How coronavirus has accelerated our adoption of technology

We have known the potential of telemedicine for years, yet it only gained widespread adoption when much of society was locked down and couldn’t visit medical professionals physically. The potential for remote work has been there since the advent of the internet yet only became the norm when firms were forced to choose between a remote, distributed workforce and indefinite hibernation.

Likewise, for many firms and consumers, our understanding of the supply chains was limited to placing an order for an item and that order appearing at our doorstep: a depth of understanding that proved manifestly inadequate when the virus threw global supply chains into chaotic disarray.

As we emerge from the current crisis, we need to think about how we can leverage the successes and learnings from the pandemic as the foundation for a more resilient, more digital, and ultimately more instrumented world.

This means supply chains where each step is digitally integrated to provide all participants with real time visibility and the ability to rapidly configure global supply chains in response to risk and future crises. It means remote medicine where patients will use wearables and other devices to provide their physicians with real-time immutable information on their health status; and it means an increasingly distributed, remote workforce where work will be performed anywhere – and everywhere.

This is all accelerating two related trends that we were well aware of before Covid – Edge Computing and 5G.

Edge computing is the possibility of doing more and more complex computation at the edge of the network. Whether it’s inside a drone surveying a building site, a medical device on someone’s arm, an autonomous vehicle that is delivering some goods to someone’s home, or a 3D printer sitting at the end of a secured digital supply chain and printing a prosthetic limb for a patient in a remote location. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75 percent of enterprise grade-data will be created and processed at the edge, taking place on billions of connected devices and every single industry will be impacted by this shift.

5G is the fifth generation of cellular broadband and will provide an exponential increase in bandwidth to the Edge with much lower latency. Many of the benefits of 5G networks come from greater reliance on software than previous generations of wireless technology. As we move to a world with more edge computing, software-driven 5G provides the network capacity to connect these myriad devices to each other and to the world.

Capacity demand increased tremendously in the telecommunications industry in the early stages of the pandemic with network utilisation jumping between 30 percent and 50 percent as the demand to remain connected became more important than ever.

This, coupled with 5G, signals a huge market opportunity in the telecommunications space, and a new frontier in cloud computing. In 5G networks, software can manage network operations and perform tasks previously controlled by hardware through network virtualisation and cloud computing. For example, in existing wireless communications infrastructure, network performance hinges largely on the technical limitations and proper functioning of specific hardware. Through network virtualisation, 5G networks can be updated and repaired remotely.

These software-driven 5G approaches, particularly cloud computing, can enable innovation on a massive scale and support new kinds of applications not possible on 4G networks. Additionally, open interfaces can ensure that all the components of a 5G network, from the Edge to the core, can easily interoperate, enabling greater diversity and security among telecommunications suppliers.

IBM has a long history in working with the world’s largest telcos to help drive their digital transformation as they modernise workloads. In fact, 83 percent of the world’s telcos are IBM clients, including AT&T, Vodafone, Bharti Airtel, Verizon and more.

IBM and AT&T announced recently the extension of their strategic partnership to help clients securely leverage 5G and edge offerings in any environment – in the cloud, on premises or at the edge – with IBM’s hybrid cloud platform.

The collaboration is designed to make it easier for clients to capture the 5G opportunity – in any environment. This will enable clients in every industry to harness the 5G and Edge opportunity to transform user experiences, uncover new revenue streams and optimise processes. For example, the healthcare industry could more rapidly adopt tools to help fight pandemics, such as monitoring patients remotely via connected medical devices.

In manufacturing, 5G-connected automated operations can help reduce costs and control quality on production lines through robotics and near real time visual analysis. Farms can report soil moisture and nutrient levels in real time with 5G Edge technologies.

IBM has also recently launched the IBM Cloud for Telecommunications – an open, hybrid cloud architecture designed to help telecommunications providers address the specific challenges of the highly-regulated industry: accelerating business transformation, enhancing digital client engagement and improving agility as they modernise their enterprise applications and infrastructure to unlock the power of 5G and Edge. Nokia, Samsung, Cisco and 35 more partners have committed to join IBM’s ecosystem and help accelerate 5G and Edge innovation for customers.

As 5G is progressively rolled out across the planet, firms should start to think about how an open, hybrid cloud approach to Edge computing cannot just enable a more resilient and flexible future; but how it can enable entirely new business models by solving previously intractable problems of bandwidth, compute capacity or interoperability that hindered innovation. Think about advanced artificial intelligence algorithms, from being deployed on Edge devices or wireless bandwidth limitations that prevented the movement of the vast amounts of machine-generated data into the cloud for analysis and training of machine learning algorithms.

We are already working with asset-intensive industries, such as mining and energy firms, to instrument their equipment; using predictive maintenance solutions to analyse this data to predict and prevent breakdown at the component level. We have seen productivity improvements of 30 percent in some cases. The automobile industry, with the shift towards autonomous vehicles, is another early adopter of Edge Computing: a connected vehicle navigating a busy highway is processing the vision itself and deciding how to navigate in real time.

IBM data has shown us that nearly 7 in 10 IT professionals expect 5G to have a big impact on their business. Primarily, the majority see the potential impact that 5G will have for faster AI applications, increased speeds for services and more effective communication with edge and IoT devices thanks to cloud computing.

Edge computing, powered by software-driven 5G, will transform the way in which our businesses are configured in the future. Enterprises are poised to lead in the 5G and edge generation, and those companies that take steps now to prepare their hybrid cloud strategy will be ready to capitalise on its full potential.

Takreem El Tohamy, general manager, IBM Middle East and Africa