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January 2019

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While it would be an exaggeration to say that the last few years have been a golden age for technology companies, there’s no denying that things have been remarkably calm considering some of the seismic shifts taking place in the way that many organizations consume IT resources. That may be about to change, as a new market landscape begins to emerge at the same time as the global economy shows signs of losing steam. From the impact of a slowdown in China to the growing influence of service providers, here are 3 things you can expect to see in the IT market this year.

The SaaS market has been growing at rapid pace for several years, and that momentum shows little sign of slowing. While the market is dominated by a small handful of large vendors, the long tail of the SaaS market is filled with many up-and-coming companies who demonstrate tremendous innovation, and as such, are experiencing staggering growth. From a SaaS buyer perspective, expectations continue to heighten surrounding what software vendors should, and ultimately must, provide if they want to survive over the long term.

In October 2018, a Reuters article informed the world that Amazon had scrapped an AI–based recruitment application that turned out to be biased against women. Most headlines about this story highlighted the company’s failure in developing an actionable and fair solution for one of the most important processes of the HR team.

However, what this and similar examples of today’s AI “failures” neglect to acknowledge is the complexity of end-to-end process automation based on AI technology. This complexity stems not only from current technical limitations but also from the immaturity of corporate policies, government regulations, and legal systems to deal with machines that automatically analyze, decide, and act.