Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Global VC reveals the top 5 enterprise tech trends that will shape 2022

General Partners at global VC firm Telstra Ventures highlight the key disruptions and innovations that will shape the tech world in 2022.

We are witnessing the most significant shift in the way we work since the first industrial revolution. Today, flexibility defines the workforce; work revolves around personal lives rather than the other way around. As a result, the Fluid Workforce is spurring growth in venture capital investments, with significant growth across EdTech, Cloud, Network, and Security Tech seen in 2021. The next step is to design and build tools to augment and support how today's fluid workforce live their lives and want to collaborate with colleagues. Water cooler conversations and side conversations in the hallways or lunchroom are not happening. Burnout and mental health issues are rising. People inherently want human-to-human connection, not just adding another SaaS enterprise tool to their workflow. Businesses will need to move beyond technology solutions that merely help staff to do their jobs outside of the office but empower employees to boost their productivity and engagement in the fluid workplace. 

Saad Siddiqui, General Partner, Telstra Ventures

2.  Accelerating software innovation 

As the unrelenting pace of software innovation continues to accelerate in 2022, the gap between the ‘haves' and "have ‘nots' will likely increase. The ‘haves' understand that everything is being powered by software and they're mastering the software development process with quality, speed and high levels of collaboration.  Companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (FAANG) have been teaching us this for years.  In August of this year, the FAANG had a combined market cap of $7.1T and made up approximately 19% of the S&P 500. These companies understand that great achievements come from the continuous release of software improvements - not ‘digital transformation projects'. To ramp up release momentum, mainstream companies will be forced to build stronger continuous software development muscles with companies like GitLab and incorporate a DevSecOps / GitOps approach to designing, building, testing, deploying and managing their applications at scale. These innovations will need to be released onto an autonomous and composable infrastructures like Upbound, a Telstra Ventures investee, and open source Crossplane, which leverage the power of Kubernetes to deliver high levels of flexibility, automation, resilience and speed. 

Steve Schmidt, General Partner, Telstra Ventures 

As business units face greater cost and gross margin pressures, either from inflation or added competition, there will be a stronger demand for more AI and machine learning-based optimizations like Asapp, a Telstra Ventures investee that raised its $120 M Series C earlier this year.  We're already seeing the early adopters of Asapp's AI/ML capability reduce their Contact Center costs by as much as 30%-60% while massively improving their Net Promoter Scores (NPS). When you're spending $1B per annum on contact centers, like the top US Banks, Telco's and Airlines, that's a saving of $300M - $600M annually. As market companies like American Airlines, JetBlue and Dish Network adopt more AI/ML at scale, their competitors will be forced to react. In 2022, more companies will push the limits of what's possible with AI/ML in terms of driving real-world business impact.

Steve Schmidt, General Partner, Telstra Ventures

4.  More intense ransomware battles

According to various reports, somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of companies fell victim to ransomware in the last year. Little wonder that we've seen governments and corporations stepping up to try and take the fight to the criminals. However, accessible, usable tools mean that attacks are easier to orchestrate, hence ransomware payments from US banks almost doubling between 2020 and 2021. As the frequency of these attacks increases, so does the power of the financial lure for criminals. This problem won't go away anytime soon and I think it will get worse in 2022 before it gets better.

Marcus Bartram, General Partner, Telstra Ventures

5.  New names in cyber-insurance

Right now, there's a dislocation in the insurance market. Businesses need and want cyber-insurance, some urgently, but traditional providers are hesitant to underwrite cyber-specific policies. There's a clear gap here, where new players that better understand cyber-risk could step in. With the right products, they could price dynamically, respond to market demand and more accurately gauge the impacts of loss. Traditional insurance providers look unlikely to change for some time yet, so there's a significant window for those new cyber-players to start up, develop and grow. We've recognised this trend with investments in Corvus in cyber insurance and reThought in flood insurance. 

Marcus Bartram, General Partner, Telstra Ventures

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