2020 will be remembered as a tumultuous period for most industries, including IT.
The new pandemic context reshaped our way of thinking, reordered priorities and long term planning.
Here, at 112Hub, we could see the early changes in the IT industry, thanks to our daily activity that revolves around software development needs.
Drawing the curtain over 2020, we admit that the market's dynamic has been a pleasant surprise: Despite normal cautions, the major players continued their growth and some software technologies sky-rocked in demand.
Here are the top 3 branches that drew our attention in a positive manner:
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – For industries that are not IT related, we believe it to be more of a long-term investment, not an immediate need, but the idea of robotic automatization flourished in the minds of most managers.
The result was a high demand for software solutions that will automate business processes such as interpreting applications, processing transactions, dealing with data, sales targeting, composing and delivering personalized emails.
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality – It wasn't difficult to anticipate the pandemic benefits for the gaming industry. But the VR and AR are also used for non-ludic activities such as personnel training, education and marketing.
VR stats for 2020 show that the adoption of VR in e-commerce can boost online shopping conversion by 17% (Source: Swag Soft)
There are more that 170 milion VR users worldwide and the VR+AR market is expected to grow to 209.3 billion USD by 2022 (Source: Statista).
For the moment, Sony is the world’s largest vendor of VR devices, accounting for 43% of the total VR device shipment share.
Internet of Things (IoT) –Acording to Statista, the global spending on IoT is forecast to reach 1.1 trillion USD in 2022.
Here, at 112Hub, we received requests for multiple IoT projects in the past months, and most of them were fresh ideas that attracted funds, so they could blossom into ingenious prototypes.
Statista forecasts that by 2030, approx. 50 billion IoT devices will be in use around the world, creating a network of interconnected devices spanning everything from self-driving cars to kitchen appliances.