Diagonal view enables Digital
Enterprises have been developing applications horizontally(based on business processes) or vertically (based on LOB). While the intersection of these has been achieved with complex application integration, however it has taken months and even years to achieve the final goal.
In the collaborative era "Diagonal" views of applications where a data stream from the IOT sensors can be fed into a SCM or CRM further feeding into the finance forecasting application thus allowing organizations to dynamically price or forecast cash flows. CxOs can leverage these data points to focus on strategy and outcomes quicker rather than focusing on the technologies underneath.
The intersection can be used at any layer abstracting the complexity of the underlying technologies. The interaction using REST APIs allows extraction of meaningful data in a much easy manner than before. Automation coupled with architecture and a robust infrastructure beneath is allowing organizations to reengineer technology to serve their end goals. Multicloud enables enterprises to optimize from a technical debt and Microservices helps delivering applications quickly. The ease of creating service pipelines with Public Cloud integrating with the legacy on-prem is helping in management of IT costs while continuing to deliver on better applications. From ingest to visualize, Public Cloud has made it easier to create campaigns, test application performance and user impact, mine big data or add machine learning to deliver facial recognition, better chatbots or online fraud detection.
Someone in a popular movie said " With greater power comes greater responsibility". Microservices and Containerization enables faster applications but it also brings the challenges of networking and security. While Kubernetes partly solves the networking challenge with pods, security still remains a challenge which is getting addressed by DevSecOps. Application dependency mapping (ADM) is becoming key as there are a plethora of applications living inside an enterprise. What took months earlier to discover, is now easily automated by tools like the Cisco Tetration Analytics which provide these mappings quickly.
Transforming to Digital requires mindset, resource availability and good consultants to create a roadmap and navigate through it. Automating the infrastructure and exposing it to the applications is the key towards a true multicloud environment enabling machine learning, microservices and bringing agility to development. This will help enterprises address opportunity costs rather than cost savings alone.