Digital Technology Platforms in Next Generation Workspaces

And we’re back for part three of this eight-part series on trends influencing digital transformation within the next generation of workspaces! In this post, I will be expanding on the trend: digital technology platforms.

A digital technology platform is a symbiotic collection of technology capabilities and components that provide an inter-operable set of services that can be brought together to create applications and services. This is important because many organisations are already investing in this area and spending will increase as they realize very quickly digital technology platforms provide the basic building blocks for, and are a critical enabler of, digital business. The platform viewpoint gives a technology anchor model to guide technology vision, reducing complexity and redundancy.

There are five major digital technology platform types to enable the new capabilities and business models of digital business and these are represented in the image below.

Currently, two key types of platforms are rapidly emerging: one is the Internet of Things, so there’s the IoT platform of course, and the other one consolidates and delivers customer experience, advanced analytics & intelligence and they are called conversational AI platforms (or CAPs).

CAPs are general--purpose platforms that deliver a new paradigm supporting AI-rich, pervasive, proactive and conversational applications. A range of focused artificial intelligence services are needed, including neuro linguistic programming (NLP), deep learning, sentiment analysis, personality profiling, concept-relationship extraction, and other methods for inferring intent from content and context.

Chatbots and Personal Assistant apps (like Siri, Cortana, Amazon Echo) acting as conversational intermediaries with intelligent cloud services were just the beginning. The conversational aspect of the CAPs supports the development of conversational systems, with NLP rapidly replacing rule based synonym and phrase substitution to interpret user input. These are tools and services to support immersive, continuous and contextual experience that goes beyond the voice-/text -powered conversational interface delivering the pervasive aspect of the CAP.

The platform detects and adapts to patterns in the user's behavior, asks questions to clarify the user's requests, provides unsolicited and meaningful suggestions, and autonomously takes an action on the user's behalf. CAP--enabled applications move away from fixed commands for communications between people, bots, agents, assistants, applications and other services. Many vendors are speeding to market with new CAPs that will host a broad range of solutions. Organisations will need to start thinking about how to leverage these systems and platforms. 

IoT platforms are a collection of technologies and standards that form a base set of capabilities for communicating, controlling, managing and securing elements of IoT. Flexible and stable IoT platform services are needed for building IoT solutions and then connecting them to business solutions which drive specific business outcomes.

One thing to consider is that many organisations thought they could leverage existing platform technologies and direct them towards the complexity of IoT in terms of ingesting data, analyzing the data and orchestration, etc. Most came to find out they had to build out a lot of new things for provisioning, integration, API management and other components. It’ll be necessary to build and architect an IoT platform. There are good pieces out there from top vendors like Microsoft, etc. but they shouldn’t be expected to provide a complete solution. There are just too many moving components – continuously evolving standards, is one of them. Although IoT platforms are essential, they remain fragmented and immature, requiring complex integration efforts. Entrants to the IoT platform market are driving rapid change from specialized IoT platforms toward more comprehensive offerings, but the market it still maturing.

An enabling component of all this is a microservices architecture – a modular approach to deal with complexity: think purpose-built app which leverages specific services via API. These services are known as microservices and they reduce the scope of a service down to an individual feature or function optimized for agility and scalability at a detailed feature level.

Functions are coded and become services separate from each other but interact via defined interfaces that together make up an application.

Another piece to that is access to external based cloud services. Organisations like Netflix and twitter realized that if they wrote these individual functions as services, then distribution, deployment of individual services would be easier and done as needed instead of the entire application being redeployed every time there was a small change to a function or service; this approach would be much easier and scalability was achievable. The key is this modular approach and the application layer is the foundation for how to create a set of business ecosystems platforms and the way you’re going to service your digital customers.

Behind this it’s is all cloud-based – cloud architecture supports this – the only way to effectively deliver solutions in some cases. It’s server-less using containers on the back end which is another abstraction model gaining ground as developers don’t have to think about server resources – they are abstracting from the function of the container. It’s service-oriented as I described and it is software defined with use of APIs. And its’ event driven – which is important. This model is more dynamic then an explicit direct call in typical request-driven models. The service registers itself and generates request on its own. Events become a central primary mechanism to define connection to all these pieces with APIs in a more subordinate role. For example, responding in real time to a distress signal from a home device or changing trucking itineraries in response to new road or weather information can create a differentiating business advantage.

A key trend in the market that will impact next generation workspaces is that everything is becoming software and vendors, even legacy OEMs are embracing Software as a Service. Let’s talk through a couple of inter-related trends. We mentioned in the previous slide API interfaces between services. One example is a vendor’s collaboration system as a messaging bus that is accessed via API. Think embedding OEM messaging within salesforce, for example. Tropo provides a cloud API for voice and messaging to help make deploying messaging functionality via API possible.

When we speak of the software as a service model, it’s not just about technology implementation. It’s a much more a financial issue as we’re dealing with licensing and operational costs. The hardware is a capital expense and sold at cost, but with a monthly subscription service to the software that may actually help employees perform their business function in their workspace. Licensing models are increasingly priced per user per month which gives organisations the right to use the software (maintenance included) and many vendors include hosting in the vendor’s cloud. But even if you run the media elements and infrastructure on-premise in your own datacenter, you’re still paying the full price for the license. Again, not a technology restriction, a commercial one.

On the infrastructure side to enable these models, you’ll see more hybrid implementations in terms of where the media elements are…on premise at the datacenter and then a burst to cloud when needed. The decision will be more about security and capacity issues, it won’t be about the capital cost anymore.

Another component in this area of providing digital services to end-users in the workspaces for tomorrow is around DevOps. This is something organisation need to get a handle on within their own operations. DevOps is a coordinated effort between Developers and Operations, often as one combined team, using common tools and processes to deliver new capability and updates in an automated and reliable way. DevOps is an “essential digital enterprise capability for the continuous delivery of software-driven innovation that enables organizations to get to market fast and collect customer feedback quickly”. See, end-customer needs are dynamic, changing faster than ever. DevOps creates a pipeline from idea to the end-customer at pace with the market.

That pace of change is accelerating…so start thinking about identifying opportunities for Automation while applying DevOps to streamline concept to delivery which is needed to keep up with the pace in the digital economy!

The next trend on our list is what we call the collaboration continuum and it speaks to the pervasiveness of video collaboration due to video everywhere within workspaces for tomorrow.

Be on the lookout for Post Four coming soon!