A Year in Transition: A Look Ahead

By | December 30, 2016
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As the year winds down, I wanted to share a few brief notes and observations. In short, I view 2016 as a ‘transitional’ year. This transition will unfold  unfold over multiple years. It will see new technologies and business models rising while others fading away. Some highlights based on what we at Xona Partners have been involved in:

  1. Open Source in Telecom: The advent of Open Source in the telecom is significant and has a highly disruptive impact. In our analysis, the status quo can be altered through emerging applications discussed in our paper: Will Open Source Disrupt the Telecom Value Chain. The effects are wide-reaching both on the interaction between ecosystem players as well as redefining existing player’s core value proposition.
  2. IoT Connectivity: Heated debates on IoT as market players align around different technologies, particularly low-power wide area technologies. There are many factors to understand to determine a strategy and a path forward. Insights are summarized in our report: Mobile and Wide-Area IoT: LPWA and LTE connectivity.
  3. Embarking on the next wave of leapfrog technologies: A battle brewing amongst Cloud giants, telecom service providers and industry vertical players as they place bets of the next wave of disruptive technologies. Shared spectrum, ad hoc mobile networks and open source-based networking solutions are founding the basis for new leapfrog opportunities as we present in The Timely Internet Technology Leapfrog Opportunity.
  4. Applied Artificial Intelligence: Artificial intelligence has become pervasive and fused into different solutions and services. Sitting atop the value chain, AI remains a key differentiator by imparting intelligence on what otherwise is a commoditized solution or service. This is beyond implementing big data or even data science. This year we implemented solutions for an IoT infrastructure and e-commerce platforms. In all cases, the investment in artificial intelligence has paid dividends to provide a distinct advantage to drive their respective businesses.
  5. Cloud at the edge of maturity: Next generation private and public Cloud solutions are evolving at a rapid pace. DevOps and continuous integration/delivery frameworks are being integrated into web-scale application development. We continued work with technology and service providers to shape their strategies and devise successful enterprise IT transformation models.

I like to take this opportunity to thank all the readers and subscribers of this blog for their support. Best wishes for a Happy New Year and see you in 2017!