REBUILDING THE HUMAN RACE THROUGH THE FOURTH PLATFORM
S analysed the computing industry’s remarkable shift to the third platform. Most enterprises’ new strategic IT investments through 2020 will be built on third platform technologies and solutions.
The first platform is mainframe computing, which began in the late 1950s and continues today.
The second platform is client-server computing systems. This began in the 1980s and also continues today, with PCs tapping into mainframe databases and applications.
The third platform is the current platform of IT, built on four pillar technologies: cloud, mobility, social, and big data/analytics. It began in the early 2010s and is transforming IT much faster than the first two platforms ever did. IT is rapidly shifting to the third platform.
As the third platform evolves, IDC sees the emergence of a first wave of innovation accelerators, technologies critical to business transformation that can radically expand its capabilities and applications. They are:
Robotics: Machines that can perform tasks based on current states and sensing, without human intervention.
Internet of Things (IoT): A network of uniquely identifiable end points (or things) that communicate bi-directionally without human interaction using IP connectivity.
Natural interfaces or Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR): Purpose-built devices worn on the head and over the eyes. Whereas AR allows the wearer to see his or her surroundings while being served data or feedback through overlaying digital objects in the real world or simply generating actionable feedback in the form of a heads-up display, VR completely obscures the wearer’s vision of the outside world, creating an all-inclusive virtual reality.
Cognitive/Artificial Intelligence (AI) Systems: A set of technologies that use deep natural language processing
and understanding to answer questions and provide recommendations and direction.
3D printing: 3D printers create objects and shapes made through material that is laid down successively upon itself from a digital model or file.
Next generation security: The recognition of the direct link between mastery of data and the ability to protect it.
The third platform and these innovation accelerators are what enterprises deploy to drive digital transformation (DX) via the use of information to create value and competitive advantage through new offerings, business models, and relationships. IDC’s DX Maturity Benchmark of over 1,600 companies reports 67% of enterprises have already begun their transformation as digital explorers or digital players, while only 5% have fully transformed.
Even though the third platform is relatively new, the fourth platform is on the horizon. It will be defined by the integration of digital technologies with human biosystems as well as the use of digital technologies to engineer biological systems at the cellular and subcellular level. Such technologies are starting to enter early research and development stages at the moment.
The next four years are the “proto” period where we’ll see proof of concept/prototype offerings, and the first Amazons, Googles and Facebooks of the next era are likely to emerge. The next platform will not make the third platform obsolete, instead building atop its technologies.
By 2020, one-third of health/life sciences and consumer product companies will begin to develop products and services tightly integrating third platform technologies with the human body. “Augmented Humanity” offerings will go mainstream in the mid-2020s. Augmented humanity is defined as the use of technology to both aid and replace human capabilities in a way that joins person and machine as one. This augmentation also defines machinery used to replace or enhance parts of the body.
The mission for fourth platform solutions will be augmented humanity including augmented sensing, memory and cognition, biostructure, mobility and immunity improving our lives.