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A CONVERGED FUTURE

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Updated : April 5, 2015 00:31  am,
By Editor

img55Converged infrastructure promises to do away with many challenges of traditional datacenter architecture as it offers scalable integrated solutions

Converged infrastructure promises ease of deployment, central management, and optimization as it brings together storage, servers, networking, and management together. Leading vendors have been rolling out new converged infrastructure systems. Their objective is to offer a new way of integrated IT that radically redefines the way IT infrastructure is built and maintained and is geared to support cloud ready environments.

The value-propositions are quite appealing for both SMB and enterprise customers. It helps meet Technology expectations such as eliminate silos, simplify systems management, adopt efficiencies and effectiveness through virtualization, improve TCO alongside reduced footprints, improve automation as well as make the infrastructure far more agile.

Shams Hasan, Enterprise Product Manager, Middle East at Dell says, “Converged infrastructure is one of the fastest-growing segments of the IT industry.  Integrated infrastructure delivers ease of deployment, reduces capital equipment expenses, facilitates scalability and reduces management complexity.  Converged solutions are being widely adopted by large enterprises where infrastructure sprawl has chewed up budgets and made scalability a challenge, and as a method to speed delivery of IT services. They are also proving to be beneficial to IT-strapped small and mid-sized organizations, which often lack the skills and resources to keep up with increased business demands for IT services.”

According to Kartik Shankar, Senior Sales Manager, StorIT Distribution, as data centres and storage solutions continue to evolve, converged infrastructure is also taking the centre stage in modernization. Organizations that have invested in software-defined technologies for their data centre transformation are seeing value in converged infrastructure solutions.

He adds, “The trend towards converged infrastructure is primarily driven by TCO and performance objectives demands of emerging technology solutions. Sizing key components of the IT system infrastructure gets highly complex and challenging to meet the objective through the traditional way. Currently converged infrastructure is the most matured approach to address these challenges and backbone/infrastructure backbone of web 3.0.”

The traditional datacenters have seen the sprawl of technology silos of storage, networking, compute as separate racks. This is addressed through taking the convergence route to IT deployment.

Suda Srinivasan, Director for Product Marketing at Nutanix says, “Enterprise datacenters have become incredibly complex over the years. Every aspect of the legacy infrastructure lifecycle is a challenge, from buying and deploying to managing, scaling and support. At the heart of the problem is the traditional three-tier infrastructure model, with servers connected over a network to a shared scale-up storage solution. Converged infrastructure, or more specifically hyperconverged infrastructure, addresses this problem of complexity.”

There are two approaches to achieving the integrated systems infrastructure deployment. VCE, part of the EMC Federation champions the hardware-focused, building-block approach which is categorised as converged infrastructure whereas Nutanix, SimpliVity and recently VMware etc offer hyper-converged infrastructure, taking the software defined route. While converged systems are in general separate components that are designed to work well together, hyper-converged systems are modular. Hyperconverged solutions integrate compute and storage resources in a single x86-based server deployed in scale-out clusters.

Hyperconvergence in the ascent

Virtualization has pretty much become a standard for enterprise infrastructure except for a few legacy business critical applications. Converged or hyper-converged infrastructure can help realize greater benefits of virtualization.

Karthik says, “We can find enterprise setups managing both virtual and physical environment in many cases. This is majorly due to the limitations in the traditional infrastructure approach and support/compatibility challenges from the application vendor, etc. This is where converged infrastructure plays a major game changing role by providing custom engineered system components fine-tuned to run even legacy applications. This approach helps to balance and align the right system components to meet the business requirement, with improved performance and ease of infrastructure management.”

Hyperconverged infrastructure uses the webscale approach that is modular and scales up as required. This is well aligned with the needs of virtualization and cloud based infrastructure.

Shams says, “Once deployed, with web scale, the converged compute and local storage platform with distributed software technology can create extremely dynamic data centers that can easily be scaled.  This strategy and capability is crucial for the modern data center.”

