Dec 24, 2015 | By Alec

With the end of the December already in sight, it’s a busy time for economic consultants and data analysts. What could the new year bring and what trends do innovators need to keep a close eye on? Among them is top international data analyst Gartner, who is known for making fairly accurate predictions of growth trends. In that respect, it says a lot that they are very quick to point to the somewhat volatile, if very potent growth of the 3D printing market and industry. Only yesterday, their Pete Basiliere predicted that top 3D printing innovator Stratasys will encounter some difficulties in an expanding market, but that the 3D printing market as a whole will do very well indeed. But even in the wider scope of emerging technologies, 3D printing is clearly of some importance, as Gartner recently identified it among the top ten strategic technology trends for 2016.

 

Of course Gartner has a very keen eye for emerging and strategic technologies, something they define as technologies with the capacity to make a significant impact on organizations or markets. “Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to the business, end users or IT, the need for a major investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. These technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives,” they say on their website.

And from that point of view, the last year saw the meteoric rise of a number of fascinating concepts and technologies that seem to be absolutely packed with potential. Gartner therefore recently compiled this top ten at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2015 in Orlando earlier in the year, one of the most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives in the world. There, they recognized which technologies will have a significant impact in 2016 and the years that follow. "Gartner's top 10 strategic technology trends will shape digital business opportunities through 2020," David Cearley, the vice president of Gartner, said. "The first three trends address merging the physical and virtual worlds and the emergence of the digital mesh. While organizations focus on digital business today, algorithmic business is emerging. Algorithms — relationships and interconnections — define the future of business. In algorithmic business, much happens in the background in which people are not directly involved. This is enabled by smart machines, which our next three trends address. Our final four trends address the new IT reality, the new architecture and platform trends needed to support digital and algorithmic business."

It says quite a lot that 3D printing technology can be found among this list of upcoming technologies, which includes the Internet of Things, Advanced Machine Learning, Autonomous Agents and Things and the Device Mesh, among others. As Gartner explains, they have chosen to include 3D printing for the wide range of materials that are being adapted for additive manufacturing: materials like carbon fiber, glass, conductive inks, pharmaceuticals and a wide range of biological materials. “These innovations are driving user demand, as the practical applications for 3D printers expand to more sectors, including aerospace, medical, automotive, energy and the military,” they say.

Because of these growing number of applications and interested industries, Gartner argues, 3D printing will be growing explosively over the coming years. They expect that 3D printable materials will drive a very impressive compound annual growth rate of 64.1 percent for enterprise 3D printer shipments, all the way from 2016 to 2019.

It will further, they say, change the way we see production and spur on a reimagining of what an assembly line and what a supply chain are. "3D printing will see a steady expansion over the next 20 years of the materials that can be printed, improvement in the speed with which items can be printed and emergence of new models to print and assemble composite parts," Mr. Cearley said of the technology.

Of course Gartner are not alone in arguing that the coming years will bring on a revolution in terms of cloud-based operations, intelligence reaching every aspect of our lives and even the merging of the physical and the virtual words. But it is very telling that a respectable data giant such as Gartner sees 3D printing as a key element in that revolution.

The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2016 are:

The Device Mesh
The device mesh refers to an expanding set of endpoints people use to access applications and information or interact with people, social communities, governments and businesses. The device mesh includes mobile devices, wearable, consumer and home electronic devices, automotive devices and environmental devices — such as sensors in the Internet of Things (IoT).

"In the postmobile world the focus shifts to the mobile user who is surrounded by a mesh of devices extending well beyond traditional mobile devices," said Mr. Cearley.

While devices are increasingly connected to back-end systems through various networks, they have often operated in isolation from one another. As the device mesh evolves, we expect connection models to expand and greater cooperative interaction between devices to emerge.

Ambient User Experience
The device mesh creates the foundation for a new continuous and ambient user experience. Immersive environments delivering augmented and virtual reality hold significant potential but are only one aspect of the experience. The ambient user experience preserves continuity across boundaries of device mesh, time and space. The experience seamlessly flows across a shifting set of devices and interaction channels blending physical, virtual and electronic environment as the user moves from one place to another.

"Designing mobile apps remains an important strategic focus for the enterprise," said Mr. Cearley. "However, the leading edge of that design is focused on providing an experience that flows across and exploits different devices, including IoT sensors, common objects such as automobiles, or even factories. Designing these advanced experiences will be a major differentiator for independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprises alike by 2018."

3D Printing Materials
Advances in 3D printing have already enabled 3D printing to use a wide range of materials, including advanced nickel alloys, carbon fiber, glass, conductive ink, electronics, pharmaceuticals and biological materials. These innovations are driving user demand, as the practical applications for 3D printers expand to more sectors, including aerospace, medical, automotive, energy and the military. The growing range of 3D-printable materials will drive a compound annual growth rate of 64.1 percent for enterprise 3D-printer shipments through 2019. These advances will necessitate a rethinking of assembly line and supply chain processes to exploit 3D printing.

