decisions. The trend is relatively durable and popular.

Cost savings (66%)

The trend’s popularity throughout different sources is not high, yet it looks rather durable and likely to stay for a couple of years. Especially with the continuing economic uncertainty, cost optimization becomes a critical theme for any business, whether a small enterprise or a tech giant. And digital transformation can significantly reduce costs. 

Possible cost-effective and scalable solutions range from automated AI and ML solutions and cloud computing to data management.

Security and reliability improvement (66%)

Though the trend’s popularity in the media is moderate, its significance for businesses cannot be overlooked. Ensuring data reliability is crucial for meeting regulatory requirements and building customer trust. Today, customers expect companies to not only protect that data but also expect more valuable insights from these companies, like offering personalized products and services. 

Reliability problems can affect organizations differently depending on their size. For example, small service-based businesses may experience impacts on management and staff, whereas larger enterprise-level organizations could potentially face disruptions in vendor relationships, distribution channels, and transportation operations. Blockchain or cloud security solutions, For instance, can address such challenges.

Innovations (62%)

Last but not least, we should mention innovations as the driving force for businesses that want to gain and keep the competitive edge. Technology acts as a catalyst here, and innovation can be scaled. Research and Development (R&D), data analytics, and automation are some possible solutions to drive innovation within your company, and the list could go on.

Now let’s dive deeper into the essence of the most meaningful tech trends.

Cloud computing and moving to cloud (92%)

With multiple cloud solutions available, businesses can choose the most suitable cloud services for each workload or application. For example, they might use one cloud provider for storage and another for computing resources. It helps spread workloads across multiple cloud providers and reduces the risk of downtime or service disruptions. All these solutions, each in its way, offer flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency, as users can access computing resources on-demand and pay only for what they use. Here are some of them marking a milestone in how businesses can use technologies to their advantage.

Cloud edge and computing
Cloud and edge computing involves distributing computing workloads across remote data centers and local nodes to improve data sovereignty, autonomy, resource productivity, latency, and security.

Moving to cloud
According to recent research, organizations are increasingly looking to move their IT estate to the cloud by 2025 (about 60%), utilizing multi-cloud architecture and industry cloud platforms. However, moving to the cloud requires careful planning and execution to ensure a successful transition. Businesses must evaluate their current IT infrastructure, data, applications, and security needs before choosing a cloud provider and planning the migration process.

Industry cloud platforms
They can be highly beneficial for businesses as they come with prepackaged applications and configurations designed to meet the industry’s specific needs. Companies can save time and money by developing custom solutions and instead focus on their core business operations. Additionally, industry cloud platforms provide shared resources, and users can scale them to match their needs and pay only for what they use.

Cloud economics 

Recent research has shown that companies tend to focus on cloud costs once they break $100 million, which is not just a tremendous waste but also a wasted opportunity to generate value. In that respect, cloud economics can potentially transform businesses with such practices as cloud infrastructure audit and improvement, cost optimization, and account management.

Digital Immune System (DIS)
Last but not least, one recent trend is implementing DIS solutions. Thus, Gartner predicts that companies investing in creating digital immunity can reduce downtime by 80% and increase customer satisfaction significantly by the year 2025. 

AI solutions (85%)

AI technologies have already achieved mainstream exposure decades ago and are improving time-to-market, as they require less Involvement in code and speed the testing process. For instance, Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features, like code completions, natural language to code generation and even a code-assisting chatbot.

Applied AI

In practice, Applied AI is used in various industries, from healthcare and Finance to transportation and manufacturing. The creation of self-driven robots, face and object detection for security, speech recognition for customer assistance, user behavior analytics, forecasting services for manufacturing, and sensor data processing for error and damage detection are just a few solutions with AI assistance. Applied AI holds great promise to solve complex problems but requires careful planning and execution. Proper selection, design, and deployment of AI-based systems can bring significant benefits to businesses, including increased efficiency, productivity, and profitability.

Adaptive AI

As adaptive AI can learn from its experience and automatically adjust its functionality and performance to optimize results, it becomes a solution where you must deal with dynamic data volumes. For example, an adaptive chatbot can learn from past interactions to identify patterns and improve its conversation quality. AI integrations of online training algorithms have been for Finance, ad tech, eCommerce, and other industries. 

