“The application development space has undergone a lot of changes due to the cloud computing platform adoption” – By, Mr Subramaniam Hariharan, Vice President – Solution Architecture & Delivery at Indium Software

What are the challenges when an organization use legacy techniques to develop applications?

In the application development space, the faster one brings out an application to market, the better. The normal tendency of delivery teams is to use tried and tested technology frameworks and processes to quickly build, test and release applications. ‘When things are working, why change it?’. This is what we hear from Managers and department heads who are under constant time pressure to deliver within stipulated time & budget.

Technology is evolving every day and technology obsolescence is a big risk for systems that are expected to have a long shelf life. Along with technology, processes need to evolve to avoid new risks. Legacy technology exposes a bigger security risk as hackers are finding newer ways to steal valuable customer data. From time to time we read about how tech companies face data breach. Unless these companies constantly change their tech & processes, these kinds of potential risks continue to exist. Newer technology also improves efficiency.

The challenges faced by companies to adopt new technology and processes are manifold. From finding resources with new skills, retraining existing staff, adjusting the verification framework for capturing new metrices, there are many new issues that management needs to address. There is also the risk of moving known point of failures (like tool limits) to unknown point of failures (human resource skill levels with new tool). This can be challenging to management as they may not have the right knowledge to manage these new risks.

Highlight advantages of platform reengineering, integrated cluster, and cloud-native solutions

Platform reengineering has become a necessary step in long shelf life applications (like ecommerce portals, bank websites, etc). Every day there are new protocols emerging due to change in technology landscape. To keep up with these changes and to avoid security risks, Enterprises need to plan and invest on platform reengineering.

Earlier, there was a lot of resistance for organizations to move their operations to the cloud. This was mainly because it was perceived as moving your data / IP into the custody of some invisible third party. Trusting the data and code with an external entity seemed like a huge risk. Now with improved security features and options provided by cloud providers, the perception of risk has come down drastically. Many software service providers and product developers have adopted cloud based / cloud native solutions, especially if it is a B2C application. It makes more sense to leverage the already existing powerful & flexible infrastructure options available from cloud providers to quickly build and deploy enterprise applications.

Cluster computing provides faster processing and large storage capacity than a single server architecture. Clusters are more reliable as it removes the single point of failure of single servers. Applications that require high availability and perform large scale processing do better when architected as clusters. Clustering also provides better scalability for businesses that expect growth in their user base.

How it enables to estimate and align digital resources based on demand, segment, and complexity?

The application development space has undergone a lot of changes due to the cloud computing platform adoption. Software development effort has come down due to the availability of various pre-built frameworks for specific use cases. Nevertheless, due to various other demands from clients, the overall delivery effort has been increasing regularly.

Application developer focuses on development activities alone and does not worry about the deployment as most of the components are deployed in container/ serverless architecture. A new set of teams (DevOps) is utilized to take care of the source code management, deployment architecture and other infrastructure management. The infrastructure of code management and CI/CD combining with automation testing have increased the system and processes efficiency.

In the recent past we have seen a surge in DevOps requirements due to this increased cloud adoption by the organization. Also, the deployment complexities increases when the organizations choosing the microservices based architecture and containerization of the same. There are many more cloud related service components being used to fulfill the clients’ business requirements like auto scaling, auto detection of services, collecting the metrics on individual service components etc.

There is also a high resource demand on testing segment. There are various types of testing performed to deliver quality product. Automation testing is the one insisted by most of the customers as it releases the physical presence of resources at the build time. Though manual application testing is performed to ensure all the functional features delivered, unit testing through program is also mandated now a days. This increases the development effort to double from the original effort estimation.

Why it’s important to double down on digital and omnichannel presence to improve customer experience?

The customer base is the inherent value of any business. A happy customer is a loyal customer. Traditional businesses are transforming into digital business to stay relevant. With more customers preferring doing business transactions over digital platforms, businesses need to adopt a digital avatar to keep their customers. It also widens their market from local to global reach.

With evolving technology, application of technology has also diversified, increasing the channels through which businesses can reach their customers. A customer also expects access to information and data from businesses through these diversified channels. For example, A bank’s customer expects that he can see his transactions on his mobile as well as his laptop. With NFC becoming popular, customer expects to pay contactless using his watch or his Credit Card without entering his PIN. He also might want to check his balance using Alexa or Siri from the comfort of his living room sofa. As electronic gadgets evolve and become smarter, a lot many channels are opening for customer touch points.

It becomes imperative for software product developers to make sure that they product leverages and aligns with all or most of the channels that their customer might use to do business with. Else, the business risks losing the customer.

Share insights on successful platform reengineering of apps for multiple industries

Several industries have moved along aligning themselves with technology changes.

This is most apparent in the eCommerce industry. eCommerce has come a long way from just a website presence. Robust eCommerce portals have moved from online order placements to payments. eCommerce has also spawned allied businesses for logistics and order fulfilment. eCommerce portals have move to mCommerce platform for complete mobile based business transactions.

Another important industry that has seen major platform reengineering is Banking. Banking, world over has moved to digital platform with omnichannel presence. Banks offer several products from traditional CASA, loan products & credit cards to more sophisticated investment options, wealth management services. Many banks have started providing payment and collection related services through partners, and other financial services for other businesses. This is not possible without fresh platform ideas that are more secure and faster. With the advent of Block Chain & Bitcoin, traditional financial services are in the process of undergoing transformation once again.

Manufacturing has also seen quite a bit of technology refresh with IOT and AI playing a major role. Advances in VR and AR is transforming end-customer support, which has always been a challenge for manufacturers.