Click to Transform: Selecting the Right Business Model

Many companies operating within the modern data economy extract value from the collection of data on customer segment purchasing behavior. One of the most prevalent business models used is the consultancy. Consulting provides guidance on the data efforts of others. This type of effort could crosscut other data analytics and obfuscation strategies. Consultants trade experience and expertise for money. One critical element of a data consulting operation is domain knowledge beyond that of the client’s industry. This domain knowledge can uncover the best ways toward enhancing margin, profit, or budget utilization. 

Analysis of the 2018 IBM IBV study revealed that organizations were harnessing the cloud to recast customer relationships and transform both product and service development. The best three examples of how organizations relied on cloud computing to impact company profits, industry value chains, and customer value propositions were as follows: 

• Optimizers that use the clouds to enhance customer values incrementally and improve organizational efficiency. 
• Innovators that improve customers value through cloud adoption that results in new revenue streams or even changing their role within an existing industry ecosystem. 
• Disruptors that rely on the cloud to create radically different value propositions, as well as generate new customer needs, segments, and industry value chains.

Many data-centric business models will also need to revamp their information technology processes so that they can leverage composable infrastructure capabilities.

Composable Infrastructures

This modernization task transforms legacy data centers into private clouds and migrates existing legacy or packaged applications onto this highly automated environment. It reduces the friction often caused by retraining staff in public cloud operations, modern infrastructure technologies, and composable solution management tools. Composable infrastructures can build new revenue-generating products and services faster while simultaneously addressing the key inhibitors to change, which include the false impression that cloud cannot support the operational/performance requirements of critical applications (e.g., SAP and Oracle).

The blue-green deployment technique is often used for this as it reduces downtime risks by running two identical production environments. Only one environment is “live” and serving app production traffic at any instant. Automation helps avoid large amounts of application development rework by infusing regression testing into the daily workflow. The resultant continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline ensures that quality is built into all enterprise products and services from the outset. It’s adoption will subsequently reduce the cost of incremental changes and improves the economic viability of small-batch development.

Fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks will use multi-access edge computing (MEC) to extend composable enterprise infrastructures to the network edge. This capability is broadly referred to as edge compute which provides services characterized by ultra-low latency and high bandwidth and real-time access to mobile network information. 

Most modern applications are designed based on the distributed computing software development model. This model uses a client-side to initiate server requests and remote-server to process these requests, allowing developers to identify applications that require processing at the edge as distinct from features that need high compute power or that do not require near real-time response. Through composable infrastructures, application developers can also leverage infrastructure as code (IaC), which describes the complete automation of infrastructure provisioning and deprovisioning. 

Learn more about digital transformation innovation: pick up a copy of my new book, Click to Transform - and, when you buy now, get an invitation to join me for an exclusive Q&A on November 20!

Article generated by AI in cooperation with Leaders Press based on Kevin Jackson’s Click to Transform.