‘Tis the season for looking ahead to emerging innovations, and perhaps no other industry outside fashion presents more fodder than the fast-moving technology sector.
Here’s a look at nine trends to keep an eye on this year, according to Los Alamitos-based IEEE Computer Society:
• 5G, enabling everything from driverless and connected cars to super gaming and the industrial Internet of Things;
• virtual reality and its less immersive sister technology, augmented reality;
• nonvolatile memory, which can retrieve information when a computer is off, bringing down data costs and power consumption in the process;
• cyber-physical systems and their ongoing deployment to operate smart grids; next-generation air and intelligent transportation systems; smart medical technologies; smart buildings; and smart manufacturing;
• data science, or extracting insights from big data from trends, statistics, connections, patterns and more;
• capability-based security, or unforgeable access points that add protection against today’s most common cyberattacks;
• advanced machine learning, which builds a model based on examples and then makes predictions and decisions based on the data;
• network function virtualization, an emerging virtual infrastructure for cloud service providers that promises reduced costs, greater convenience and reliability;
• containers, a potential boon for moving applications to the cloud, essentially running them as if they were the only applications in an operating system.
We’ll check back at the end of the year to see how these trends played out.
Ingram Ends Year Strong
December was Ingram Micro Inc.’s busiest month of the year as the world’s largest technology products distributor diversified into shipping toys, games, sports equipment and other gifts for the holiday shopping season.
The Irvine-based company also kept up the frenzied pace on the corporate side, closing three acquisitions last month.
Its $175 million buy of two e-commerce fulfillment divisions of Netherlands-based DocData BV furthered its “global branding initiative” launched in June 2014 while adding at least $150 million in annual revenue.
The company’s takeover on undisclosed terms of Sao Paulo, Brazil-based Grupo ACAO, one of the largest IT providers in Latin America, is projected to add $300 million in annual revenue. Grupo is a value-added reseller of IBM, Oracle, EMC and VMWare products, among others.
The acquisition on undisclosed terms of parts of Switzerland-based Parallels Holdings Ltd. added commercial cloud management services, intellectual property, the Odin Service Automation brand and about 500 employees—many software engineers with cloud expertise.
Disaster Aid Deal Done
Irvine-based Paragon Software Group Inc. has signed a multimillion-dollar deal to supply disaster recovery applications to Data Deposit Box Inc., a Toronto-based cloud backup and recovery services provider.
Paragon’s Bare Metal Recovery product is an integrated feature of Data Deposit’s cloud service offerings, which are designed to protect critical data for small and midsize business and large corporations.
Paragon, which projected $15 million to $20 million in sales last year, has thousands of customers, including Western Digital, Cisco Systems, Dell, HP, Microsoft and Toshiba.
