Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023.  Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Tech Stack Cost Efficiencies, Cloud Databases, Blockchain and Why Edge Computing Will Fuel the Evolution of Reliable AI

By Ravi Mayuram, CTO, Couchbase

Despite the economic downturn and market volatility, IT leaders will continue to view technology as an opportunity to innovate while leveraging it to minimize the negative impacts of the current downswing. The last few years have shown us that the demand for fast, flexible and affordable technology will continue to grow despite a challenging economic environment - and more importantly, leaders must continue to invest in their teams, partners and customers. Below, I share six predictions that I anticipate we'll see in the upcoming year.

2023 will be the year cost efficiency is officially built into the tools of today's modern tech stack

In the current economic climate, we will increasingly start to see more vendors bake cost efficiency into their solutions as a way to offer a competitive advantage. This shift will drive more vendors to ensure their offerings optimize costs for customers while enabling increased productivity. For example, more organizations today are moving away from having multiple database technologies that provide for different functionalities of the business and instead are considering one single database that is efficient, able to scale and be used across the organization. Database providers that support a variety of verticals and use cases and lower the cost of doing business will see heightened demand.

Technology has the ability to impact business cost optimization and for vendors today, adaptability is key - especially in this changing business environment. Technology providers who can understand sudden market shifts and continue to provide innovative, yet cost-saving solutions will come out on top.

As the runway to land digital transformation results shrink, CTOs will prioritize architecting technology to serve as better business partners for enterprises

Traditionally, CTOs were known as technologists and not so much as business stakeholders and strategists, but today - the role of the CTO is expanding to not only encompass the technology vision, but business vision, too. Companies are more hyper-focused on their tech investments than ever before and as the runway for digital transformation gets shorter, CTOs must look through the lens of providing smarter solutions to support overall business strategy.

More importantly, CTOs are now thinking about how they can be better business partners to customers by providing solutions that will not only benefit a customer's technology stack, but offer a service that can bring efficiency and agility to keep technology spend under control.

Cloud databases will reach new levels of sophistication to support modern applications in an era where fast, personalized and immersive experiences are the goal

From a digital transformation perspective, it's about modernizing the tech stack to ensure that apps are running without delay - which in turn gives users a premium experience when interacting with an app or platform. Deploying a powerful cloud database is one way to do this.

There's been a massive trend in going serverless and using cloud databases will become the de facto way to manage the data layer. In the next year, we will also see the decentralization of data as it moves closer to the edge to offer faster, more dependable availability. Additionally, we'll start to see the emergence of AI-assisted databases to enable teams to do more with less. The proliferation of data will only continue, making AI-assisted databases a critical strategy to making the data lifecycle more operationally efficient for the business.

The role of IT will be redefined to meet the needs of digital transformation

The days of IT teams focusing purely on delivering and managing IT infrastructure are gone. This reflects the growing importance of IT professionals for organizations, as they continue to prioritize digital solutions for business growth, customer experience and other benefits. To deliver this, tech departments will be expected to play a wider, more consultative role in understanding business needs, and address these with technology solutions.

This shift changes the requirement for essential skills within IT teams, as businesses place much greater significance on key IT activities, such as digital transformation. With these projects at the very top of business to-do lists, and the benefits touching all areas of an organization, it's clear how useful IT professionals will be in a consultative role, to help plan, implement and maintain digitization efforts.

We will also see IT professionals required to educate other areas of the business. This will be driven by the rise in utility computing, and tools like low-code development, which lower the barrier of entry to successfully creating and managing applications. With other employees developing systems and overseeing cloud infrastructure, IT teams must act as the gatekeepers for efficient and compliant work.

In addition to the skills needed for effective consulting, IT teams must also act on intelligence from all the data that businesses collect and generate. Team members demonstrating these skills will quickly make themselves more recession-proof as they help the business evolve and make the most of its resources.

DevOps will adopt blockchain and newer programming languages

With the emergence of Web 3.0, working with blockchain (specifically Ethereum) will be in every DevOps pro's playbook-mirroring the boom of adopting machine learning. Newer programming languages, such as Solidity, that are designed for developing smart contracts will enter the toolkits of developers. 

In an increasingly data-centric world, edge computing will fuel the evolution of reliable AI

AI is ubiquitous in our everyday lives. It suggests what to buy and the news we read. It could determine the emails we receive and augment the cars we drive. And because of this, AI will be even more embedded in our world. It'll go through a maturation phase that enables us to rely on it more. Predictability and explainability of AI will improve dramatically as we move forward.

Moreover, AI will evolve from being algorithm driven to being more data driven. In order for this to be effective, more and more computation will happen at the edge for AI to be reliable, responsive and cost-effective. This trend of more data influencing the algorithms will determine how AI will evolve to be a tool that is relied upon heavily in this data centric future.

Moving forward

There is no debate that technology plays a central role in today's most exciting innovations, but business leaders need to put in place strategies for predictable success in a tough macroeconomic environment. That way, when the economy returns to a state of growth-which it will-businesses will be ready to capitalize on and embrace the even bigger role that new and emerging technologies will play in the future.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As CTO of Couchbase (NASDAQ: BASE), Ravi is focused on driving deeper customer and partner relationships and evangelizing Couchbase in the market. He came to Couchbase from Oracle, where he served as senior director of engineering and led innovation in the areas of recommender systems and social graph, search and analytics, and lightweight client frameworks. While at Oracle, Ravi was responsible for kickstarting the cloud collaboration platform. Previously in his career, Ravi held senior technical and management positions at BEA, Siebel, Informix, HP, and startup BroadBand Office. Ravi holds a Master of Science degree in Mathematics from University of Delhi.