As the old adage goes, there’s no time like the present. This rings especially true in our current age of innovation at a breakneck speed. And yet, IT leaders may still feel fear surrounding large-scale digital transformation.
However, with the right planning process, challenges can be mitigated before the migration process even begins, says Claus Jepsen, chief technology officer at UK-based Unit4.
Are you rethinking your cloud strategy and tilting toward a hybrid model? Rising hosting costs have sparked boardroom debate about where technology stacks should reside. But each enterprise needs to find its own answer.
Concerns about cloud price hikes and contract lock-ins have triggered IT media discussions about how companies should manage risk and possible damage to the marketplace. In the U.K., competition within the public cloud infrastructure market is under investigation from regulators.
We are entering a period of experimentation and innovation as the latest crop of cutting edge technologies mature and are adopted at scale. This moment could be a huge opportunity for smaller companies and public sector bodies to steal a march on their larger rivals. With so much change happening so quickly, the time is right for smaller enterprises to leverage the competitive advantage of being small, agile and adaptable, and utilizing their flexibility to move fast and break things to identify new opportunities.
According to Statista, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market is estimated to reach $232 billion by 2024, up from $197 billion in 2023. More organizations see the value in subscription-based purchasing, greater scalability and the easier remote access commonly available from the cloud.
To distinguish itself from other technology articles this week, I will uniquely focus on #AI in just a few sentences where its relevance is most prominent. Instead, the emphasis will shift to what I perceive as the future of enterprise resource planning (#ERP) — a topic that may lack the allure of #AI but, I argue, holds greater relevance for most of us in the business world.
Platform as a service (PaaS) provides a complete cloud platform, including hardware, business software and infrastructure. It’s a popular alternative to on-premises solutions that can save costs and complexity.
One of the things that makes PaaS appealing is “abstraction”—the underlying infrastructure of its architecture is kept out of view from users to make the system easier to use. Your computer’s operating system (OS) is a similar abstraction, keeping the technical details of how the system works “behind the scenes” so you can just use the applications you need.
As IT departments look to support executives with technology that can keep up with the ever-increasing speed of business change, many are turning to composable enterprise resource planning (ERP). Before moving forward, here is some advice to consider based on my company’s experience to help make the best choice for your organization.
Composable IT involves a range of individual components that can be selected and combined. With growing numbers of organizations benefiting from the flexibility of composability to meet their needs, many are now considering whether it can also play a role in their ERP systems.
As organizations seek new enterprise solutions to meet evolving business needs, many are undertaking what can seem a daunting process: enterprise resource planning (ERP) system implementation. The number one pitfall with ERP implementations may surprise you, though. It’s a function of people, not technology. According to Deloitte, 82% of CIOs cite resistance to change as the top barrier to ERP implementation. ERP implementations are disruptive because you’re asking people to change how they work. So, you’ll have to sell them on it by emphasizing the benefits. A modern ERP system can solve business problems, but successful deployment requires getting users on board and building consensus for new ways of working.
Programming is sometimes seen as more of a “dark art” than an engineering discipline. Developing programs that can be read and used by non-programmers is an “El Dorado” that many businesses have longed to reach.
Enter low-code/no-code development: intuitive tools designed to allow business users to build applications and therefore reduce IT staffing costs, accelerate innovation and provide businesses with greater agility to respond to change. They’ve seen an explosion in popularity in recent years, but what are they, and are they really the future?
Programming has made more farewells than Frank Sinatra, but the difference being that “Old Blue Eyes” eventually played one final concert, whereas programming isn’t going to go away.
Year after year, pundits float a new meme: low-code/no-code systems will mean the end of the need to hand code or (the latest universal panacea) ChatGPT will become all-powerful and obviate the need for software engineers. Let’s be clear: there is no prospect whatsoever that at some point in the future we won’t need to code. Indeed, quite the reverse is true. But what is also true is that we have come a long way in reducing bespoke coding and replacing that with software extensibility.
Claus Jepsen 