Keysight executives offer their insights on the operations that shape businesses and the technological trends unfolding through the lens of the pandemic, whose effects will endure in organizations and society.
 
The rise of quantum computing


Quantum computing is an emerging technology that has continued to thrive during COVID-19, both in terms of innovation and investment. 2022 will be a pivotal year for quantum computing. The need for high-precision testing and measurement will expand rapidly to enable superconducting quantum systems to reach their full potential.

Multi-qubit quantum computers are coming to the cloud.
In 2022, several companies will deploy quantum processor units (QPUs) with 100 qubits or more to the cloud. These advances will create new challenges for device developers, including scaling (larger quantum computers), deployment (more calibrations), and repeatability (in their manufacturing).

• Advances in Two-Qubit Gate Error Rates:
Two-qubit gate error rates are currently a major limiting factor in the performance of quantum algorithms for applications in finance, pharmaceuticals, and logistics. With the current demonstration of improvements in QPU technologies in two-qubit gate error rates, record low levels of system noise are expected in 2022, which will help improve the performance of quantum processors. These advances will create a new challenge in reliably and efficiently measuring small gate error rates and understanding crosstalk in QPUs.
 
Robust Supply Chains 


Current supply chain disruptions—limitations in the availability of semiconductors and raw materials, coupled with logistical constraints such as congested ports and a shortage of truck drivers—have created a bottleneck that will continue to limit production in 2022. Supply chain robustness is now critical to an organization's ability to navigate the current volatility. Organizations will further refocus their efforts on achieving future-proof supply chains to gain a competitive advantage. Additionally, sustainable supply chains will be prioritized to mitigate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impacts.

Supply chains will become more agile and digital.
Digital technologies will create new capabilities for the supply chain ecosystem. With greater automation and visibility, organizations will be more agile and able to react quickly to fluctuations.

The self-managed supply chain will become a reality.
By widely embedding cognitive automation, supply chains will become smarter. This will lead to automation making recommendations, predicting outcomes, and eventually making decisions autonomously.

Business continuity planning and risk mitigation:
Instead of relying on a single global supplier, there will be a shift to multiple suppliers and regional divisions to reduce disruption. This will be a vital factor in the robustness of the supply chain.

Designed for robustness:
Product design will incorporate more readily available, standardized parts, enabling organizations to respond quickly to disruptions. Maintaining safety stocks for critical components will replace the current just-in-time inventory strategy.
 
Virtual collaboration will be more sophisticated.


The pandemic has shown organizations that they can succeed with a distributed workforce. In 2022, virtual collaboration will become more sophisticated, with organizations using innovative technology to increase their productivity. This new wave of remote collaboration will create a complex network of connected systems where measurement and testing will be essential to ensuring a secure and seamless experience.

Virtual/Augmented/Mixed Reality (VR/AR/MR) technologies will support improved visualization. In product design, digital twins will create design simulations before the physical product is built. These simulations will enable collaboration between remote design teams, improving the overall process and reducing the time and cost required for product development.
Remote monitoring with automated systems, including warehouse robots and delivery drones for logistics, will capture and consolidate data that remote workers can share and monitor in real time.
 
Enterprise IT
: Citizen Developers Will Be Dominant by 2025.
The biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for CIOs is the democratization of IT through citizen development. A citizen developer reports to a business unit or other responsibility other than IT. By 2027, there will be five times more citizen developers than regular developers in organizations.
The accelerating pace of digital transformation, with all workflows being automated, streamlined, and interconnected, is fueling the insatiable demand for applications.
The widespread deployment of intelligent technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) on no-code or low-code platforms, makes it easier for citizen developers to automate processes. As a result of this shift, CIOs will no longer be constrained by resources and will be able to rapidly scale their digital transformation efforts. However, they will need to continuously monitor and test the user experience across the entire ecosystem of applications and services.
The shift to citizen developers will add to the security burden, requiring CIOs to have real-time visibility into their networks to ensure the safety of both users and citizen developers. The rise of citizen developers depends on continuous intelligent test automation, ensuring that everything works as users expect and that systems are secure.

In enterprise systems, cloud-based composite architectures will displace traditional monolithic architectures
. IT organizations will accelerate the digitization of their businesses through API-based integration of cloud-based solutions from a wide variety of vendors to achieve unprecedented levels of adaptability, functionality, customer experience, scalability, and robustness.
Each company will become increasingly dependent on the performance, reliability, and security of the networks of its cloud service providers, solution providers, and business partners.
Network visibility and digital twin solutions for networks will need to find new ways to promote the required levels of performance, reliability, and, most importantly, security across networks in multiple enterprise groups.
 
