By Sreedhar Veeramachaneni, founder and CEO of System Soft technologies

Botalytics, configurators, no-code/low-code - what's it all about in 2020?

As we start a new decade, we continue chapters and write new ones in the book of technology. It'll be an exciting hear with new developments in software development, blockchain and digital transformation - among others - coming up.

• Digital transformation - employees will demand digital empowerment at work that is better than what they get for free at home. Consumer-led digital transformation is changing lives, there's no doubt, but enterprises are still one ball behind the eight in terms of materially improving the working lives of these people. Failing to meet expectations driven by advances in consumer tech, in an era of full employment (especially for knowledge workers), will have grave business consequences and will fuel attrition.
• Fintech - welcome to the era of "Botalytics" - yes, that's a mash up of Bots/RPA and Analytics.  As bots get smarter, they will use AI and ML to move more aggressively into the province of highly paid Fintech humans that used to do important process tasks such as underwrite loans, adjudicate insurance claims, perform actuarial and rate pricing decisions, manage interest rate hedging programs. For financial companies that invest in new Fintech, the impact will be to streamline businesses and leave the humans in the operation more time to focus on creating value, rather than doing the legwork that goes behind it.
• AI & Machine Learning - will be the best friend that cloud vendors have ever known. Why? Because as AI fuels ML, and as IoT becomes more ubiquitous for consumer and business applications, the biggest challenges will be processing performance. The vast amount of data that will be generated and need to be analyzed at light speed will mean that only a few organizations will possess the CPU and storage capacity to meet the swelling demand. And the only organizations to have that capacity and capability will be the top cloud vendors.
• Software development for SaaS - SaaS vendors will have to provide no-code, low-code IDE's to complement their offerings. Failing to do so will be a competitive disadvantage. Customers of SaaS vendors aren't going to want to hire programmers to customize SaaS for their needs. They'll want to hire 'configurators.'  The former is expensive and time-consuming. The latter is cheaper and faster. 
• Blockchain - Remember when no one trusted the cloud? That skepticism still exists in large part for Blockchain. That will change as companies not relying on blockchain in 2020+ will be at a competitive disadvantage, especially in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, logistics and banking.

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