According to Jan Ursi, Senior Director, Channel Sales & Marketing for EMEA and India at Nutanix, the traditional datacenter architecture with multiple components that need to be glued together manually is not built for virtualization or cloud. It is too complex, too rigid, scales in too large increments and slows down provisioning of new applications

He adds, “Virtualization is the default vehicle to Cloud, but the underlying IT infrastructure needs to change, learning from the most successful web companies like Google, Amazon, Azure, Facebook, etc. Simplifying the datacenter by virtualizing without a SAN, using a converged webscale virtual computing platform is critical for Virtualization and Cloud projects to live up to their promise.”

Nutanix, the leader in the hyperconverged space deploys more hyperconverged infrastructure than all other players in this space together with a 52% market share, according to IDC. The EMEA region represents around 25% of the global Nutanix footprint.

“Hundreds of datacenters rely on Nutanix to run their critical applications already for many years. The Nutanix projects are a mix of size and verticals, serving SMB enterprises like ADD in Belgium to large organizations like Orange Business Services. The uses vary from running critical tier-1 server workloads like Microsoft SQL, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft Exchange to others like VDI, Big Data, Branch Office and Disaster Recovery projects,” says Jan Ursi, Sr. Director, Channel Sales & Marketing for EMEA and India at Nutanix.

Nutanix offers a software-defined solution that does not rely on any purpose built hardware. The Nutanix solution runs on a commodity server architecture on top of any industry standard hypervisor (VMware, Microsoft hyper-v or KVM).

However, customers can also choose between a wide portfolio of Nutanix nodes with a different mix of compute and storage resources on board. Next to the native Nutanix NX series appliances, customers can also opt to source the Dell XC series converged webscale appliances powered by the Nutanix software.

Some divergence with the convergence

There are two approaches for converged infrastructure. One where a single vendor owns all the technology, bundles it, tests it and then sells it as a single bundled solution to the customer. The second approach is when different vendors collaborate to bring the latest and best solutions based around a validated reference architecture that describe configurations of server/storage/networking products, which is integrated into one unified solution that is assembled, integrated and tested before selling it to the customer.

The converged infrastructure space is populated by many of the large sized vendors including some new start-ups. The vendors in the fray include EMC, NetApp, Cisco IBM, Hitachi, HP, Dell, Oracle etc. Reference architecture offerings include NetApp’s Flexpod and EMC’s VSPEX. Hitachi offers both pre-fabricated solutions and reference architectures under its Unified Compute Platform (UCP).

The flexpods

Flexpod is a reference architecture that uses technology from NetApp and Cisco Systems. The FlexPod solution portfolio combines NetApp storage systems, Cisco Unified Computing System servers, and Cisco Nexus fabric into a single, flexible architecture.

“The FlexPod, is a combination of networking servers from Cisco, NetApp storage with software from VMware for virtualization. The result is an integrated stack which solves the problems companies had in the past of buying and building their solutions and trying to make them work. The FlexPod is configured to work from the get go and is typically used by customers wishing to build a private cloud and then start to move towards a hybrid public,” says Graham Porter MENA Channel Manager.

The Flexpod converged portfolio has three offerings. Flexpod Datacentre is designed for large environments. FlexPod Express is targeted at small and medium-sized businesses. Finally, there is FlexPod Select, which is targeted at high performance workloads, including Hadoop big data analytics. According to NetApp, FlexPod has seen a sharp uptake in deployments and is an area of growth for the company moving forward.

Fadi Kanafani Regional Director, MENA and Pakistan at NetAPP says, We have 50 validated designs between us and Cisco for this integrated stack which makes it the number one converged cloud-based solution in the market now, a market that now exceeds 3B dollars globally. We have in excess of 4000 customers on the FlexPod which is showing over 80% growth from 2013 to 2014. ”

The VCE way

VCE, one of the key players in converged infrastructure, is a company founded by EMC, VMware and Cisco and now owned largely by EMC. The company has an appliance based approach and offers Vblocks that are prefabricated in their factories according to customer requirements.

