UPDATED 16:00 EDT / JANUARY 14 2020

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Best of theCUBE 2019: Five big tech topics to follow in 2020

With about 1,200 interviews broadcast in 2019 alone on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, it’s virtually impossible to capture all of the key themes discussed. But that’s not going to stop us from trying.

Here are five key topics gleaned from a look back at top interviews that Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE and principal analyst at Wikibon Inc., selected as the top 10 segments to remember as 2020 gets underway:

Growth of the modern enterprise

If there was one theme uppermost in the minds of many executives interviewed last year on theCUBE, it was digital transformation. It was all about changing the enterprise to become agile, nimble, seamless, innovative, data-driven, hybrid and application-centric.

That’s a tall order, as many enterprises have discovered, yet the steps taken by older institutions, such as banks and the aerospace industry, were especially revealing.

When DBS Bank Ltd. decided it wanted to transform into a digital technology company, it started looking more like a startup than a financial institution founded over 50 years ago. Today, DBS uses open-source packages to manage critical workloads and offers its banking services on Netflix.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. has now migrated more than 90% of its data and applications to the Amazon Web Services Inc. public cloud. “I can’t imagine doing what we’re doing now in a private data center,” Steve Randich, executive vice president and chief information officer at FINRA, said during a CUBE appearance in July. “There’s no scale; it’s not as secure.”

A collaboration between Raytheon Co. and Dell EMC is also transforming the way major government institutions, such as the Department of Defense, deploy software. In one example, a contact award system for deploying new applications in the U.S. Air Force that previously took five years was reduced to 150 days.

Major providers of digital transformation services, such as Amazon Web Services Inc., are seeing growth of the enterprise through the eyes of builders at the doorstep. Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of AWS, acknowledged that in a December interview where he outlined two types of enterprise customers.

“There are those that want to get at the low-level building blocks and stitch them together creatively,” Jassy said. “And then we have those who are willing to give up some of that flexibility in exchange for getting 80% of the way there much faster. Both segments of builders we want to serve and serve well.”

IBM and Red Hat

Fifteen months after IBM purchased open-source provider Red Hat Inc. for $34 billion, the deal remains the largest software transaction in tech history. It was a major story then and will continue to be in 2020 because it represents IBM’s huge bet that the long-term future of computing will be hybrid and open-source.

For its part, Red Hat made several important moves in 2019 to strengthen its position. The firm released Enterprise Linux 8 in May, the first major update of its Linux operating system since 2014.

Red Hat’s latest release also included new features designed to make it easier for DevOps teams to leverage hybrid deployments, a critical area for IBM going forward this year.

“The world is going to move towards containers; the world has already embraced Linux, and this is the time to have a new architecture that embraces hybrid,” Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of cloud and cognitive software at IBM, said during an interview in May. “We were clear that is where the world is going to go. We put our money where our mouth was.”

Kubernetes and cloud-native

The container orchestration tool Kubernetes was named by its creators after the Greek word for “helmsman” or “pilot,” and the technology has become a core technology in the cloud-computing world. One survey charted its growth from 50% adoption in 2018 to 86% in 2019.

What lies ahead for Kubernetes in 2020? According to one of its creators, the answer could well be a steady march toward boredom.

“I think it’s going to disappear in terms of going to be so boring, so solid, so assumed that people don’t talk about it anymore,” Joe Beda, principal engineer at VMware Inc., said during a conversation in May.

Two major moves by cloud providers stood out in significance for the coming year.

Google LLC rebranded its Cloud Services platform in April under the name of Anthos, wrapping Kubernetes into a hybrid-cloud solution. It is an important step for Google, as it seeks to position itself in 2020 as a big cloud player for enterprise.

Meanwhile, AWS announced upgrades to Fargate, the firm’s own solution for running containers without having to manage servers or clusters. As popular as Kubernetes has become, it remained a complicated technology to use.

“Folks love Kubernetes as a tool and as a community, but it can be a pretty significant lift operationally,” Deepak Singh, vice president of compute services at AWS, said during an interview in December.

AI and social responsibility

The expanding field of artificial intelligence and growing application of it in daily life fueled a debate in 2019 around its use for good and evil. Properly applied in fields such as healthcare, it can save lives. Improperly applied in use cases such as authoritarian rule or propaganda, it can promote social divides.

This new reality has prompted major technology firms to formulate positions on the use of AI, and it has been a bumpy road. In April, Google was forced to dissolve an external advisory board one week after forming the group to monitor its use of AI, following an outcry around the selection of some members.

Other companies with AI-powered facial-recognition products confronted a growing backlash as the technology was used by Chinese authorities to identify protesters in Hong Kong.

Issues surrounding the use of AI will certainly not go away in 2020. In a wide-ranging November interview with Jeffrey Snover, architect for the Office 365 intelligent substrate platform at Microsoft Corp., the technologist sought to define what AI was meant to do.

“The heart of most AI is trying to figure out ‘you’ to achieve some result,” Snover explained. “Our competitors do that to try to get you to click a button to buy on an ad, or buy something you don’t need, or subvert some government. That’s none of our objectives. We want to understand ‘you’ for exactly one reason: to make you successful.”

5G and video for all

Deployment of the new 5G wireless standard is expected to pick up speed in 2020. This was further confirmed this month by Qualcomm Inc.’s top executive who indicated that the technology was scaling faster than 4G and called estimates of 200 million 5G-equipped smartphones by the end of the year “conservative.”

The rollout of 5G will likely boost video consumption through the roof. Video already accounts for over 60% of downstream internet traffic and is expected to reach 82% in only two years.

Faster, more robust 5G connectivity will affect many different areas and turbocharge companies, such as Zoom Inc., which provide collaborative services on a video-based platform. Cameras will be ubiquitous and dictate service delivery in ways that can only be imagined.

“Who would have thought a year ago that when you rent a car, you can just look at the camera on the way out and you’re approved to go?” Zoom Chief Information Officer Harry Moseley said in a March interview. “The future is going to be absolutely amazing.”

Check out all of the videos from Stu Miniman’s Best of theCUBE 2019 list:

Photo: Ales Nesetril/Unsplash

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