5 Global Trends That Might Make HCL Software Particularly Relevant For You In 2023

1.????Governments closing in on Microsoft’s sloppy Data Privacy policies

With recent publication by a workgroup consisting of representatives of German federal and regional governments of a damning report of a large scale investigation data privacy compliance of the Cloud based M365 platform ?concluding that the system cannot be operated in full accordance with the European General Data Protection regulation (GDPR) many customer are left considering their options.

Too often it has been stated that there seems to be no credible alternative to M365 when it comes to digital workplace solutions. That is downright false as HCL’s Digital Workplace platform has since many decades been and continues to be an equally powerful and in its latest modernized release an in many aspects superior solution. With the modern HCL Verse Email Client providing highly stable fully featured Email and Calendar functionality, ?HCL Domino delivering secure workplace App development and deployment features, the HCL Sametime Chat and Audio / Video conferencing solution providing powerful workstream collaboration and last but not least the HCL Connections Enterprise Community platform offering powerful and sustainable knowledge sharing and social networking features, this highly integrated environment offers really everything its market dominating rival does but with one critical exception. The HCL Cloud Native Architecture hands full control over where it is hosted, how it is deployed, where the data sits and who has access to it to…. ?yes, you, the customer. ?No matter if you prefer to deploy on premise, in your own data center, in a private cloud or a public cloud, the choice is yours. Under HCL’s direction all those solutions have jumped miles forward from where IBM had left them prior to the divesture, providing a more than viable alternative to the dominant market player. ??

2.????Inflation is making customers being more selective about where they are spending their money

The continued high level of inflation in most western industrialised countries is increasingly ?having an effect on consumer spending behaviour. With less spending power in their pockets, consumers are becoming more selective about what purchases they make and also about ?where they make them. As has already been visible during the pandemic, the readiness of customers to switch from their habitual brands if they can get a perceived better deal elsewhere continues to rise (as a McKinsey Study of US customer shopping behaviour has found). As a result?companies can no longer rely on long term brand loyalties and have to start fighting for every customer. This includes providing highly targeted marketing campaigns, individualised online and hybrid shopping experiences and leveraging the full potential of mobile apps that visibly reward customers for loyalty with special offers and discounts based on their location and?behaviour). Some companies have even gone to the length of pushing discount offers to customers as they start getting near a competitor’s store. This however requires a very sophisticated and comprehensive technology infrastructure that will not only allow you to create these personalised experiences both in a browser and on native mobile apps but also allow you to capture and segment the vast amount of?customer data points now available through mobile and online channels to maximise the impact of your targeted micro campaigns. HCL’s customer experience suite is one of only a few that can comprehensively cover the full scope of readily integrated tools needed to support these projects from a single supplier. ??

3.????Programming skills shortages have reached a record high

With the war in Ukraine the already highly competitive market for skilled App developers has just been hit with a sledge hammer as the huge pool of freelance developers from Russia and Ukraine has dried up often due to young talent being drafted into military service. ?So what can be done if you are struggling to staff your development projects? Even more overtime for the remaining staff does not seem like a sustainable solution. So how about letting technology reduce the time and effort involved in creating your critical Apps. Low Code and Multi Experience Development Platforms (MXDP) like HCL Volt MX have a proven track record of speeding up development cycles by up to 60%. This is achieved through reducing the friction in Business to IT communication, by clever automation reducing repetitive tasks, by simplifying the complexity of creating multi modal output (i.e. Web and Mobile App) as well as by automating multi-platform-delivery (e.g. Android and iOS) of your application. Add to that a highly efficient Middleware Platform to orchestrate the connection to your complex backend system infrastructure and you will arrive at a real productivity booster. Doing more with less effort is not just a hollow promise here, it really works.

4.????Budgets for large IT Investments are being cut back

Even if you do not experience any skills shortages, you may well hit another roadblock to successful realisation of your digitisation plans: whilst last year’s economic downturn had not instantly affected running projects that were already budgeted, this is looking significantly different when you are trying to start this year. Budget freezes and reductions are everywhere usually affecting the smaller , “nice to have” projects that are so important for positive employee experience but are not seen as business critical by senior management.

There is a strategy though that can help buffer the impact of this by allowing you leverage the manpower that you already have and who are being paid from existing budgets, even if these people are not trained developers or even IT people in the wider sense. The Citizen Developer concept is proving very successful in companies like Lufthansa who, due to complexity and strong exposure to economic ?ups and downs, have notoriously long backlogs in their centrally managed IT projects. With HCL Leap, a true No Code development platform, technically minded business people from all sections of the organisation have embraced local business challenges and developed Web based Applications that digitise, automate and solve a multitude of business problems.

5.????IT Security threats and malicious government hacking are more frequent and more?dangerous than ever

With the Pandemic related move to a remote working model, the number of cyber attacks has shot up and continues to rise in double digit numbers. Aside from crime related incidents such as ransomware attacks, financial fraud and industrial espionage, we are increasingly seeing targeted large scale attacks on critical infrastructure as experienced when a group of hackers attributed to foreign government sponsored actors ?brought the entire German long distance rail traffic to a halt for several hours. ?

Next to the obvious human factors, attackers’ prime gateways to your enterprise network, customer data and company secrets are known vulnerabilities in deployed Commercial Off The Shelf software packages, that companies have not managed to or didn’t bother to address in a timely manner even though patches are mostly available.

And it is an increasing challenge to keep an ever more diverse ecosystem of servers, desktop platforms, mobile devices and even IOT devices patched and up to date at any one time.

Most Unified Endpoint Management Solutions are only addressing a subset of the above making it intransparent and often time consuming to bring the entire ecosystem up to date quick enough to prevent being caught out by the ever present threats. ?

HCL BigFix, ranked in the most recent ?Spark Matrix quadrant as one of the technology leaders in the UEMS space, is one of the strongest and most comprehensive systems on the market that will help you secure your enterprise network and infrastructure by significantly reducing the time from detection to fixing of security vulnerabilities in any of your deployed software applications.