RSMUS.comToday is National Technology Day (#TechnologyDay), so I thought I’d weigh in on one trend I see for 2017 and beyond.
The movement to cloud technologies has enabled technology to advance at a rapid pace. We’re seeing hot trends with the Internet of Things (IOT) where we’re seeing sensors everywhere monitoring and improving existing processes. We’re seeing Big Data play a large role for organizations looking to take action on data that they weren’t able to access before. Companies are even implementing a digital first footprint that is creating a business model poised for growth and expansion at a rapid pace. There are hundreds of examples of technologies that are advancing at an accelerated rate because of the cloud computing architecture. One trend that I see technology companies investing heavily in 2017 and beyond is to increase the speed of applications delivered over the internet.
Increased speed of applications delivered over the internet
Traditional SaaS based applications like a salesforce.com or NetSuite have been helping businesses with their core business functions for a couple of decades now. They used to have a hard time competing with business applications hosted on premise due to things like speed and security. Now days, these types of applications are being selected before on premise solutions and even big players like Microsoft are releasing their solutions such as Dynamics AX on the Azure platform as a cloud offering.
Delivering these business applications over the internet means that sometimes you’ll see slower page load times and movement between screens. You still achieve economies of scale on the throughput of processing on the back end handling transactions and scripts, etc., but I see technologies companies looking to accelerate the speed of these applications to make them even more user friendly.
A great example here is the recent acquisition of NetSuite by Oracle. Some of the primary reasons for the acquisition was to be able to scale and provide better service on a global scale. Not only does this mean more localization for countries on the application at a global level, but you’ll see increased performance from the application.
To illustrate my point, just look at the number of data centers that NetSuite had (5 – 3 in North America and 2 in Europe) compared to what Oracle will offer them (19 across the globe in all major regions).
Just because you have more data centers doesn’t mean that you will automatically have increased speed in performance. But it does illustrate the fact that the largest technology companies realize that they need to create leaps in performance of their applications that are delivered over the internet and they need to do it now! They will continue to invest heavily to improve the user experience of their applications because ultimately it is a competitive advantage to selling their product. That type of competition will play out here for the next 5-10 years as we continue to see companies migrate their business applications to the cloud.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but we used to be okay with the fact that it took 2-5 minutes to load a page on AOL back in the 90’s using a dial-up connection. Today, we might be seeing page loads at 1-5 seconds, but as technology continues to enhance, we’ll be using applications at the speed of a blink of an eye.
By: Brent Knowles
Twitter: @bknowles34 – Follow my posts here today for #TechnologyDay
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brentknowles
