Starting from the recent study published by Gartner, we have decided to highlight some of the ideas we share with those analysts in our value proposition:
- Using methodologies in our design process to create concrete advantages for thousands of SME users who digitize their work with our cloud products.
- Following "new" principles foretold to be enablers of the next generation of business applications. One of these?
Fostering an ecosystem of interconnected, specialized and highly scalable microservices — versus monolithic solutions.
The study conducted by Gartner investigates the sudden changes in the companies' needs that force IT organizations to innovate faster and dynamically adapt their applications. Therefore, the reuse of skills and resources inside and outside the organization is one of the enabling factors. Consequently, a best practice becomes the design of interchangeable, modular components that cooperate efficiently in dynamic and complex systems – similarly to Lego bricks.
In other words, we are referring to “composable enterprise”,
another step towards innovation that demarcates new leadership models and the adoption of advanced technological platforms. This new architecture makes organizations more resilient and increases the likelihood of success in uncertain scenarios.
Back to Gartner's analysis, a composable business thrives on four pillars:
- high speed through discovery,
- greater agility through modularity,
- better leadership through cooperation,
- resilience through autonomy.
Above these pillars, there are three fundamental principles for a modular business:
- Modular thinking: it fosters creativity and helps to compose coherently by combining the principles of modularity, autonomy, cooperation and discovery.
- Modular business architectures: ensure that organizations, like the solutions they adopt, are flexible and resilient, thanks to structural capabilities that support business operations.
- Modular technologies: represented by parts, modules and everything that connects them. These are the base tools to achieve composable businesses.
How is ITER IDEA's proposal in line with the projections for next-generation business applications?
At ITER IDEA, we design applications and processes by taking advantage of the most complete and innovative offer of cloud services on the market.
We integrate the best cloud providers services into a single, highly-optimized and efficient platform, making these opportunities available instantly and perfectly interoperable with each other.
The platform allows you to mask the underlying infrastructure's complexity to innovate faster.
Sure enough, agility remains one of the strategic keys for modular applications built to be scalable, secure, and able to access innovative functionalities through the integration of AI technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and computer vision.
Technological challenges like never before.
Above, you can appreciate an ecosystem of ITER IDEA applications designed to digitalize and enhance business processes: from the receipt of B2B orders to warehouse flows, from updates on the status of shipments towards end customers to the digitization of after-sales operations, with the allocation of costs to the related orders and cost centres.
All of these can be quickly integrated with the company's information system and with leading tools such as Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, Trello, Notion and Jira, and advanced technologies like Sentiment Analysis, Speech-to-text and Deep learning.
Real independent blocks with their own defined roadmap that, cooperating, create a new, fluid and inclusive experience.
How can companies rely on technology partners, such as ITER IDEA, to accelerate automation and develop, deploy and integrate next-generation business applications?
In his article on composable businesses, Vala Afshar (Chief Digital Evangelist in Salesforce) identifies the partnership with AWS (Amazon Web Services) as a determining factor for business developments in line with the objectives of modularity.
As a matter of fact, tight collaboration with cloud professionals is often the major booster for achieving such strategic and decisive advances. And, as we always remark, it's a revolution accessible to businesses of any nature and size.
Continuing with Salesforce's case study, the power of composability is not just about reusing blocks and integrating microservices but also innovating without the need to manage underlying architecture updates over time – a typical limiting factor for future innovations.
This logic is indeed familiar to us and the serverless technologies employed to design our solutions.
The final contribution is by Gregor Hohpe (Enterprise Strategist AWS). In his recent speech, "Building modern cloud applications? Think integration", he underlines how serverless services crucially support the scalability of solutions, thanks to how these services communicate with each other. All this results from over 40 years of innovation in system integration and advancements in coupling mechanisms, i.e. the measure of the interdependence between two or more systems in coordination with each other.
Serverless is more than just a different way to run your cloud workloads. The benefits of these paradigms are much more decisive, and concern how services:
- are designed to ensure security,
- communicate with each other,
- are kept programmatically updated,
- store and access information,
- and so on.
We believe this shared definition of services integration is essential to designing next-generation enterprise applications. Are you with us?