IoT  
: Focus on subscription services, not devices.
Connected devices are ubiquitous across all industries; the key now is the delivery of subscription services. In 2022, intelligent technologies will enable organizations to treat their customers as a single segment and deploy hyper-personalized services. For example:
A smart refrigerator presents weekly menu options based on individual preferences (gluten-free) and then suggests shopping lists for the preferred supermarket with the necessary ingredients for the meals.
By 2025, these types of personalized services will have grown rapidly, and more than 50 percent of American households will have at least one subscription.

Traditional industries will transition to usage/subscription-based models.
Rolls-Royce leases its engines based on usage; trains operate on per-kilometer contracts. As the on-demand services economy continues to expand, subscription models will extend into business and consumer markets. This includes cars, appliances, and automated services. Connected infrastructure will alert us when repairs or replacements are needed, as predictive maintenance becomes the norm by 2024, optimizing the availability of these services.

Autonomous vehicles will help drive the shift to Mobility as a Service (MaaS).
The combination of autonomous vehicles and the shift to subscription-based services aligns with the vision of a world where car ownership is no longer necessary. By 2025, consumers will move towards a rental-as-a-service model, making it easier for them to go wherever they want, whenever they want. Another advantage of autonomous vehicles is that users can optimize their locations to maximize intended use. This ensures that anyone who wants a car has one when they need it, using the fewest possible vehicles by analyzing historical and real-time data to feed predictive analytics.

IoT will transform the in-store shopping experience.
Before the end of this decade, there will be no cashiers in any store. Smart technologies and RFID tags will register each product and automatically debit the customer's bank account, eliminating personal interaction in physical shopping.
By 2024, there will be a widespread deployment of robots in both stores and distribution centers, further reducing the number of jobs for humans in the retail industry.
Supermarkets will be the next victim in the store apocalypse. As RFID tags become ubiquitous in both homes and stores, supermarkets will supply directly from the warehouse to the customer, eliminating the need for physical stores.
Drone delivery will be the norm by 2025 to meet the demands of younger consumers and to accelerate product delivery.
 
Healthcare diagnostics:
In the same way that IoT began to displace analytics to the network edge, the situation is repeating itself in the healthcare sector. Increasingly sophisticated and accredited devices (such as an Apple Watch) feature technology that allows individual patients to perform a wide range of diagnostic tests on their own devices at home, anytime. This trend will expand into new markets, offering a range of standalone preliminary diagnostic solutions in most homes by 2024.
 
Security
– Cyber ​​risks in the supply chain will increase.
With greater reliance on technology, cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities will become a growing problem for supply chains as hackers focus on the IIoT and other critical infrastructure targets, including supply chains. Designing a robust supply chain will require connecting the entire ecosystem and ensuring that persistent attacks by hackers are unsuccessful.

By 2025, SecOps will be the number one operational priority.
With security breaches being a growing threat to every industry, DevOps will finally be replaced by DevSecOps in 2022 as businesses realize that security must play a leading role in a hyper-connected digital world.
IT and operations security teams will collaborate and integrate tools, processes, and technology to keep organizations secure. Security audits and targeted attacks against the network itself will be the only viable way to mitigate risks.

Standards will be introduced to help secure connected systems.
Each connected device presents another attack surface that hackers can exploit. With the complexity of connected systems, organizations have lacked visibility into where problems occur. By the end of 2023, standards will emerge that provide a single, secure interface to IoT systems to reduce the attack surface and provide better visibility into attempted and successful attacks.
New security tactics will be essential in an increasingly connected world where trust and security are paramount. Identifying coverage gaps and patching vulnerabilities before hackers exploit them will be a competitive advantage for any organization.
 
Digital Transformation and Connectivity
: There will be an insatiable demand for bandwidth.
The demand for bandwidth continues to grow with no end in sight, rising like a digital tsunami. In today's world, more devices are transmitting and receiving ever-increasing amounts of content: high-resolution images, 4K and 8K video, dynamic interactive experiences such as multiplayer games, and telemedicine.
 
