With the Union Budget 2021 announced , electronics giant Lenovo India, revisits some of its 2020 technology predictions from pre-pandemic to see how they’ve evolved, and predict COVID-19’s effect on (re)emerging technologies and the biggest trends set to take center stage into 2021 and beyond.
The pandemic has triggered unprecedented disruptions in work, school, social connections, and many industries from healthcare to entertainment. It has also accelerated digital transformation into warp speed in 2020, creating radical shifts in the new “everything-from-home” environment. The year 2020 was all about transitioning to the ‘Work from Home’ scenario. While remote working existed in parts even before the pandemic, the last few months have taught us that it’s possible to work remotely. In a white-collar work environment, the productivity question will always be up for debate, but we have seen that it can be efficient if you have the right IT infrastructure and collaboration tools. The pandemic has also resulted in a lot of new technology trends coming up. Here are a few Technology predictions by Lenovo for the year 2021:
The new normal will be the golden era of employee experience, with a hybrid mode — a combination of remote and office-based work — that can meet varied needs of both employees and employers. Remote work has increased the need for high quality devices, security and collaboration platforms and the new normal will require companies to customise their offerings accordingly.
Organizational security and consumer privacy are here to stay: With the traditional network suddenly moving away from the corporate environment, the perimeter has now expanded to all devices connected remotely to the cloud or other work devices – where even smart home devices may add risk to corporate networks as employees login from home.
Develop and enhance technology: The work/learn-from-anywhere culture will prompt companies to develop and enhance technology that is tailored to the new behaviours of the workforce.
Technology will improve education quality through immersive learning, personalized learning, new forms of assessment, and collaboration. Hybrid learning which was unthinkable earlier could become the norm and quality education can break the distance barriers and reach many more.
Connected devices are now essential for everyone: There will be a demand for always-on and always-connected PCs, offering freedom from dependence on Wi-Fi alone. Further, connected smart home assistants will also grow in popularity.
Stepping up services to enable seamless support to customers: From providing support in a few offices to support across millions of homes spread across multiple cities and towns. There have also been notable camera improvements across all device types.
Home entertainment will need to get more immersive: Gaming as a way to stay entertained and socially connected, while apart, will continue to flourish in 2021. Home immersive entertainment experiences will benefit from the display, audio and battery life improvements that can be automatically optimized by AI and Machine Learning built into the devices. Augmented Reality enables smart glasses to come to the forefront as well.
Electronics manufacturers are gearing up for technology trends like AI, VR/XR, Edge Computing: Edge computing helps process data closer to the data sources in order to achieve a quick response time. It will help support workload migrations and benefit the cost and flexibility of wireless network operations. The transition to edge computing has been driven by higher compute that can process more complex workloads including machine learning and AI. More businesses are likely to move data analytics and AI-powered apps from the cloud to edge computing. Companies are shifting from hardcopies to cloud applications and multi-cloud applications and multi-cloud management solutions.
“There are some jobs that cannot be done remotely (like retail sales) and there are some tasks that are better done face-to-face. Hence, I think the future of work is going to be a hybrid of remote working and working from the office. The work/learn-from-anywhere culture will prompt companies to enhance their technological infrastructure according to the new age workforce. The six pillars of the Union Budget 2021 add enormous value to the economic relief post the pandemic issues and paint a futuristic picture for the new year. It has managed to address some of the key issues around Atmanirbhar Bharat, education and Digital India that presents significant business opportunities for global corporates such as Lenovo. With the PLI scheme announced along with the increased focus on ‘Make in India’ in this budget, we are confident that it will encourage local manufacturing, and further bolster the local PC market. Lenovo will also support the government in enriching India’s economy, by boosting digital infrastructure in the field of education and additional focus on promoting inclusive development. The national education policy also creates an opportunity to build the Indian EdTech ecosystem to make it best across the globe for research & innovation, and empowers the citizens to scale up their skills.” – Rahul Agarwal, MD & CEO, Lenovo India