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4 technologies that can revolutionise the office in 2017

With every passing year comes the promise of a new set of nifty tech to change the way businesses run. And 2017 is no different.

Already, there are dozens of new ideas and technologies popping up, promising to be the next big thing to revolutionise your workspace. But which of these new technologies actually could have an impact of business, and which ones should you pay attention to?

Syntax IT Support London has picked the 4 most exciting and revolutionary technologies for you to look for over the next 12 months.

Chatbots

Automated chatbots aren’t necessarily a new idea, but 2017 will see them take centre stage. Social media sites such as Facebook already use content that makes users question whether they are speaking to a real person or a bot, and big names like Google and Apple have plans to release games and services centred around automated speaking and voice control.

This will make big businesses sit up and pay attention, as chatbots have the potential to completely change the way customer service is run. It would, obviously, mean less of a requirement for actual people to answer customer queries, and could massively help boost productivity by assigning these remedial tasks to the bots, while letting human members of staff focus on more important aspects of the business.

Dual monitors

This is one of the simplest changes to tech rumoured to make it big in 2017, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Having more than one monitor for your device opens up a whole new world of tech and productivity, especially for business.

Firstly, it means saying goodbye to constantly closing and minimizing applications so you can switch between them. This alone will save employees time. It also offers the possibility of multiple screens on the move, a service currently being put forward by big names such as Pixel, Dell and Mac.

More screens mean more applications which means more productivity, and you don’t even have to stop at two screens – many businesses already offer even higher numbers of monitors. And these multiple monitors don’t need to be physically separate either. You could have four monitors on one screen, keeping everything open and leaving everything viewable.

Blockchain

The blockchain was a breakthrough piece of technology for 2016. This smart ledger technology was vital for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, as well as many new fintech start-ups.

However, it’s predicted that 2017 will take blockchains to the next level, using them not only for currencies but for many fundamental aspects of business, such as network and system management. This virtual trail of crumbs forms a chain of recent valid transactions that can be seen to reinforce each other, bringing a new level of reliability to business.

The cloud

Yes, we’re still talking about the cloud. Even though this revolutionary technology has now been around for several years and has been adopted widely, it continues to improve and evolve business processes, year after year.And this isn’t going to change for 2017.

There are some massive names in the world of tech which rely on cloud software – Facebook, Dropbox and WhatsApp to name a few. But it isn’t just apps and social media that have jumped on the cloud bandwagon, as more and more IT infrastructure used in business is turning to the cloud for data storage and sharing. This will continue in 2017.

IDC predicts that by 2020 67{d8b66277a7518e4eec372fc66ba9c89064d9fca13d781d7d97b205a7ede9dbc0} of all enterprise IT infrastructure and software will be in the cloud. These are huge numbers, and prove that in 2017 the cloud will only get bigger and more trusted by its users.