 
Meeting customer expectations for the next generation of wireless devices will require disruptive innovations that provide a significant reduction in size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C)

The insatiable appetite for bandwidth and reliability has resulted in an explosion of complexity in wireless infrastructure, both in fixed elements and user terminals (UEs). New RF bands, formats, and advanced modulation techniques contribute to this increased complexity. However, consumers are unwilling to accept increases in the cost or size of UEs and demand even longer battery life. Achieving the necessary SWaP-C reductions requires a multifaceted approach, including advanced packaging technologies that allow hundreds of mmWave components to be interconnected simultaneously while extracting unwanted heat, as well as novel approaches to microcircuit manufacturing.
5G will drive digital transformation across multiple industries
. Through the end of this decade, the pace of transformation will continue to accelerate. In 2022, the large-scale deployment of 5G will boost the speed of change by eliminating bandwidth limitations. Device deployments and certifications, as well as network deployments, will continue to grow as Open Radio Access Networks (O-RANs) mature, with large-scale 5G deployments following.
5G devices will be ubiquitous by 2022. The focus will be on new Industrial IoT devices with improved latency and reliability. 5G coverage in rural locations will still be limited, and 5G-assisted autonomous vehicles (Level 4) will not yet be available in 2022.
Continued investment in 3GPP Rel 16 and 17, and beyond, will focus on new capabilities such as reduced latency, improved reliability, and enhanced positioning, enabling new use cases in vehicle automation, industrial networks, and factories.
5G will enable the next stage of ubiquitous computing by distributing intelligence wherever it is needed and improving the efficiency of all processes for better control and reduced waste.
6G: More is happening than you think:
By 2028, 5G networks will be everywhere, making the original 5G vision a reality by enabling vertical industries far beyond what we currently think of as “mobile communications”—such as Industrial IoT, digital healthcare, smart cities, and extended reality (XR) applications, which are currently just concepts. The first commercial 6G networks will be available that same year, paving the way for the convergence of the physical, digital, and human worlds through applications, computing, and communications. This will ultimately create the Internet of Everything (IoE).
 
The 2028 rollout of 6G will be made possible by ongoing research. Investment will increase in 2022 from the academic, government, and industrial sectors. This research will determine how to make the vision surrounding 6G a reality. 6G will make mobile communications an even more fundamental part of our professional and personal lives.
The adoption of digital twins will forever change how we design, build, and deliver products
. As organizations move toward digital transformation, they will realize the limitations of virtual systems and increase their adoption of digital twins. For example, in emerging industries like autonomous vehicles, manufacturers have no margin for error, and with digital twins, they can simulate all possible permutations and continuously refine the design.
Digital twins present a new way of approaching design and simulation that is more efficient, practical, and compliant with increasing regulatory requirements. Unlike a virtual model, a digital twin updates performance, maintenance, and vital data of physical systems in real time, improving decision-making. To keep pace with digital transformation, digital twins will be an essential part of product design.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and cloud conversion technologies will increasingly enable future networks.
This will include transforming the network core and improving mobility, as well as new software technologies that will increasingly enable telecommunications, including O-RAN, 5G core network, and mmWave mobility.
Artificial Intelligence will also continue to transform testing, analytics, and automation.
AI/ML is at the heart of automation, not just in running tests, but in how we use data to make informed decisions. It is much more efficient to move the algorithm to the data than to move terabytes of data to the cloud, so we expect to see some advancements that help us gain insights faster from data in motion.
With the increasing complexity of a primarily digital world, testing isolated code is no longer effective. In 2022, code conformance will no longer be the sole determining factor in whether software can be released. This is especially important in the growing number of systems using AI technology, where not all responses are deterministic, requiring AI to "test AI." Intelligent test automation will be vital to ensuring our complex, connected world functions exactly as needed.
 
Sustainability and ESG will remain key
. Supply chains will integrate sustainability.
As organizations attempt to mitigate their ESG risks, they will prioritize sustainable supply chains. A sustainable supply chain will incorporate:
reducing the carbon footprint in shipping and logistics planning, and having carbon accounting platforms in their systems to monitor emissions data;
creating a circular supply chain (reduction, reuse, recycling, and remanufacturing) to minimize waste impacting the environment and to reduce the cost of raw materials;
supply chain integrity. Ethics and compliance will become increasingly important, encompassing fair and legal labor practices through responsible sourcing;
and a climate-intelligent supply chain. This will assess how climate change affects the availability of materials and identify potential supply chain disruptions.
Creating sustainable supply chains requires comprehensive testing and verification to minimize the carbon footprint.
Home sustainability scores:
With homes saturated with connected devices, sustainability efforts are impacted. By 2025, home energy rates will be a factor in the smart ecosystem, and the efficiency of connected devices in the home will be scored. This score will be vital in the sale or rental of homes, especially for Millennials and Gen Z.
As everything is digitized, a complex network of system and application services is created that requires rigorous automated testing to ensure that everything not only works as expected but also minimizes environmental impact.
The push towards net zero will need to expand.
The push to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 will require the deployment of a wave of new technologies. However, this does not address the carbon already in the atmosphere. To reset this balance, a form of industrial-scale carbon recovery will be necessary before the end of this decade.