Creative AI (Generative AI)

What is already unfolding in front of our eyes, human-oriented content, is being generated by AI at an exponential rate. OpenAI, Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, large language models, generative adversarial networks, unsupervised deep learning approaches, and generative models are just a few on the list, with more yet to come.

These solutions may help fill this talent gap and dramatically increase programming speed and comprehension.

Data management (83%)

With the amount of data that businesses use multiplying daily, the trend will likely stay for decades. Data management’s primary focus lies in the overall management of data throughout its lifecycle. It has manifold directions, from data strategy consulting to data mining and data warehousing solutions to intelligent process automation and applied observability. Let’s have a brief overview of these trends.

Developing company data foundations is the vastest category here. It practically means creating well-structured and scalable data environments that can handle large volumes of data, ensure data quality and provide seamless integration with other systems.

Applied observability

Business-wise applied observability refers to a strategic approach that enables organizations to have complete and accurate visibility into the performance of their systems and applications. To proactively identify and resolve issues and gain in-depth insights into their data, companies should apply reliable BI and data clustering and perform data processing and analysis.

Big Data

Big Data is what businesses have to deal with daily in their workflows. Therefore it requires a system of solutions around it. First, it requires robust storage and management solutions that can handle the volume, velocity, and variety of data an organization generates. Secondly, Big Data analytics involves processing and analyzing large and complex data sets using tools such as Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and MapReduce. All the tools mentioned enable organizations to extract valuable insights and make data-driven decisions.

Data Lake

This technology can help businesses when there are vast amounts of raw data from various sources to be stored and analyzed (such as databases, streaming platforms, and third-party applications). With no pre-processing, managing data becomes more cost-effective and drives informed decision-making. Additionally, Data Lake architecture provides businesses with scalability and flexibility to accommodate future data demands and integrate with other systems and tools.

Data Visualization

Being data-driven is no longer a vogue but a necessity. It is critical to communicate complex data clearly and concisely, uncover key insights, and accelerate decision-making processes to keep the competitive edge. In search of reliable data visualization tools, businesses often turn to Tableau or Power BI as the most famous and renowned ones.

Next-gen development (78%)

Next-gen development goes beyond the traditional development of software applications and involves improving processes and software quality across each stage of the software development life cycle. It harnesses modern technologies, methodologies, and practices, such as:

• AI-enabled testing
  We expect automated script writing to exceed 80% of test coverage within the next decade, making testing faster and more efficient.
• AI ‘pair programmer’
  Code recommendations based on the context from input code or natural language help developers code faster with reduced friction. 
• AI-based code review
  Eliminating manual inputs and removing human biases results in faster, more efficient code reviews.
• Low-code or no-code platforms
  Allow non-developers to build apps in a more resource-consuming way. 
• Microservices and APIs
  Microservices and APIs serve as building blocks, making development faster and businesses more agile. APIs open new revenue streams, which can be provided externally to other companies’ integration. Overall, with all the tools and practices mentioned, developers can focus more on the capabilities their applications would enable than on the specifics of building the apps, which, as a result, saves resources, as well.

Dev culture and management (77%)

As said before, trends can affect not only technologies but also people management and the employee sphere. Dev culture and management trends embrace strategies that help developers deliver better outputs and stay motivated, thus bringing more value to the business.

Among these are:

• tech debt estimation and fixing
• retaining the best talents
• accessible inclusion for new growth
• employee productivity management
• reimagining the workforce.

Tech debt estimation minimizes incurred costs and technical troubles, keeping the company on track and within budget. Retaining loyal employees is vital for employee morale and business success. Organizations prioritizing accessibility and inclusivity attract a diverse workforce and new growth opportunities.

Metaverse (59%)

Although Metaverse has received significant attention before, this trend does not seem to be well-timed, and there is little evidence that it can have a significant impact on businesses in the near future. Metaverse is a relatively newborn and continuously evolving technology, and it still needs to be made clear how it can be applied to business operations or provide a clear return on investment. Additionally, since the technology is still in its early stages, it still beholds high risks for entrepreneurs. There may also be a ‘hype gap,’ where interest and enthusiasm for the technology can outpace actual capabilities and adoption by users and businesses.