Tom O’Reilly, CTO – Middle East & Africa at VCE says, “Vblock is a highly engineered single product. We have determined the best possible way to configure networking, storage, software, compute and virtualization altogether into one product. We manufacture our Vblocks in the factory, where we build not only the physical box, wherein we rack, stack, power and cable everything but we also logically configure the entire v-block for a customer’s datacenter. We also do logical configuration survey (LCS) at the customer site before that to understand the environment as to how they want use the Vblock. So when our v-blocks arrive at the site, they are ready to powered on, connected to the switches, to the networking and all ready to deploy mission critical applications.”

The company provides customers support through the full lifecycle. It provides a one window support for different elements of the vblock.

He adds further, “Each v-block is a single product to us and since we built it, we are best placed to provide the support. We do the support for the entire stack that includes networking, storage, compute, networking, virtualization etc.”

VCE also have a proprietary software called pro vision intelligent operations (Vision IO). This helps customers to manage the Vblocks as a single set of resources rather than have a tool to manage software, storage, networking etc separately. It gives them a view of the entire datacenter. In addition, VCE also has the Release Configuration Matrix (RCM) – essentially a firmware level for the v-block.

Tom says, “When we ship the vblocks from our factory, they are in a known good state; we know that they have been configured correctly and everything has been tested and validated. When a release is come from EMC, Cisco or VMware, customers may want to do updates for security or performance reasons whatever, we on a regular basis release a RCM – so that customer can have an entire firmware level update for the v-block instead of customers teasing and doing each update on their own. We do the testing and validation in our labs before we release the RCM so that spares the customer the hassle. This is true convergence as we approach it.”

The EMC Federation appears poised to take advantage of the growing demand for converged systems, especially in data centres. So the companies that are part of the Federation operate as separate entities while they have integrated product development.

Tom adds, “When we became part of EMC, anything that was part of converging technologies was put under the VCE umbrella. Today there is EMC VSPEX- which is reference architecture, EMC VSPEX blue- which is their hyper converged solution that they just announced and is built upon VMware’s EVO:RAIL,  and then there is the VCE Vblock. These solutions all provide some rapid ways of achieving some standard goals from customers and wrap the customer expectations around the solutions. The go to market strategy remain the same- VSPEX and VSPEX blue remain EMC products – it is just that their Marketing and Engineering will be under the VCE umbrella and report to the VCE Management. They go through the EMC channel. Our go to market stays the same with the VCE channel.”

VCE is now expanding its lineup of integrated infrastructure solutions with the VCE Foundation for Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. This integrates VMware’s NSX network virtualization technology and vRealize management and orchestration software. In addition, the solution includes EMC’s ViPR software-defined storage (SDS) product.

Tom adds, “We are going to offer VCE foundation for enterprise hybrid cloud. Software defined storage, software defined networking and management orchestration tools will be pre-fabricated in a v-block from our factory. That will speed up the customer’s path to deploying enterprise hybrid cloud. That will be offered to the channel.”

The outlook

Adopting either of the key approaches, through convergence or hyperconvergence, the end goals are better alignment of the IT infrastructure in line with need to rapidly provision computing resources but only as required, to reduce footprint and eliminate sprawl, achieve pooling of resources in a seamless way and have the ability to scale. Vendors are betting on significant growth in terms of demand for such integrated systems.

MarketsandMarkets forecasts the converged infrastructure market to grow from $11.53 billion in 2014 to $ 33.89 billion in 2019 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 24.1%. MEA is also expected to experience significant growth during the forecast period. For the channel, those who have a strategic client base and have a great understanding of their client’s organization and their business needs, will hold the interest of value add distributor and vendors looking to take these solutions to market.

