Data Bytes: Pandemic Tech Drives 2020 Gartner Hype Cycle

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“Health passports” that indicate COVID-19 status are among the pandemic-related technologies that lead new additions to the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2020, the research firm said last week.

Gartner says mobile applications like Health Code (China), Arogya Setu (India) and ALHOSN (UAE) are being used to provide COVID-19 status and immunity information to guide access decisions for rail and air travel.

“The sheer populations in India and China using health passports pushed this technology to a 5% to 20% market penetration, an unprecedented number for a technology just entering the Hype Cycle,” Gartner said in unveiling the 2020 list.

The Hype Cycle “highlights technologies that will significantly affect business, society and people over the next five to 10 years,” says Brian Burke, Research VP, Gartner. “It includes technologies that enable a composable enterprise, aspire to regain society’s trust in technology and alter the state of your brain.”

Gartner predicted the top emerging trend for 2020 will be “composite architectures” that create more agile IT infrastructure that can provide more resilience amid rapidly changing business needs. Another trend highlighted was Algorithmic trust models to ensure the privacy and security of data, provenance of assets, and the identities of people and things, which could include blockchain technology.

Another top trend was “DNA computing and storage” that use DNA and biochemistry in place of silicon or quantum architectures to perform computation or store data. The data is encoded into synthetic DNA strands for storage and enzymes provide the processing capabilities through chemical reactions.

Gartner acknowledged that DNA computing tech “is currently rudimentary and expensive with significant technical barriers to mainstream use. However, the impact of a successful DNA computing and storage option would transform data storage, processing parallelism and computing efficiency.”

5G Equipment Sales Accelerating, Especially in China

Telecom and data center research house Dell’Oro Group says that despite economic uncertainty, the market for radio access network (RAN) equipment to support 5G networks is “accelerating at a much faster pace than initially expected.”

“Initial findings suggest that we correctly assumed that the importance of connectivity in combination with the on-going 5G rollouts by the early adopters would be enough to offset weaker developments in the less advanced MBB (mobile broadband) markets resulting in a RAN market that appears disconnected from the underlying economy,” said Stefan Pongratz, Vice President with the Dell’Oro Group. “At the same time, it is increasingly clear that we underestimated the magnitude of the 5G acceleration in some of the advanced MBB markets.”.

In its 2Q20 RAN report, Dell’Oro Group says it is making a upward adjustment in its forecast for near-term RAN growth, driven by faster-than-expected growth in China. The firm said shipments of 5G NR (New Radio) gear accelerated in China, and it also saw growth in millimeter wave 5G NR deployments.