4 Predictions You Can’t Afford to Ignore

By: Stephen Miles (CTO, Asia Pacific & Japan, CA Technologies)

You may not have noticed it but your last interaction with a brand was likely via an application or website rather than in person. As businesses increasingly interact with customers through software driven platforms, the complete experience a brand can deliver matters more than brand loyalty.

As a result, businesses are pushing the boundaries of disruptive trends such as big data and mobility, all of which aredriven by software, to find new ways to drive internal processes, enable commerce, and enhance the overall customer experience. In fact, companies who are seen as industry leaders today largely owe their success to their ability to effectively utilize software to capitalize on disruptive trends.

Moving Beyond Keeping the Lights On

2015 will be the year that enterprises make their biggest leap to keep pace with user demands. Keeping the lights on will no longer be sufficient in today’s application economy as we anticipate significant shifts in the way businesses approach security, business revenue structures, and customer experiences.

Central to these shifts, we’ve identified four predictions that businesses simply cannot afford to ignore in their strategic planning process for 2015.

The Rise of Dynamic Applications

In today’s environment, we are more likely to interact with a company through their application than with a person. We anticipate a shift where applications not only help people make decisions but predict what they need.

We’re starting to see these types of application behaviours begin to emerge this year, and businesses who effectively capitalize on this upward trend in 2015 will gain market share by delivering consumers a seamless and intuitive experience.

Continuous Security

With applications soon to act as proxies for human counterparts,security can no longer be an afterthought.For example, shifts in security such as “zero-touch authentication” would start to become essential where devices make silent decisions in the background based on consumer behaviours and locations.

Another common concern is that as businesses expand beyond single markets in the region, they start to face new security threats in new markets. This regionalization of businesses will help drive the need for a more strategic approach from enforcing security to taking a more targeted approach driven by behavioural analytics to determine potential vulnerabilities.

Lastly, with data breaches dominating headlines in 2014, businesses will start to approach software security from the outset and embed it early on into the development life cycle so that DevOps grows from continuous improvement, delivery, and feedback to include continuous security.

Alignment of IT and Business Objectives

With the shift in dynamic applications and enhanced security measures, IT will begin to contribute more to the bottom line and new business models will require a shift from the traditional method in which software is developed and deployed.

This year, DevOps will take centre stage where businesses will look to integrate it as part of a strategic business imperative. This approach will enable businesses to develop faster, better quality applications, and more importantly, better alignment with business objectives.

A pertinent point to note is that IT and business objectives alignment has to go beyond satisfying external customers to serve internal end users as well.In our recent Vanson Bourne survey, 38% of APJ respondents indicated that they have aligned their IT and business objectives across the business but only 17% have indicated they are very effective in strategically managing the business of IT ¹.

Invisible Analytics

In the past year, Big Data has been a major tech buzzword with numerous media outlets discussing its various application and benefits. This year, we expect to see enterprises devote more resources to tap into this ambient data to improve customer experiences through as-it-happens insights.

In fact, this approach not only enables more sophisticated customer insights and better data management, but will also play a critical role in an analytics-based security strategy.

2015: The Year of the Leader or Laggard?

Today, technology is at the centre of driving business innovation. Significant shifts in 2015 will feature prominently in the way business and IT are run, applications are developed, and content is managed. Businesses have the unique opportunity to take steps to determine if 2015 would be the year they would become an industry leader or laggard.