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2025 Hospitality Tech Trends

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By Prince Thampi, Founder and CEO, Hudini

As we approach 2025, the hospitality industry is poised for transformational growth, driven by evolving traveller preferences and advancements in technology. The future of hospitality promises enhanced convenience, personalisation and sustainability, with a significant focus on creating memorable experiences for guests. Let’s dive into five key trends that will shape the hospitality tech landscape in 2025 and beyond.

  1. The Continued Rise of Frictionless Technology

The increased demand for frictionless experiences is set to dominate the industry, with more and more travellers preferring hotels that offer touch-free check-in, check-out, and room access via mobile apps. This trend reflects a broader shift towards easy interactions powered by seamless digital integration. Mobile apps have been an essential tool for a few years now, enabling guests to manage their stays, order room service, and access hotel information effortlessly. With the introduction of Gen AI, those apps have become more powerful than ever and are now able to provide highly personalised recommendations and speak in different languages.

Hotels embracing this trend will gain a competitive edge, as tech-savvy travellers prioritise convenience and efficiency during their stay. According to a recent survey by Deloitte, around 72% of travellers are more likely to choose a hotel that offers mobile check-in and check-out services over those that don’t.

  • Hyper Personalised Guest Experiences

In 2025, personalisation will continue to be at the core of hospitality services but will finally be taken to the next level thanks to Gen AI. Guests expect hotels to anticipate their needs and offer tailored experiences, from customised room settings to personalised dining recommendations. Apps powered by AI are now able to predict guest needs based on a wealth of data, ingested from the hotel systems or fed externally.

Leveraging guest data and insights, hotels can create unique offerings that cater to individual preferences. This level of personalisation not only enhances guest satisfaction but also fosters loyalty and repeat bookings. According to Oracle’s findings, biometrics and AI are set to play pivotal roles, with 62% of guests valuing automated recognition for personalised interactions. Biometrics will experience a breakthrough into mainstream hospitality in 2025. Facial recognition technology has matured significantly and is ready to be weaved into the guest experience. It will enable better security and guest recognition while protecting their privacy at the same time.

  • AI-Enabled Customer Service

Artificial intelligence is revolutionising every aspect of the hospitality industry, but will be by itself a new way of providing customer service. Chatbots and virtual assistants are becoming standard tools for handling common queries, offering instant support, and streamlining operations at any time and in any language.

AI-driven solutions not only enhance efficiency but also provide guests with 24/7 assistance, ensuring a smoother and more satisfying experience. By integrating AI technologies, hotels can free up staff to focus on delivering exceptional in-person service.

  • Sustainability and Eco-Friendly Practices

Sustainability is no longer optional, it’s a necessity often enforced by regulation. Travellers are increasingly favouring hotels that adopt eco-friendly practices, such as using locally sourced food, implementing energy-efficient operations, and reducing waste.

By prioritising sustainability, hotels not only meet guest expectations but also contribute positively to the environment. This commitment to green initiatives enhances brand reputation and attracts environmentally conscious travellers. A recent survey by Booking.com found that 83% of global respondents believe more sustainable travel is vital, with 49% believing there aren’t enough sustainable travel options and 53% saying they get annoyed when a hotel prevents them from being sustainable.

Smart use of technology is key in the sustainability journey of hotels. Technology can accurately measure the reduction in carbon footprint, it will help reduce energy and adopt renewable energy sources, and will enable the effective management of food waste. Many hospitality apps allow guests to apply green energy settings to a room, some will even exchange your energy savings to loyalty points.

  • The return of ‘real’

With Gen Z – the first generation grown up with everything digital – becoming the next large group to travel, the craving for ‘real’ experiences is bigger than it ever was. Hotels focusing on truly unique and hyper local experiences; a great meal, cultural outing, or wellness treatment will win the hearts of this generation.

Fortunately hotel apps, AI, automation of processes, sustainability tech and the removal of cumbersome processes like checking-in and studying paper manuals will free up hotel staff to allow them to do what they do best: providing unforgettable, personalised and sustainable experiences.

