THREE TECHNOLOGY PREDICTIONS FOR 2023

FRED LHERAULT, FIELD CTO, EMEA & EMERGING MARKETS AT PURE STORAGE, WRITES 2023 WILL BE THE YEAR OF SUSTAINABILITY AND ESG.

The last three years have seen a lot of upheaval and change. Technology — the cloud in particular — has helped us a lot since then, enabling organisations to drive adoption of remote-working capabilities at scale, and reinvent business models to cope with the demands of regulators and home-based customers.

The Arab Gulf has a famously young population, so the region’s businesses must continue to cater to digital natives and their predilection for online mobile-first experiences. Meanwhile, enterprises must also allow for the rise of ESG, which is, somewhat paradoxically, largely driven by the same consumer base. In 2023, we expect vendors, service providers, and customers to become locked in a cooperative dance of sustainability, negotiating fiercely over who should shoulder the costs of inefficiency.

What follows are three key predictions for the year ahead for the regional technology market.

Businesses will make technology choices based on sustainability

With sustainability being a priority for many organisations, efficient technologies which use less energy and have a better carbon footprint will be on many board’s agenda. Today’s businesses are much more environmentally conscious, but volatile energy costs have forced the issue in many countries around the world and in the next year we will see green and sustainability credentials at the tip of the spear in conversations between vendors, service providers and customers. Many groups within organisations will develop a much greater understanding of sustainability metrics and methodologies and will start applying them when making technology choices.

Containers will be the key to cloud neutral infrastructure designs — beating lock-in

While historically large enterprises have worked with different cloud providers for different use cases, this creates cloud lock-in which customers are sick and tired of. Next year we will see an increase in customers building cloud neutrality into their design to avoid this lock-in even if it’s only to prepare for the future. To do so, companies will rely heavily on containerising applications, making them portable across private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructure, regardless of the cloud providers at play. There will also be a push to consolidate management of applications through Kubernetes platforms with all the flexibility, speed, cost effectiveness and security needed to ensure success in a cloud neutral environment.

Hiring IT specialists will become harder: organisations will hire more generalists

Every organisation is struggling to find Kubernetes, data analytics and machine learning specialists as these are some of the most in-demand skills in IT at the moment. However, companies don’t actually want to hire people who are good at only one thing — they are looking for people with a breadth of skills. As a result organisations will need to hire more generalists and fewer specialists, even in critical roles, and train them in areas where skills need to be developed. This will be far more efficient for the IT organisation in the long run, as specialists tend to serve as a bottleneck if they are the only personnel who can solve specific problems.

Challenges promote innovation

Organisations across the region will survive by taking wisely considered leaps into new paradigms. The technology is there, and even if the skills are not readily available, there are costeffective ways of solving this issue, such as training existing employees. External issues such as inflation will continue to pose challenges but given the region’s track record (much of it occurring in the past three years) of overcoming obstacles, I think we are on track for an innovative 2023.