Reflecting on another year in tech – reviewing the trends of 2024 and looking at what’s on

[UKIMEA_Insights]

Reflecting on another year in tech – reviewing the trends of 2024 and looking at what’s on the horizon for 2025

The last 12 months in tech have seen progression in many areas, and, as always, we like to look back at our experts’ predictions for 2024 to see how accurate they were, before shifting our gaze to the forthcoming year.

We rounded up some of our colleagues to review these predictions and make some of their own; Paula Lender-Swain, Director UKI Public Sector Sales, Hannah Brier, Senior Sustainable Transformation Technologist, Matt Armstrong-Barnes, Chief Technology Officer for Artificial Intelligence, Simon Wilson, Chief Technology Officer for Aruba, Nyla Kongsinh, Senior Technology Evangelist and Dave Strong, Director for Advisory and Professional Services UKIMEA.

Watch the full video here 

A look in the rearview mirror

Last year’s predictions hinted at a year of rapid evolution across the board. Simon agreed that a lot of these have come to fruition, saying, “Certainly people are more interested in AI, they’re more interested in sustainability, they’re starting to deploy new technologies like cloud management, so I think a lot of those predictions came true.” He also suggested that he’d like to see more customers take advantage of the capabilities on offer this year.

Nyla commented on the prediction of 2024 being ‘the year of GenAI’, saying, “I think we were pretty spot on and how it’s going to lead the way.” Hannah agreed, noting that sustainability was also mentioned and that, “Organisations are looking at that as on the horizon in terms of the net zero target looming.”

Matt noted that even though AI had exploded in use and popularity, many organisations were lagging in developing an effective AI strategy. “Lots of them are leaping towards the technology without understanding how they can put in the strategic framework that means that executing AI is going to be much simpler, much quicker and much more effective.”

Dave also hinted at the potential of hybrid cloud still not being realised, commenting that, “I think it’s absolutely the right model for the future, and it’s being adopted by so many organisations, but I don’t think we’ve even touched the surface.” He suggested that organisations need to embrace a ‘hybrid by design’ approach in their IT cloud execution.

Focusing on the year ahead

AI popped up again as a key trend for 2025, with a few different facets leading the charge.

Paula Lender-Swain suggested that AI could have an incredible impact on those who struggle to access technology in more traditional ways, saying, “They can speak into AI, it can help them with things like dyslexia, putting together their thoughts, filling in forms, applying for jobs - all sorts of things”. Offering access to services in a new way could have the potential for improving daily life for a huge number of citizens across the UK.

Sustainability continues to be a priority, and with the explosion of AI there are some beneficial use cases for using AI to hit sustainability goals. Hannah said, “What really excites me for the future within the technology industry is the topic on heat recovery - there's a tremendous amount of heat that is generated in data centres.” Extracting heat from data centres and reusing it elsewhere could lead to a reduction in electricity use for cooling those data centres.

Dave Strong agreed, hailing data centres as an underrated technology that may have a great impact on 2025. “What we're seeing is a resurgence of distributed data centre infrastructure and design, purely focused about sustainability. When we take the heat that comes off our AI computing, we want to make use of that.” Dave suggested that this can only happen with a distributed environment, where the heat can be taken for uses such as heating swimming pools, hospitals and other good uses. He added, “I think we're going to see an absolutely change in how the UK looks at data centre technology and how we build data centres and that whole distributed data centre infrastructure”.

Matt Armstrong-Barnes agreed that AI will dominate tech this year, and highlighted the evolution of microservices, explaining the direction that our partner, NVIDIA is taking. “They have introduced a collection of microservices that we can build into our platforms to give customers an absolutely fantastic outcome.” With this technology continuing to evolve, Matt suggested that the collaboration of multiple microservices would offer a huge step forward in building artificial intelligent architectures, with private cloud playing a critical role in that.

Join us again in 12 months to see if our predictions were correct…

Ukimea Insights
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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