FOUR STEPS FOR SUCCESS: Platform Strategies for Agility, Flexibility, and Scale

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1 FOUR STEPS FOR SUCCESS: Platform Strategies for Agility, Flexibility, and Scale

2 Mike Facemire Principal Analyst, Forrester Research The current system is broken thanks to the power of mobile. Agility, flexibility and scale. Enterprises are re-architecting their infrastructures to deliver those attributes. Entrepreneurs and developers are now building those elements into their businesses from the start. What s their secret? These organizations choose platforms that deliver those benefits and employ an atomic mindset to help them create complete solutions. In a series of recent reports, Forrester Research principal analyst Mike Facemire described the approach being taken by successful organizations who are looking to bring more agility, flexibility and scale to their businesses. He outlined the necessary steps to become a more adaptable enterprise. Facemire is a leading expert on application development, architecture, design and strategy, as well as next-generation open web architecture. This white paper recounts the conversation Twilio had with Facemire about this topic during the webinar entitled Four Steps For Success: Platform Strategies For Agility, Flexibility & Scale. If you want to learn how to help your organization to become an Adaptable Enterprise, read on. 2

3 nimble / secure engaged smart the adaptable THE ADAPTABLE ENTERPRISE A new type of company has emerged according to Forrester Research: the Adaptable Enterprise. These companies have broadly embraced mobile, adopted new customerfacing systems, and successfully engineered (or re-engineered) their back-end infrastructures to support their growth strategies. To be successful, these adaptable enterprises and their developers needed to establish an IT architecture to support the rapidly changing requirements of their unique markets. These architectures are characterized by three elements: first, they needed to be engaged; second, they needed to be smart; and lastly, they needed to be nimble and secure. In the 1980s, engagement was limited to what could be done on green screens and with simple ASCII characters. Today, true engagement is done through brand new front ends, through mobile software that's very contextual, and through apps that are driven to solve problems. By gathering and leveraging data, these adaptable enterprises have become smarter. They use analytics to achieve real-time understanding of what employees and consumers might want to be doing. And finally, by being more nimble and secure, these organizations can effectively orchestrate the resources needed to capitalize on new revenue opportunities. 3

4 agility flexibility scale MOBILE CHANGED EVERYTHING The Adaptable Enterprise is responding to changing markets and to a set of implementations that are broken. Many companies thought they had created architectures that would sustain growth. But the thing is, the game changed. With mobile everything is different for the enterprise. In the traditional web-centric world, all you had to do was worry about the browser. Now, you need to accommodate a robust set of devices that need to access data from anywhere, over a range of conditions and at any time. Consumer expectations have changed as well. To address this, you need agility, flexibility and scale. To be agile, you need to break the hard binds between the data and the interface to address all the differing types of devices accessing your back end. Flexibility is necessary to handle all the rapidly changing competitive and consumer demands on your brand and your service. And the need for scale is radically greater. In the web-centric world, travel apps might be accessed once or twice a day (say before leaving for the airport). Now, with mobile devices, travelers can access the travel app before they leave, multiple times while in transit, and at the airport while waiting for their flight. The impact on companies back end systems could be 10 to 20 times more than in the past. 4

5 client tier delivery tier aggregation tier services tier MOBILE DEMANDS A FOUR-TIER ENGAGEMENT MODEL Back in the web-centric day, the industry focused on three-tier web architectures. You had a data tier, an application tier, and then a presentation tier or a client tier. And while that worked well back in the day, now driven by mobile we have changing business demands and need a four-tier engagement model. The client tier is the presentation layer for all the differing devices on the network. The delivery tier is simply how we cache data and distribute it. At the bottom of the stack, we have the services tier that includes internal data and third-party services. And the aggregation tier integrates the services and data. It composes internal-external services the fourth tier such that you can quickly go to market with a new experience, and also update it if new threats or opportunities emerge. 5

6 THE FOUR-TIER MODEL NEEDS A SOLID FOUNDATION Mobile isn t just about the current handset-centric world. It s also about future channels, wearables, the internet of things, sensors everywhere and much more. To address this, that four-tier engagement platform needs a solid foundation in the aggregation and services tiers. As we push toward the composable enterprise in a world in which we don't create everything ourselves we take what's out there from organizations that specialize in the lower level components. We use those to dynamically compose together the experiences our customers need. In that model, it s extremely important to build on solid foundation starting in the services tier. These foundational platforms include a range of Software-as-a-Service offerings such as CRM from Salesforce.com, file storage from Box, compute cycles from Amazon Web Services, analytics from Splunk and communications from Twilio. From these solid foundational elements, through their normalized APIs, you can compose and re-compose the customer experiences you need to have in order to be successful. 6

