Keysight Technologies predicts technology development trends in 2021

In 2020, the world has experienced an unprecedented public health crisis - COVID-19. This has affected every aspect of society, forcing businesses, governments and private institutions to adopt working from home, accelerate digital transformation and rethink the way they achieve innovation.

Keysight Technologies has given its assessment of the changing business operations and technology trends amid the pandemic and said the impact will continue to have a lasting impact on organizations and society.

Growing acceptance of remote work: Distributed and remote workers have gained new respect and recognition, especially in terms of technological innovation, which has led to a hybrid of remote and on-site work environments, which will continue to exist even in the future.

Collaboration technologies and practices have and will continue to take on new meanings, and tech companies will upgrade the training and organization of mission-critical innovation teams that will be managed remotely.

Engineers and other innovators will need to return to the field to operate collaboratively, but when they collaborate will be more intentional and strategic.

Enterprise sales organizations will undergo significant change as hybrid selling (in-person and virtual) uses new methods to build relationships and targets, as well as alternative methods to deliver product and solution demonstrations remotely.

STEM will help drive talent development: With the growing focus on diversity and inclusion, we will see extremely fierce competition for technical talent.

In all regions there will be a centralized and amplified commitment to STEM.

Explore and implement new ways to deliver virtual learning opportunities that can level the playing field.

Businesses and governments will address equity issues across the “digital divide” (“lack of resources such as computers, smartphones, Wi-Fi, and broadband”) that the pandemic has exacerbated.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) will assume greater business importance: no longer a specialized issue, CSR will become an ethical and business imperative aligned with corporate value creation strategies.

Shareholders, in addition to employees and customers, will increasingly recognize that businesses with a real commitment to CSR can generate better long-term returns and achieve more sustainable practices.

Ethical supply chain, inventory and material sourcing suppliers will examine a company’s CSR program before entering into a working relationship with an organization.

A highly sought after talent pool will recognise CSR as a fundamental responsibility of the companies they consider and therefore an important determinant of their career choices.

Climate change will continue to cause supply chain disruptions around the world, making business continuity planning and supply chain resilience strategies critical to business success. This will highlight the need to:

Assess potential risks along with mitigation strategies and plans covering end-to-end supply chain processes.

Flexible procurement strategies involving the procurement of multiple alternative parts, redesigned parts and standardized parts.

The focus is on ensuring facilities are resilient and having crisis plans in place in the event of a natural disaster.

New approaches are needed to address the financial implications inherent in these concepts.

The impact of a hybrid workforce on technology development, design, and deployment will be addressed through software: A hybrid workforce, with social distancing, will accelerate software support for product design and development.

Software will also be critical to digital transformation: The pace of innovation will accelerate in 2021. The adoption of digital tools, processes, and software-led solutions will transform the approach and speed with which companies innovate, grow, support customers, and conduct business.

Businesses will accelerate transformation using software that increases productivity, efficiency, accuracy, security and time to market by digitally collecting and capturing information, combined with the use of advanced analytics and data visualization to gain the insights needed to accelerate innovation.

Greater emphasis on new software solutions for design, testing and validation, and for the analysis and interpretation of these results, especially:

R&D measurement and analysis will require more experimentation and iteration. Engineers will need to perform in-depth analysis of the data, which will require richer automation capabilities beyond the basics.

As the electronic environment becomes more complex, design and simulation become more complex, requiring measurements of power flow, thermals, and packaging while validating prototypes to ensure the design works as expected.

Security will take on new meaning in 2021. Developers will address potential security issues early in the design cycle, including security testing. There will be a greater emphasis on how products are deployed, the use of touchless and contactless technologies, the elimination of human intervention, and fully automated networks that are self-healing.

User experience will continue to become increasingly important to both customers and vendors of all types of software solutions, driven by the growing role such solutions play in both professional and personal contexts, as well as rising expectations driven by frustration with mediocre experiences.

5G remains a strategic imperative for businesses and governments in 2021: Although the pandemic slowed deployment in 2020, in 2021 we can expect:

5G will be a focus of international attention as 5G networks will drive improvements in power, energy and financial infrastructure. However, the issue of cell site zoning and related policies will become a bigger issue for national and local governments.

5G will move beyond smartphones into industry and enable applications in virtualized healthcare.

Manufacturing and network deployment will catch up with device launches in 2020, and 5G devices will become more diverse with multiple price points.

Dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) and new national spectrum policies will drive widespread deployment of 5G as user device accessibility grows, addressing current coverage issues and deployment costs of mid-band spectrum.

Greater investment in infrastructure to support IoT and IIoT (Factory 4.0), including distributed cloud and hyperconnectivity: There will be an emphasis on dedicated 5G networks for industrial enterprises, which will particularly facilitate remote operations and management.

An increasingly remote workforce will power the IIoT, which will require companies to deploy smart devices to effectively manage manufacturing and factory operations remotely. We expect:

There has been increased investment in automation and the use of robotics and machine learning to manage facilities, and there is increasing use of the cloud to automate production lines.

With the rise of automobiles and other facilities, new solutions for manufacturing automation, testing and analysis of all components continue to emerge.

To achieve real-time, predictive control, more investment in IIoT capabilities will be needed, which will require an increase in the number of machines and sensors, as well as a network infrastructure that can manage the growing number of devices.

Although early, expect to see accelerated investment in quantum computing: By 2021, quantum entered a robust research phase, and major players will continue to experiment and invest in quantum research into the future.

Today, there are many competing qubit technologies: leading technologies include superconducting, trapped ion, silicon spin, and photonic implementations. These technologies will continue to advance rapidly in 2021.

Quantum materials research will heat up in 2021. This will be supported by a strong pipeline of investment, some of which will be funded by major governments as they learn more about the geopolitical and economic advantages of quantum computing.

In 2021, more customers will increase their access time on quantum computers in the cloud to run new algorithms to find quantum advantage. In 2021, more players will begin offering quantum computers, cloud services, or both, as well as expanding the capabilities of the computers available to users.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are here to stay: The automotive industry has been adversely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but production and manufacturing have begun to resume.

As the number of sensors powering in-vehicle networks continues to increase, the in-vehicle networks will need to keep pace.

Electric vehicle sales will grow, but will only account for a small portion (3%) of total auto manufacturing. Interest in electric vehicles will rise as countries face stricter emissions standards while traditional auto manufacturing stagnates.

Autonomous driving investments were modest in the first half of 2021 but picked up in the second half, with greater aggressiveness in Greater China as the region works to phase out traditional cars by 2035.

As for the United States, with Biden taking office, 2021 will focus more on the development of autonomous driving and electric vehicles.