November 2017 has come and gone and for those of us here at PTC, that means things have really sped up as our annual conference approaches. The same is true for the global ICT industry as a whole. Many of the global business trends and technological developments we have been watching saw considerable movement over the past 30 days. In this piece, we’ll take a look at which topics and stories generated the most buzz on social media.
Submarine cables continue to connect the world.
New builds of submarine cables are booming around the world, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. $4.2 billion of new cables will enter service from 2017 to 2019, and more are being planned beyond that. Content providers are increasingly behind these new cables, seeing the opportunity to connect many of the unconnected around the world and bring their services to millions of new users. One notable content provider, though, has interesting reasons for not jumping on board this trend.
China continues its rise.
Though penetration into Chinese markets from outside companies remains limited, there is growing news about big innovations from within the country as well as increased partnerships with outside cloud and service providers. The country’s path to 5G looks strong and its cloud market is predicted to be worth $104 billion by 2020. While AWS has been obligated to clarify the extent of its business in the country, it also made clear how much it values its business there. Other top providers are also aware of the increasing importance of building relationships with China’s carrier-neutral data center providers and its e-commerce and cloud giants.
The Inaugural PTC Innovation Awards.
This year, for our 40th Anniversary celebration, we are very excited to debut a new portion of our annual conference: The PTC Innovation Awards. The PTC’18 Innovation Awards are designed to recognize the individuals and companies that have transformed and continue to transform our industry and the markets we serve. The awards include a wide range of categories, such as Lifetime Innovation, Best Overall Innovation, and Best Quality of Life Improvement, and will be juried by a panel of industry experts. We are eager to recognize those individuals and businesses that have made a real impact on the world in the past year. If you want to read more about industry innovation, check out Capacity Media’s Confidence, Innovation & Leadership report 2017.
Increased interest at the edge.
Not so much a revolution as an evolution in data processing, edge computing continues to grab attention and resources. A result of the massive (and rapidly increasing) amount of data being created globally, particularly by machine to machine connections and IoT devices, edge computing enables the data processing to happen in smaller, more agile processing units that exist closer to the end user. While edge computing already plays a vital role for some businesses, the projections are that it will play an even more important role as 27 million new IoT devices come online each day, with 20 billion expected to be generating data almost constantly by 2020.