7 aggregated platforms decoupled layers proprietary stacks MARKET EVOLUTION The transition to a four-tier engagement architecture is in its infancy. The analysts at Forrester Research believe the market will progress through three stages. Look for the more advanced providers to stay ahead of these developments Proprietary stacks: Typically solutions that attempt to operate according to the new architectural principles. API management offerings aggressively going after the aggregation layer, position them as core to many successful four-tier solutions Decoupled layers: Vendors start to recognize their sweet spot and defensible market position in a specific tier. They reimagine their products to address the emerging four-tier model Aggregated platforms: In this mature phase, major vendors will coalesce their platform services in a way that attracts an ecosystem of customers, developers, and supporting vendors. 7

8 1 use services 2 integrate external services 3 move to 4 FOUR STEPS TO SUCCESS To be successful in today s market you need to solve traditional business problems for instance, providing access to your organization s data but via a whole new set of different devices, at faster speeds, and with higher user expectations. With that in mind, the first step to success is selecting services platforms that flex and scale. Also know as Backend as a Service (BaaS), these expand with you. Some even bring caching mechanisms essentially for free. The second item is integration. Stop building everything yourself. For instance, there s no reason to implement your own data storage mechanism. There s already multiple services, out there, competing for that business. Instead, integrate with these external third-party services. The third thing is to move to a lightweight multi-factor security model. The increasing population of mobile devices that must work on light-weight, transient networks demand the same light-weight, asynchronous transient solutions. And finally, apply an anatomic services mind set when architecting your solution. Break things down to their smallest level. Dynamically compose back services that create higher order and engaging experiences for your customers. architect with atomic mindset 8

9 Joe McCorckle Sr. Director, IT Voice/UC Services, RealPage Adding text capabilities to their voice services increased RealPage customers lead closure rates by 40%. A PLATFORM STRATEGY CASE STUDY: REALPAGE RealPage is one of the top providers of property management software. They help organizations manage commercial and residential real estate. They have a SaaS platform and they re also leveraging the Twilio platform to extend web experiences to mobile devices. In their version of composability, they started with a lead management solution and then added voice services. They used Twilio to provision phone numbers that could be easily tracked, and integrated that capability into the rest of their platform. Then they moved on and added additional capabilities: text messaging. RealPage wanted text messaging as an additional means of interacting with their customers. SMS adds a whole new channel for them to interact not only with their direct client customers, but for their client-customers to interact with their customers who are mobile consumers. As their customers needs evolved, they were easily able to adapt, composing new capabilities as needs arose. As business needs change, RealPage can compose various elements. In this case, they started with a web platform, then added voice, then text messaging and more. Platforms with open APIs provide an easy way to mix and match services, to add platforms on top of platforms, to compose, assemble, and reassemble to build various classes of solutions. 9

10 CHOOSING A SERVICES PLATFORM client tier a restful service api analytics data portability flexible pricing cloud to cloud What should you be looking for in a services platform? Good question. First, you need cloud-based storage and processing. You need a place to store data and access that data, one that scales elastically with your business. Cloud storage does that. To access the data, you need touch points, or RESTful APIs. Through a normalized set of access points will allow your developers to quickly iterate. From there, analytics gives you real-time feedback on how folks are using it further informing iteration. Data portability is another key component, giving you the flexibility to move at will from service provider to service provider. A flexible pricing model is also key, allowing you to adapt to changing market pressures. And finally, take advantage of cloud-to-cloud lightening. Tie services together in the cloud and take advantage of all the processing power offered by these cloud platforms and enrich the experience for customers with speed. 10

11 CONCLUSION Mobile changed everything for businesses. But mobile isn t the end of the evolution, it s the beginning. It has created a new class of worker and consumer. It has heightened their expectations, and placed greater demands for speed and access to information. To address these demands, you need to be adaptable and flexible. You need an infrastructure that scales elastically with your business. And most importantly, you need to rebuild your business around the idea of composability and rely on services platforms that allow you to adjust in real-time to the demands of your customer. 11