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With DMTT into effect from Jan 1st, 2025, a tax expert explains everything businesses in Bahrain need to know!

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DMTT

Last September, the Kingdom of Bahrain introduced a new law to implement a Domestic Minimum Top-up Tax (DMTT) at a rate of 15% on businesses operating in the Kingdom that meet certain criteria.

With the new tax  into effect in time for the new year, Mr. Nilesh Ashar, an international tax specialist with more than 25 years of experience, serving as Senior Managing Director & Head of Tax Middle East at FTI Consulting, provided a comprehensive overview of the new law and its implications for businesses in Bahrain.

Mr. Ashar stated that the Kingdom’s decision is a significant milestone in the Middle East, with Bahrain emerging as a front runner to implement the DMTT on large multinational enterprises (MNEs) having presence in the Kingdom.

“The new law underscores Bahrain’s international commitment as part of the inclusive framework of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to address base erosion and profit shifting by MNEs,” stated Mr. Ashar.

“Effect from January 1st, 2025, onwards, the law is largely based on the OECD Model Rules on global minimum tax (GMT) in terms of calculation of the tax, exclusions, and reliefs. Additionally, the new law contains specific provisions on procedures, enforcement, and anti-avoidance measures applicable in the Kingdom.”

While explaining who will be affected by this tax, and what the law actually entails, he added that the new law applies a 15% tax on the income of Bahrain entities (including permanent establishment, joint venture, and JV subsidiaries) that are part of an MNE group with annual consolidated revenue exceeding €750 million, for at least two out of four preceding fiscal years. However, the tax does not apply to foreign subsidiaries of a Bahraini-headquartered group or other foreign group companies that are part of the same MNE group. The DMTT is also not applicable to certain excluded entities as specified in the law, including government bodies, international organizations, non-profit organizations, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and certain investment funds.

Mr. Ashar explained that the law lists specific transitional and permanent reliefs from the levy of DMTT, including transitional country-by-country safe harbor relief, exclusion for the initial phase of international activity, de-minimis exclusion, and simplified computation safe harbor relief.

Describing key considerations for businesses, Mr. Ashar said that, detailed rules (Executive Regulations) are expected to be published in the coming months, it is now imperative for businesses to assess the impact of the DMTT on their Bahrain presence, evaluate the availability of any reliefs, and prepare for the compliances to be undertaken based on the law read in conjunction with the OECD Model Rules.

Mr. Ashar described, “In terms of taxable income, this is defined in the law as the financial accounting net income or loss for the fiscal year, before making any consolidation adjustments eliminating intra-group transactions, in accordance with the local accounting standards. Detailed rules on calculation of taxable income will be prescribed in line with the OECD Model Rules. Several compliance obligations are specified in the law including obtaining a registration, filing of annual tax returns, and paying taxes in advance over the relevant fiscal year. These compliances are expected to be in addition to the notifications and filings as required by the MNE Group under the OECD Model Rules.”

In addition, the law also provides specific provisions on enforcement via conduct of tax audits, assessments and procedures in relation to litigation and appeals. Mr. Ashar noted that a Tax Objection Committee will be formed for this purpose. Also, penal consequences are laid out in case of defaults, like failure to obtain registration, file tax returns, or submitting incorrect data. Such defaults may trigger stringent administrative fines, without prejudice to criminal liability.

Mr. Ashar further explained that a general anti-avoidance rule empowers the National Bureau of Revenue to disregard any transaction if it is not genuine or its primary purpose is to obtain a tax advantage against the objective of the law. Furthermore, the law specifies certain acts to qualify as ‘tax evasion,’ resulting in onerous consequences including criminal liability for legal persons, if held responsible for such evasion. Dispute resolution through a settlement process is acknowledged.

Mr. Ashar concluded that the Executive Regulations to the law are yet to be issued and are expected to prescribe detailed rules, controls and manner of calculation and application of DMTT in a manner consistent with the Model Rules. He also noted that since the law is published in the Arabic language, his views are based on an unofficial translation of the law.

