Quantum, Metaverse, NFTs and Healthcare blockchains coming in 2022

Manjusha Madabushi is the CTO and Co-Founder of Talentica Software, the global leader in product development services for early and growth-stage technology businesses. She has mentored over 70 start-ups in building successful products across domains like FinTech, Media & Ads, EdTech, and Healthcare in a career spanning more than 3 decades. Manjusha is an avid hiker and an IIT Mumbai & Northwestern University alumnus.

In the coming year, we can expect to see many exciting software developments including the acceleration of Blockchain technology to protect health data, real-world use cases for quantum computing, and more practical NFTs.

Healthcare blockchains in 2022

Protecting and limiting patient health data is correctly the biggest concern and hindrance in bringing AI-based healthcare products to market. In 2022 blockchains will start to play a significant role in ensuring data privacy within the healthcare sector, for building machine learning models and AI Inferencing.

Quantum Annealing

While powerful quantum gate computers are still far from being commercially available, in 2022 Quantum Annealing will solve many real-world optimization use cases. Despite providing approximate solutions, quantum annealers are superior at solving some NP-hard optimization problems that take conventional computers' exponential time.

Building the Metaverse

With Facebook renaming itself to Meta and starting to build the Metaverse, in 2022 and beyond, we will see big investments and innovation in virtual world-based online gaming, social networking, and virtual reality-based products like virtual conference platforms. Expect new applications that enable meetings with characters in the virtual world filling the place of corresponding human entities. The concept of renting/buying virtual real estate will also pick up.

Practical NFTs

Last year we experienced a boom in NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in the form of digital art, songs, and collectibles flooding the market. In 2022 we will see NFTs expand into more practical applications such as decentralized finance and digital twins that represent a connected digitalized version of actual physical entities.

Serverless Clouds Spark Innovation

Serverless architectures promise a truly pay-as-you-go service where the infrastructure scales invisibly as an application requires it and the user doesn’t have to get involved with configurations and technicalities. In 2022 and beyond, serverless will enable new user experiences and impact the broader trend across the cloud and the entire tech landscape by creating experiences that make innovation more accessible.

More AutoML

After initial success, AutoML solutions from organizations like Google and AWS will make it easier to try out different approaches thereby reducing time to market and improving the accuracy of predictions.

Poly Clouds Win Over Multi-Cloud

We will see businesses adopting Poly Cloud more to leverage the best offerings of cloud service providers for specific parts of the workload instead of Multi-Cloud, where the same workloads run on multiple cloud platforms. Poly Cloud makes it easier to connect and collaborate with partners who aren't running on the same IT stack and helps avoid vendor lock.

Distributed Technologies Will Merge

Cloud Computing technologies have emerged as a paradigm shift in software development methodologies, but they still follow a centralized approach. In the last few years, decentralized technologies like Edge Computing, Tiny ML, Blockchain, and 5G technologies have emerged and are now becoming mature. Merging these distributed technologies will unearth exciting real-life use-cases in the near future.