CES and the Future

By Tom Nault, CEO, Hudson Cloud Systems

I’m often asked: how do you stay so far ahead of technology trends? The answer is a bit complicated. Hudson Cloud Systems’ founder, Behan Venter, and I have been friends since 2009, shortly after the sale of Open Interface North America to Qualcomm where I was CEO and Executive Chairman. As Behan and I got to know each other, and he was contemplating starting the company that became Hudson Cloud, we invited him and his business partner at the time to join us at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, now just called CES.

For many years, Behan joined our group at CES, where we get about a three-year window into the future of consumer electronics technology. Every evening, we’d sit around discussing where it was all headed. It gave Behan, and later Leon, our COO/CFO, a glimpse into what we were all experiencing. The conversations were always engaging, not to mention all the networking that happens at the show. We couldn’t get enough of it.

One of Hudson Cloud’s most important characteristics is our constant, hard look at what’s coming and why. When you attend CES often enough, you start to see the trends, and you can spot which technologies are rising or dying. I always describe it as watching a technological horse race. Some innovations catch on, while others fade. Virtual reality, for example, once showed great promise but turned out to be a dud. So did 3D TV. We predicted those failures early. While VR and augmented reality certainly have clinical applications, we could see the market limitations. All of these insights shaped our companies and gave us more knowledge to pass on to our customers.

We had a similar reaction to 8K, Siri, Hey Google, and a host of others that launched with a splash and withered like unwatered plants. We did predict that Amazon, with Alexa, would eventually become tightly integrated with consumer electronics, and it has. In 2024, we saw firsthand what AWS was doing with analytics. We could see the wave of AI picking up momentum.

Through it all, one thing stood out to Behan: the only way to technologically futureproof any computer-station-intense company was through the cloud. Instant access has actual time-savings value that can be quantified on a large scale. He, like all of us, understood one of the biggest truths in technology: it always flows in the direction of convenience.

A cloud infrastructure enables a nimble future, while others clinging to older data management methods will eventually face significant cost challenges just to remain current. Some won’t make the leap well. Others, those adopting a cloud infrastructure, will evolve with minimal effort.

The big surprise about attending CES every year is that something always comes along that none of us saw coming. The entire show shifts like sheep being herded across a vast meadow. The biggest shift we ever saw was the year following the launch of the iPad, and suddenly, companies were either building on it or dying on the spot.

The next CES will take place in January 2026, and we plan to take a substantial group from Hudson Cloud. We want everyone in the company to participate in what’s next. Naturally, we’ll be writing about what we see and bringing those insights to future industry conferences to share what we think matters to our customers, and why.