What Digital Convergence means for Enterprise Software

The digital world, which now is all around us, is converging. This means that television, Internet, telephony and a host of other services are starting to use the same mechanisms for delivering the service or delivering customer management. I have written about smart metering, how using some form of the Internet - our energy usage will be made more efficient and tailored to our specific usage patterns. Television is being delivered over the Internet, Internet televisions, iPlayers and the like are becoming the norm (creating huge demands on bandwidth).

I would like to address the question of enterprise software. More and more in my day-to-day consulting I encounter companies who are diversifying their businesses to provide a wide variety of services over the Internet. After-all, if you can provide television over the internet, why not sell music, why not offer broadband and maybe even throw in a mobile phone or fixed line phone contract. If you have the systems to do all of that you might as well re-sell energy, not to mention insurance and financial services. I am not saying it is a good idea to diversify to such an extent, but if the basic systems (billing, web-portal, customer services) are similar, it is certainly worth thinking about.

Enterprise software, i.e the software that maintains billing information, computes bills, allows one to view accounts online, handles online marketing campaigns etc., etc. will need to become more flexible to meet the growing series of requirements of it's more diversified clients. It is unlikely that one software system will be able to handle the ever growing functionality required to meet the diversification demands. However the winner in the market I believe will be those systems that offer very good, robust and scalable functionality and provide open interfaces which allow other software to easily interface into them. It is not inconceivable, that a open-source solution will in time replace SAP and Oracle as the system of choice to handle the basic back-end functionality.

Comments

Post a Comment

Please post your comments, I am interested in your views

Popular posts from this blog

The pitfalls of share options in the technology startup

Draft 1 PLEASE NOTE: I  am a simple engineer and this document should not be taken as legal advice in any way whatsoever.  Please feel free to comment or relate your stories here. All feedback is more than welcome Over the last few weeks I have been involved in trying to get a fair outcome for some options that I have in one of the many startups I have worked with over the years. As I continue to push my case forward I thought I would write some thoughts whilst fresh in my mind.  Many of us are attracted to startups due to the promise of shares or share options in the company we are joining. Many people work at reduced rates or no pay in exchange for these contracts, with the hope that one day they will materialise into some value for us. For startup companies, options are a vital currency. Initially cash is tight and using options is a means to attract the right people to help launch the company or take it to the next stage in it's evolution.  In recent weeks, I hav...
Read more

Hire for Engineers not for Frameworks

I have been faced with hiring great engineering teams on a number of occasions, I am constantly amazed at home many hiring managers and recruiters seem to focus on particular technologies and experience in those technologies. My experience has taught me to hire engineers and I have always viewed the technology as a secondary consideration. I always focuses on a grasp of engineering fundamentals and not on information about some current or past technology. In our current world these technologies are out of date by the time the ink on the contract is dry. Recently, I was approached by a leading company for a very senior role. The in-house recruiter laid on his wonderful resume with world leading software companies before affording me the chance to explain my career-to-date. He then proceeded to ask me a number of questions on specific Java libraries and how they were used. This is all information that is readily available on reference sites and in API documentation and does not ...
Read more

Insights & Suggestions For Effective Software development

I decided to note a few observations on software development based on my experiences with a number of clients over a long career, this is work in progress and would appreciate any further input or comments. Topics Data science needs systematic approach Without Specification you are in trouble Interview for excellence Agile does not mean "do nothing" Devops first is not always productive Too many resources is as bad, or worse than too little Design before Develop, before Deploy 1. Data Science needs a `Systematic Approach` We live in a `Data Science` age, it's a buzz word. We have always had data science in some form or another, it's just that the availability, techniques, compute power and volume has exploded over the last few years. Principles are not new, they are standard engineering practises, however, in the new generation of `Data Science` these standard practises are often overlooked. Here are some general rules-of-thumb I have noted down : It makes no sense to...
Read more