CEO at Urjanet, helping companies unlock the power of utility data to support sustainability goals, financial inclusion, and data privacy.
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Modern enterprise application development cycles are getting shorter in the ever-evolving tech world as technology leaders internally leverage innovative tools to accelerate digital transformation. With valuable solutions like AI-based tools, advanced web applications and third-party APIs becoming readily available to software developers, speed to market, quality and purpose-built solutions are instrumental in improving competitiveness. Whether it's banking technology, payment automation or environmental, social and governance (ESG) management platforms, the successful incorporation of third-party technology can lead to the faster creation of better products.
Demand is rising for transformative technology.
Market and customer demands are rapidly changing; organizations need to embrace digital transformation and deploy technology to support their operations to serve customers better and remain competitive. Cloud technology plays a critical role in boosting organizations' functions, helping to increase scalability, flexibility and accessibility, and C-suite business leaders are beginning to realize that. They have high expectations for how it can influence their companies growth, strategy and day-to-day operations.
According to the results of a 2021 PWC survey of Fortune 1000 companies, 74% of executives are engaged in a cloud strategy, and 56% see the cloud as a critical component of growth and innovation. The survey also found that for almost one-third of industrial product leaders, the faster creation and delivery of new digital products and services play a role in measuring the value of the cloud. As businesses navigate ways to operate in a remote environment with fewer resources, we've seen that the pandemic has also been a driver of innovation — 59% of executives that responded to a KPMG/HFS Research survey stated that the pandemic motivated them to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.
Third-party technology integrations can improve effectiveness and shorten the time to value.
Companies are constantly looking for ways to accelerate their product development while also maintaining or improving quality. There are a variety of technologies that developers can utilize to help improve their applications and fast-track product development.
• Progressive web app (PWA) frameworks reduce the amount of code that needs to be written manually for desktop and mobile devices. For example, developers can incorporate popular frameworks such as Angular, Ionic 2 and Magento to produce enhanced user interfaces faster.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) is another software development trend that's here to stay and is taking innovation to the next level, thanks to its ability to tackle repetitive and straightforward tasks through every development life cycle stage.
Since the onset of the pandemic, AI adoption has been on the rise. A survey of more than 1,200 tech execs found that more than 80% of U.S. respondents had accelerated AI adoption since 2019. In the banking industry, AI is now being used to provide customer support and detect credit card fraud. To help drive revenue from savings accounts, off-the-shelf technology can be integrated into the online banking experience by taking advantage of solutions that, for example, automate account holder engagement.
Additionally, the explosion of APIs over the past decade has been a driving force in software development and a key component of many successful apps, like Uber, which does not create the underlying technology but calls from APIs. In 2019, Salesforce.com spent $6.5 billion on an API management system, and Visa paid $5.3 billion for an API for bank transaction data.
Ensure Successful Integration With A Comprehensive Evaluation And Risk Assessment
Taking the proper steps to ensure that the risk is worth the reward can help ensure a successful outcome when integrating third-party tools versus relying on in-house capabilities. After identifying your business requirements, the risk of embedding third-party code should be estimated. Product stability, performance, security and user experience are factors to be considered.
Developing prototypes within a sandbox environment provides an experience that's comparable to production and can even help shorten development cycles. At Urjanet, we've found that this approach reduces operational risk by helping our clients discover issues earlier and offers a way to conduct end-to-end testing without impacting production environments.
I'm hopeful that third-party technology and other solutions on the market continue to offer developers the resources they need to bring quality products to customers quickly. From APIs and cloud tools to AI and analytics, leveraging innovative technology can be the answer to boosting your business and its operations during this digital transformation while also giving it a much-needed competitive advantage.
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