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Trump’s Deregulation Bets, AI Shakeups, and Digital Assets: 2025 in Focus

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Affor Analytics

By Koen Ripping, CEO, Affor Analytics

It is that time of the year again when your mailbox gets filled with outlooks for 2025 from all sides. And it’s no surprise that, again, the year’s outlook comes with a high degree of uncertainty. I’ll refrain from actually giving targets this time, as you can read them from any Wall Street’s bank outlook. And mostly, because it’s hard to get them right. In the past eight years, actual market returns were outside the range of all forecasts compiled seven times, of which the market outperformed five times (source: Bloomberg).

Still, a good case can be made for uncertainty this year. If Trump actually holds up to some of his statements, we could see deregulation on multiple aspects, lower corporate taxes, and of course, tariffs. This will obviously not only impact the US, but could affect economies globally through tit-for-tat tariffs or, for longer term effects, geopolitical actions. Our expectation is that deregulation will happen, and this will feed into a more accommodative and friendly environment for small-to-midsize companies.

This does, however, not mean an end to the Magnificent Seven’s dominance for the coming year. The driver of the outperformance has been a superior earnings growth compared to the rest, which was 33% for Mag7 in 2024 compared to 3% for the rest resulting in an outperformance of around 24% (depending on when you read this). Consensus earnings growth for next year for Mag7 and the rest are respectively 18% versus 12%, resulting in an expected outperformance of 8% for the megacaps from our equity team.

Lower corporate tax could be a potential bull case for the US market, but given the wider pro-growth strategy from the new Trump administration, we don’t see much room for this. Then tariffs are the most significant risk on the otherwise good growth outlook, but we are not expecting an outright tariff war. The tactic will probably be precisely targeted tariffs, where we see an increase in China tariffs and possibly auto tariffs on the EU and Mexico, so retaliatory tariffs will also be the answer. This would add a one-time premium on price levels, as we’ve seen in the first Trump administration, but doesn’t feed through to sustained inflation.

In general, both in the US and EU, continued easing is expected, with falling policy rates supporting economic growth in both areas. This, together with policymakers poised on enhancing growth, and with companies having, like we say in Dutch, cash that is splashing against the baseboards (flush with cash), builds towards a bull case for 2025. Amongst other trends, this will also flow towards three trends I am most familiar with: Digital Assets, Artificial Intelligence, and M&A.

Digital assets – A serious asset in 2025

2024 has been a good year for digital assets. Especially for Bitcoin, where the new BTC spot ETF cleared the way for institutional investors and others that were bound from trading on less conventional exchanges. This inflow of capital made the BTC ETFs surpass the Gold ETFs in AUM within a year, which has been around for over a decade.

Another important factor for digital asset performance is Trump’s election. Since its arrival,  the risky asset class has been met with suspicion and disbelief, mainly because of regulatory unclarity and negative publicity. With Trump pledging support to the industry and even mentioning a strategic Bitcoin reserve for the US, markets have been rallying.

A strategic reserve would drastically improve the legitimacy of the asset class as a whole. Though this is still far-fetched, our view is that the new US government will definitely be accommodative in this area. They seem to have gathered a team of experts around him that looks suited to walk the thin line of implementing new regulations while not restricting market participants and early adopting businesses.

After a very dominant Bitcoin in 2024, our digital assets team expects this dominance to decline, while still growing in value, leaving room for alternative tokens to outperform. The first signs of this shift are visible in the pick-up in Ethereum spot prices. This shift correlates with previous cycles of the market, where Bitcoin initially leads, followed by other assets higher on the risk curve. We identified two trends to gain more traction in 2025.

The first trend is tokenization as part of the Real-World Assets sector. This is one of the areas we are also exploring for our funds, like institutions such as BlackRock and JP Morgan already explored for traditional assets such as stocks, bonds, or real estate. By tokenizing these assets on a blockchain, they become more liquid and can be fractalized. The assets become tradable 24/7, and the transaction settlement is fast, cheap, and transparent, allowing for more financial opportunities.

