They assigned each of the sixteen trends on their list to one of four categories:

• Necessary trends which are well-understood and have clearly articulated strategies and initiatives, currently seeking widespread acceptance across industries and consumer markets.
• Experimental trends that are still in early or purely conceptual stages, with few functional products on the market yet.
• Threatening trends that have already seen significant investment activity or early adoption, which may be on the verge of breaking through to wider markets.
• Transitory trends that haven’t yet staked out clear market opportunities, but may find them as they become better known and understood.

We’ve put together a quick rundown of top eight trending technologies across all four categories.

Necessary

1. Software-defined wide area networking
   SD-WAN provides greater performance, bandwidth, and flexibility for networking. It’s expected that 5G networks will help facilitate this technology, which has big implications for IoT developers.
2. Time series databases
   Already in use in some industries, this “time-stamps” data in a way that allows changes to be tracked.
    

Experimental

3. Multi-cloud management
   With many businesses utilizing multiple cloud services, managing data has gotten complicated. Multi-cloud management platforms offer centralized control of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other popular cloud services.
4. Application-specific integrated circuits and application-specific standard products
   Both of these terms refer to chips designed to serve a single...