Modernisation powers agility and innovation

The rapid pace of inno­va­tion in recent years, accel­er­at­ed fur­ther by the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, has made agili­ty an essen­tial cur­ren­cy for thriv­ing and sur­viv­ing in the dig­i­tal age. To erad­i­cate the lega­cy pre­vent­ing them from adapt­ing to change at the same pace as native­ly agile star­tups, organ­i­sa­tions are embrac­ing devel­op­ment and deploy­ment meth­ods.

Mod­ern tech­nolo­gies not only enable agili­ty and cost reduc­tions com­pared with lega­cy infra­struc­ture, but also the abil­i­ty to inno­vate with­out bar­ri­ers and fail fast, which is a cru­cial facet of gain­ing com­pet­i­tive advan­tage. Sup­port­ed by pow­er­ful archi­tec­tures and devel­op­ment approach­es, such as microser­vices, automa­tion, and con­tin­u­ous inte­gra­tion and con­tin­u­ous deliv­ery, or CICD, it is much eas­i­er to exper­i­ment and deploy new fea­tures.

“Lega­cy sys­tems lack that agili­ty since they involve, in most cas­es, one big mono­lith­ic appli­ca­tion that has been devel­oped over ten or fif­teen years,” says Rafał Jasińs­ki, senior busi­ness ana­lyst at IT ser­vice provider PGS Soft­ware. “It’s big, it’s com­plex and there­fore it takes time to build some­thing new and test it. Time to mar­ket can take six months or more; with a mod­ernised approach, we can reduce this to as lit­tle as three weeks.”

While the ben­e­fits are clear, the mod­erni­sa­tion jour­ney isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a smooth one. Accord­ing to McK­in­sey research, 70 per cent of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions fail, often because com­pa­nies are not spe­cialised in cloud migra­tions and inte­gra­tions. Those that do suc­ceed typ­i­cal­ly lean on part­ners with the exper­tise in mod­ernising infra­struc­ture.

PGS Soft­ware is one such part­ner, with exper­tise and ser­vices stretch­ing across cloud com­put­ing, trans­for­ma­tion and data sci­ence, includ­ing busi­ness analy­sis, user expe­ri­ence and qual­i­ty assur­ance. Through its soft­ware devel­op­ment ser­vices, which are craft­ed to the needs of each client, PGS Soft­ware con­verts ideas com­pa­nies have into qual­i­ty IT solu­tions.

“We sup­port clients through the whole jour­ney,” says Jasińs­ki. “We assist in care­ful­ly plan­ning mod­erni­sa­tion and migra­tion, rearchi­tect­ing solu­tions and decom­pos­ing into microser­vices or oth­er cloud-native archi­tec­tures like server­less. Cru­cial­ly, our teams help clients to build new prod­ucts and fea­tures, all the while allow­ing them to learn from us as cloud spe­cial­ists, and there­fore become cloud experts them­selves through that process.”

When AIXBRO, a lead­ing sup­pli­er of auto­mo­tive parts, want­ed to improve its online data­base and search func­tion­al­i­ty, it turned to PGS Soft­ware to build a new pro­to­type in the cloud. An AWS Man­aged Ser­vices deploy­ment enabled AIXBRO to accel­er­ate inven­to­ry man­age­ment by 960 times, from tak­ing up to 80 hours to pop­u­late around half a mil­lion prod­ucts, to com­plet­ing the same tasks in mere min­utes and with lim­it­less scal­a­bil­i­ty.

“Not only have we mod­ernised our means of man­ag­ing our exten­sive inven­to­ry, but PGS Soft­ware has also shown us a future-proof solu­tion that will stay with us as we grow and trans­form,” says Ste­fan Hilbrich, direc­tor of ecom­merce at AIXBRO. “We now have a frus­tra­tion-free solu­tion as the basis for mul­ti­ple new fea­tures that’ll trans­form our com­pa­ny even fur­ther.”

Anoth­er PGS Soft­ware cus­tomer, online busi­ness direc­to­ry Yell, increased its time to mar­ket by 840 times thanks to a whole new dig­i­tal engage­ment mod­el, under­pinned by the cloud. A fin­tech client, mean­while, was able to reduce its costs by 30 per cent through a cloud-native devel­op­ment strat­e­gy, which accel­er­at­ed the intro­duc­tion of new fea­tures by 869 per cent.

In the future, com­pa­nies are going to use more cloud ser­vices, espe­cial­ly man­aged ser­vices, as they seek fast, acces­si­ble and approach­able ways of lever­ag­ing the ben­e­fits and agili­ty. Cru­cial­ly, man­aged ser­vices enable com­pa­nies to quick­ly exper­i­ment with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and machine-learn­ing algo­rithms, some­thing that would take then much longer to do on their own.

“To run a big data project on-premise, you have to buy very expen­sive, high-per­for­mance com­put­ers. You don’t know when, or even if, you’ll get a return on that,” says Jasińs­ki. “Com­pa­nies are real­is­ing they can use cloud ser­vices for this. While there is still a cost to the com­put­ing pow­er, if you are dis­ap­point­ed with the out­come of the exper­i­ment, you can just shut it down, which is cru­cial to the abil­i­ty to inno­vate and improve deci­sion-mak­ing.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it pgs-soft.com

Pro­mot­ed by PGS Soft­ware