Good afternoon everyone. Kevin Baylor, CTO of Alliance IT.

Hope you’re having a great day.

Going to take a few moments and we’re going to talk about some things that we’re seeing that is already out there in the technology world and starting to hit the small, mid-sized market outside of corporate.

We know that technology trends are always moving hard and fast. They never stay still. They’re always rapidly changing and we’ve heard about cloud computing for several years. We’ve been offering cloud services to our clients for several years as well, way before Azure was a household word.

We’ve seen a large adoption to Microsoft Azure this year. In another little article, we will talk about cloud computing, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud usage. So stay tuned later on for that topic.

But cloud computing, it has really become in its own age. It’s here. It’s a commodity. Most, I would say about 60 percent of the businesses that we run across, if they aren’t using some sort of cloud computing, they’re planning on it this year.

Fortune 500 companies, about 60 percent of them have already moved more than 50 percent of their infrastructure into the cloud in some manner or another, whether it’s dedicated applications, whether it’s a full infrastructure or a combination of both.

Statistics show that about 42 percent of businesses out there are using multi-cloud solutions and that’s really where you’re using two different vendors.

If you’re not in the cloud yet, you probably will be soon whether you like it or not and we’re here to help you make it smooth and easy and not have that rainy day. So don’t be afraid of the cloud.

A couple of other things that you might have heard about, AI or ML, artificial intelligence or machine learning. Again, AI is making a harder push into everyday technology whether it’s in processors of your phones or the computers.

The idea is that it’s there to help you stay safe, protect you, help you mitigate your risk, make sure that things are running smoothly and you can focus on your business.

Machine learning, we’re seeing more manufacturing, more industry 4.0 topics coming out that are going to make a bigger push.

The food industry, you’re going to have algorithms that, you know, they’re going to be able to predict when certain commodities are going to be running out of stock and you’re going to want to focus on getting delivery times down.

There’s going to be this balance between supply and demand and AI and ML, whether independently or together, are going to help those improve.

Manufacturing as I stated, industry 4.0 is hot and heavy. Jen has talked about that in the past and we will talk about industry 4.0 a little bit more in the future as well. But ML out there, machine learning, it’s going to monitor everything that is going on in your manufacturing and engineering processes from the state of spare parts to predicting better when things are going to need repair or need maintenance. Predictive failure is going to get even tighter and better.

As we all know, we’ve got a lot of smart home devices out there. Some of these smart homes are now tying back into the businesses. We’re bringing smart devices into the business, whether it’s from cameras to thermostats, to monitoring production floor environments. AI is all part of that and we’re going to see more and more of that in the healthcare industry. We’re going to see more of it in the finance and we’re already seeing more of it in the education industry.

So transportation, you’re going to get integrated with it too, whether it’s routing and logistics. There are startup companies out there that are doing a lot more smart matching of vendors and services and products and clients to where an individual business employee can focus more on productive type items than some of these little mundane tasks that we’ve been used to in the past.