The next wave of technical innovation will be driven by businesses looking to provide more touchless experiences to their coronavirus-wary customers. If you had asked me a year ago where I thought the tech industry was headed, I probably would have answered that we are headed toward the age of "smart everything." Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) were really in vogue last year. It seemed that nearly every vendor was scrambling to include some sort of machine learning into their products. It reminded me of the way things were several years back when all the tech vendors were rushing to include cloud in their offerings.

The next phase of networking will depend on IT learning to wrangle modern technologies in ways that simplify operations and help humans make decisions. That's the upshot of a new report by Cisco, which specifically called out technologies like machine learning, machine reasoning and automation. According to the report, "2020 Global Networking Trends Report," the new era of networking will require these technologies to power new ways of building and operating networks and solving associated business challenges. "Organizations need a new, integrated architecture for each network domain, one that is customized to meet the specific needs of that domain and that provides a way to communicate and enforce consistent policy across all domains," the company said. Cisco concluded by positioning intent-based networking -- which it offers -- as the new kind of network that's needed to harness emerging technologies and leverage new capabilities to meet business goals.

The next few years are going to be lively ones for the datacenter, with more than half of new infrastructure being deployed in edge locations, half of core enterprise datacenters and two-thirds of the major edge IT sites leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), more than half of datacenter infrastructure running "as-a-service" solutions, and a steadily growing number of companies relying on colocation partners. Those were a few of the predictions offered by the industry watchers at IDC last week with the release the analyst firm's first annual "Futurescape" forecast focused on the datacenter. Emphasizing trends emerging in 2020, the report was presented in part during a webcast led by some of its authors. "At the core of all of our predictions is the reality that technology is very rapidly moving from the back office to the front office," said Jennifer Cooke, research director of IDC's Cloud to Edge Datacenter Trends and Strategies research team. "And a lot of this is about the boundaries between an organization's internal operations and external ecosystem of customers, partners and markets. These boundaries are just disappearing."

The biggest feature in the SQL Server 2019 preview launched at Ignite is SQL Server Big Data clusters. Travis Wright, Microsoft's principal program manager for SQL Server, explains exactly what this means for administrators. Microsoft introduced a new community technology preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2019 at Microsoft Ignite on Monday (you can read about the full list of announced features here). As part of that announcement came SQL Server Big Data clusters, a scale-out, data virtualization platform built on top of the Kubernetes (K8s) container platform. SQL Server Big Data clusters is a big investment from Microsoft into a number of technologies -- and it is clear that taking one of its best-selling enterprise products and building on top of the K8s infrastructure is a moonshot at modernizing the data estate in most enterprises.

IT could use AI but can they afford it? That's the question a survey report, "Top Trends in AIOps Adoption: The Future of Digital Operations Management" by OpsRamp Inc., attempts to answer. The San Jose, Calif.-based AIOps platform provider defines AIOps as "artificial intelligence for IT operations." One focus for AI in IT would be helping to manage the alerts IT professionals receive throughout the day as systems reach thresholds or are nearing failure points or failing. The volume of alerts can become a problem itself if the IT staff becomes overwhelmed by them. "IT professionals are now drowning in'alert storms' that negatively impact service availability and increase resolution time for IT outages," the report states.

Microsoft on Monday described its SharePoint vision, new features and coming attractions, kicking off this week's SharePoint North America event. The nearly two-hour keynote talk featured Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for OneDrive, SharePoint and Office, along with talks and demos by other SharePoint luminaries. As usual with the big SharePoint events, Microsoft doled out lots of details. This article just focuses on the broad strokes. The general themes of the talk were about the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) in SharePoint, as well as mixed reality, including a new "Shared Spaces" three-dimensional capability for sites.

Microsoft has touted how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are solving many problems. Now Redmond and IT security providers are applying AI in cyberthreat detection. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have existed in computer science for decades, but in 2017 they were the hottest things in IT. Touted to address everything from helping diagnose and cure major diseases to translating live Skype sessions on the fly and enabling smart chatbots, applying AI and machine learning's highest calling may come in the effort to protect PCs, devices and critical infrastructure. Adding deep learning, automation and predictive analytics has become a key imperative by virtually every provider of software this year amid an exponential rise in cyberattacks.

Researchers at Microsoft achieved what they say is a breakthrough in speech recognition claiming they've developed a system that's as effective or better than people with professional transcription skills. The software's word error rate (WER) is down to 5.9 percent -- an improvement from the WER of 6.9 the team reported in September. The milestone was enabled with the new Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, the software that enables those speech recognition advances (as well as image recognition and search relevance). Microsoft announced both developments two weeks ago, though the timing wasn't the best as IBM was holding its huge World of Watson event in Las Vegas. Watson, of course, is Big Blue's AI system made famous several years ago when it appeared on Jeopardy and, in advance of its latest rollout, made the talk-show circuit including CNN and CBS's 60 Minutes, where IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty talked up Watson's own achievements including the ability to discover potential cancer cures deemed not possible by humans, among other milestones.

Microsoft last week released the preview of the PowerShell Module for its Azure Machine Learning (ML) service. The Azure ML PowerShell cmdlets library, available on GitHub, lets users interact with Azure ML workspaces, experiments, Web services and endpoints. The .NET-based PowerShell DLL module will let users fully manage their Azure ML workspaces, according to a blog post by Microsoft Principal Program Manager Hai Ning. The module includes the entire source code, which Ning said has a cleanly separated C# API layer. "This means you can also reference this DLL from your own .NET project and operate Azure ML through .NET code," Ning stated.