The other one is Artificial Intelligence. Many of the current platforms, such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini are centralized, coming with risks such as privacy issues, potential biases, and single points of failure. Decentralized solutions could be a solution for those who are unwilling to be exposed to those kinds of risks.

If the US takes the lead in accommodative regulation, other nations will follow. Because of this, 2025 could be the year general adoption is accelerated, leaving the digital asset market positioned to do very well.

Artificial Intelligence – Show me the customers

It almost feels like a must mentioning AI as a 2025 trend. Obviously, it has been one of the most traded and talked about trends in past years, but it feels like there is a shift coming. Spending on AI will likely increase, as overall corporate capital investment has been at an annual 2.5%, whereas the average peak capex in the last three trends (energy, housing, and dot-com) was around 8%. So there seems to be enough room there, but valuations in AI are even higher both in public and private markets. Investors will start to look more for ROI and proof-of-concept through a growing customer base.

This will feed into the trend that the focus of investment within the AI sector will change. Where in the past years we’ve seen companies in the infrastructure part of the ecosystem do very well. Our expectation is that emphasis in 2025 will shift more towards the mid- and downstream of AI, focussing on the products and services, and especially to companies where revenues actually get enhanced by the use of AI. That being said, also energy supply for these solutions will become a more important topic.

As a sub-trend, we expect identity to be a hot topic going forward. AI-generated news, images, text, and speech are spreading more and more around the internet. The need for an actual confirmation of real human output (or conversation) will increase. Ironically, this can only be solved by AI.

We have seen adaptation of multiple tools like ChatGPT, but more in a ‘getting-to-know-the-product’ kind of way. More structured solutions built on these LLMs are getting traction now that models are improving at such a fast pace, with an accuracy increase from 10% to 90% from 2021 to 2024 for competition-level math questions (source: Jensen, G., Narayan, A., Greene, A., & Simon, L. (2024). Is an AI Bubble Ahead of Us or Behind Us? Bridgewater.). Beneficiaries will be sectors where the share of tasks that can be handled by AI can reduce labor costs and increase revenue by incorporating this into their business.

All of this does not mean replacing employees, as you have probably read before, but increasing the share of value-added hours. For example, we now utilise AI-ensembles to provide our fundamental team with trading signals. This allows us to react faster to investment opportunities, and also signal more opportunities that are overlooked by humans in the first place.

In general, capital will continue to flow towards AI as a sector, but with a more stricter view on market adoption and value-addition. Ultimately adoption and ability to incorporate these tools efficiently will lead to productivity gains, but in my opinion, this will be a much longer-term trend and won’t crystallize in 2025.

M&A – Consolidation on all fronts

Last but not least, falling interest rates, cash-rich companies, and a less restrictive regulatory environment from a new Trump administration is a fertile ground for a lot more M&A activity, which has already seen a pick-up in 2024. Beneficiaries would be banks that are big in M&A, private equity and credit firms, and private business owners.

In my experience, consolidation, if rightly managed, not only leads to a better market position but can also help companies let their teams focus on their strong suits. To give a personal example, our core strength is creating AI solutions which we apply in fund management. Now, with our partnership with Dutchyard, we can outsource fund management and fundraising, leaving more time to focus on our expertise.

With the upcoming US administration giving a boost to entrepreneur confidence through a less restrictive environment, this is a trend that we expect to continue in 2025.

In conclusion, 2025 shapes up to be generally a decent year for equities globally, but with a bit more unknowns. On the digital assets front, the outlook is good, as Trump might legitimize the asset class as a whole. While AI spending will increase, the focus will shift to actual use cases as users are past the discovery phase.

2025 will belong to those with the muscle to flex less traditional assets and the foresight to leverage innovation, driving value in an evolving financial landscape.

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