Improve connectivity (58%)

By leveraging innovative technologies like cloud computing, 5G networks, AI chatbot development, and IOT, businesses can significantly improve connectivity to their customers, clients, and internal teams. Improving connectivity is a critical investment for companies seeking to modernize their systems and drive innovation and growth.

xTech (58%)

TX-tech (or ‘cross technology’) combines cutting-edge fields, such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Virtual and Augmented Reality, the Internet of Things, blockchain, and quantum computing. 

While advanced digital solutions in banking and finance started the trend and were coined FinTech, other sectors followed in the footsteps that would result in terms such as Edtech, HealthTech, or RegTech. One can spot directions that are now most in demand. For instance, FoodTech has equipped the food sector to automate supermarkets and retail outlets. On the other hand, we see how the tourism industry is beginning to embrace X-Tech solutions, with self-check-in as one of the most prominent innovations, also called Know Your Guest. Electronic signature solutions stand out among the technologies that have made possible the online contracting of all types of insurance. InfoTech is a vast branch, extending to brand-new solutions like NeuroTech, Biotech, SpaceTech, and more.

Overall, X-tech can benefit businesses in many ways, such as efficiency improvement, cost-effective solutions, new revenue streams, and competitive advantage.

Decentralized platforms

Blockchain and web3 technologies have revolutionized how you can manage your data. They are disrupting various industries like finance, healthcare, education, supply chain management, and social networking by creating decentralized platforms where data is securely stored. Web3, specifically, offers the possibility to create decentralized financial systems that enable many users to carry out peer-to-peer transactions without traditional banking. Additionally, with Web3, it is possible to develop transparent and secure supply chain systems that track the movement of goods from manufacturer to consumer. Overall, if you opt for decentralized platforms, it can provide your business with increased transparency, security, and efficiency. 

However, deploying blockchain projects can be daunting due to the technology’s complexity. This is where DevOps, digital platform engineering, and platform engineering come into play.

How Timpark Leverages Top Tech Trends

As mentioned above, knowing the current trends and their potential, you are more likely to set off in the right direction and focus on what is feasible specifically for your business.

Having explored an extensive array of trends, I proceeded to analyze which ones could fuel growth for Timspark and our business model.

How the trends fit Timspark’s goals and expertise

Summing up, we at Timspark have chosen four main directions in which we have deep expertise and would like to deliver our services for the next couple of years.

Data Management

• Developing company data foundations
• Applied observability
• Data visualization

Cloud Computing

• Moving to cloud
• Cloud economic
• Digital immune system
• Industry cloud platforms

Dev Culture & Management

• AI-enabled development and testing and low-code or no-code platforms
• Industry cloud platforms
• Platform engineering
• Superapps

Next Gen Development

• Tech debt estimation and fixing
• Make employees to do more 
• Retain best talents 
• Employee productivity management
• Fullstack development

Companies must remain agile and flexible by adapting to the latest technology and business trends as we look to the future. By embracing these trends, businesses can remain competitive, agile, and thriving in an ever-changing landscape.

Materials used

Gartner — Top Strategic Technology Trends 2023McKinsey — New year’s resolutions for tech in 2023
McKinsey — Projecting the global value of cloud: $3 trillion is up for grabs for companies that go beyond adoption
McKinsey — The data-driven enterprise of 2025
McKinsey — Demystifying digital dark matter: A new standard to tame technical debt
McKinsey — How companies can use DataOps to jump-start advanced analytics
Forbes — The Top 10 Tech Trends In 2023 Everyone Must Be Ready For
Forrester — Predictions 2023
Mercer — Global Talent Trends report 2022-2023
Stackoverflow — Comparing tag trends with our Most Loved programming languages
Stackoverflow — After the buzz fades: What our data tells us about emerging technology sentiment
Deloitte Insights — Tech Trends 2023
Deloitte — The skills-based organization: A new operating model for work and the workforce
Harvard Business Review — Where Is Tech Going in 2023?