Information of Everything
Everything in the digital mesh produces, uses and transmits information. This information goes beyond textual, audio and video information to include sensory and contextual information. Information of everything addresses this influx with strategies and technologies to link data from all these different data sources. Information has always existed everywhere but has often been isolated, incomplete, unavailable or unintelligible. Advances in semantic tools such as graph databases as well as other emerging data classification and information analysis techniques will bring meaning to the often chaotic deluge of information.

Advanced Machine Learning
In advanced machine learning, deep neural nets (DNNs) move beyond classic computing and information management to create systems that can autonomously learn to perceive the world, on their own. The explosion of data sources and complexity of information makes manual classification and analysis infeasible and uneconomic. DNNs automate these tasks and make it possible to address key challenges related to the information of everything trend.

DNNs (an advanced form of machine learning particularly applicable to large, complex datasets) is what makes smart machines appear "intelligent." DNNs enable hardware- or software-based machines to learn for themselves all the features in their environment, from the finest details to broad sweeping abstract classes of content. This area is evolving quickly, and organizations must assess how they can apply these technologies to gain competitive advantage.

Autonomous Agents and Things
Machine learning gives rise to a spectrum of smart machine implementations — including robots, autonomous vehicles, virtual personal assistants (VPAs) and smart advisors — that act in an autonomous (or at least semiautonomous) manner. While advances in physical smart machines such as robots get a great deal of attention, the software-based smart machines have a more near-term and broader impact. VPAs such as Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana and Apple's Siri are becoming smarter and are precursors to autonomous agents. The emerging notion of assistance feeds into the ambient user experience in which an autonomous agent becomes the main user interface. Instead of interacting with menus, forms and buttons on a smartphone, the user speaks to an app, which is really an intelligent agent.

"Over the next five years we will evolve to a postapp world with intelligent agents delivering dynamic and contextual actions and interfaces," said Mr. Cearley. "IT leaders should explore how they can use autonomous things and agents to augment human activity and free people for work that only people can do. However, they must recognize that smart agents and things are a long-term phenomenon that will continually evolve and expand their uses for the next 20 years."

Adaptive Security Architecture
The complexities of digital business and the algorithmic economy combined with an emerging "hacker industry" significantly increase the threat surface for an organization. Relying on perimeter defense and rule-based security is inadequate, especially as organizations exploit more cloud-based services and open APIs for customers and partners to integrate with their systems. IT leaders must focus on detecting and responding to threats, as well as more traditional blocking and other measures to prevent attacks. Application self-protection, as well as user and entity behavior analytics, will help fulfill the adaptive security architecture.

Advanced System Architecture
The digital mesh and smart machines require intense computing architecture demands to make them viable for organizations. Providing this required boost are high-powered and ultraefficient neuromorphic architectures. Fueled by field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as an underlining technology for neuromorphic architectures, there are significant gains to this architecture, such as being able to run at speeds of greater than a teraflop with high-energy efficiency.

"Systems built on GPUs and FPGAs will function more like human brains that are particularly suited to be applied to deep learning and other pattern-matching algorithms that smart machines use," said Mr. Cearley. "FPGA-based architecture will allow further distribution of algorithms into smaller form factors, with considerably less electrical power in the device mesh, thus allowing advanced machine learning capabilities to be proliferated into the tiniest IoT endpoints, such as homes, cars, wristwatches and even human beings."

Mesh App and Service Architecture
Monolithic, linear application designs (e.g., the three-tier architecture) are giving way to a more loosely coupled integrative approach: the apps and services architecture. Enabled by software-defined application services, this new approach enables Web-scale performance, flexibility and agility. Microservice architecture is an emerging pattern for building distributed applications that support agile delivery and scalable deployment, both on-premises and in the cloud. Containers are emerging as a critical technology for enabling agile development and microservice architectures. Bringing mobile and IoT elements into the app and service architecture creates a comprehensive model to address back-end cloud scalability and front-end device mesh experiences. Application teams must create new modern architectures to deliver agile, flexible and dynamic cloud-based applications with agile, flexible and dynamic user experiences that span the digital mesh.

Internet of Things Platforms
IoT platforms complement the mesh app and service architecture. The management, security, integration and other technologies and standards of the IoT platform are the base set of capabilities for building, managing and securing elements in the IoT. IoT platforms constitute the work IT does behind the scenes from an architectural and a technology standpoint to make the IoT a reality. The IoT is an integral part of the digital mesh and ambient user experience and the emerging and dynamic world of IoT platforms is what makes them possible.

"Any enterprise embracing the IoT will need to develop an IoT platform strategy, but incomplete competing vendor approaches will make standardization difficult through 2018," said Mr. Cearley.

 

 

 

Posted in 3D Printing Technology

 

 

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