Technology Trends In The Industry: From Self-Service Platforms To Clouds

Technology Trends- Which developments and technologies will be decisive for industrial companies this year? these four significant technology trends and explained what companies need to consider when implementing them.

Technology Trends: Self-Service Platforms

Customer portals have become an indispensable part of the B2C sector. B2B companies are now also recognizing the potential and are increasingly investing in self-service platforms. There are two main reasons for this:

• 24/7 availability with simultaneous cost reduction: Web interfaces are not only available to customers around the clock, but they also offer savings potential in support and sales.
• Sales generation: With a central digital contact point, industrial companies bundle customer contact and all functionalities, such as dashboards, order overviews, loyalty programs or personalized offers, in one place. This is used to operate targeted marketing and optimize the core business turnover.

It is essential to view the self-service platform as an integrated one and understand it as a single point of contact. A well-thought-out concept that takes into account all integrated systems and their interfaces is therefore essential. The architecture must also meet all functional requirements, such as features, usability, data and interfaces, and non-functional requirements, such as stability, load and security.

Business Innovation And Business Modelling

New technology trends such as IoT connectivity, analytics and higher bandwidth enable new revenue models. Companies must specifically identify these to increase their competitiveness and open up new markets. A popular trend is “Anything-as-a-service” (Xara’s), that is, to develop a range of services from your products and their benefits. For digital business innovation projects, three aspects should be considered:

• Interdisciplinarity: Different levels and departments – from management to IT to experts for UX (user experience) – must work closely together and develop a joint, comprehensive solution. Rigid structures and processes tend to be counterproductive here.
• Pragmatics: Why reinvent the wheel when you can rely on existing modules? However, pragmatic solutions also require precise, not too broadly defined, tasks and objectives.

Please focus on the market launch: It is crucial not to get lost in the conception phase for business success. With a quick go-to-market approach, you can test market entry with your offers early and then incorporate the knowledge you have gathered into the product development process.

Service-Oriented Architectures And Microservices

A successful service-oriented architecture follows the modular principle: Complex questions are recorded and solved using individual sub-problems. Microservices, i.e. services that each perform a small task, help here. Different processes can be combined like modules to form complex software. This makes it possible to expand systems as required, change them individually, and integrate them into peripheral systems.

However, setting up a service-oriented architecture takes time. Here companies should invest primarily in the conception phase. An interdisciplinary team made up of various specialists is particularly important. In this way, you can recognize all necessary dependencies right from the start. Because every visual action usually also includes a technical interaction and a corresponding infrastructure component. ” The target architecture should also take into account the respective industry and the industrial sector. Prototyping can help here.

Technology Trends: Cloud-Based Services

Today’s demanding requirements for online applications can hardly be implemented on your infrastructure. Cloud offers have proven themselves and are established. They are superior to in-house solutions in terms of bandwidth as well as availability and performance. Even the heavily regulated finance and pharmaceutical industries rely on the technology and thus underline its seriousness.

To use cloud-based services and benefit from their state-of-the-art functionalities, industrial companies need specialists who can provide support with extensive cloud expertise from conception to development. A pure migration of old systems to a cloud platform is not very effective and usually works poorly. Instead, companies have to align their concepts to the cloud from the start consistently.

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