A little more than a year ago I returned to Sweden to become Ericsson’s CTO after seven years in Silicon Valley serving as the company’s Head of Technology Strategy. Since my return, I’ve been busy touching base with colleagues across the Ericsson organization to both gather and share insights. I’ve also been meeting with a wide range of external stakeholders, including CTOs of operators all around the world, global business leaders, political leaders and researchers, as well as current and potential technology partners. These insights show the potential, and also the complexity, of the ongoing technology evolution and allows me to outline the technology trends to watch out for.
The rapid technology development and the changes in strategic investments make the technology landscape somewhat volatile. Some trends will benefit from early breakthroughs and others will suffer serious setbacks. Nonetheless, I believe that every day we are a little bit closer to the reality of what I call an Augmented Connected Society – a world characterized by ubiquitous internet access for all, self-learning robots and truly intuitive interaction between humans and machines. But which technologies in this distant-future reality are most relevant from a network platform perspective?
This year, I’ve identified these five system related trends as the ones to watch:
- The realization of zero touch
- The emergence of the Internet of Skills
- Highly adaptable, cyber-physical systems
- Trust technologies for security assurance
- Ubiquitous, high-capacity radio
As I see it, the technology industry has a vitally important role to play in the development of all five of these trends. Our role will be to deliver a network platform that supports the continuous evolution of industries and societies around the world by enabling a new digitalization and AI paradigm.
The first step is to evolve the network platform in three main areas: 5G access, automation through agility, and distributed cloud. A set of intelligent network applications and features will be required to shield network users – both humans and machines – from the complexity of what’s happening behind the scenes.
If you’d like to learn more about the five technology trends I have chosen for 2018, don’t miss the full Technology Trends 2018 article.
