Customer-driven infrastructure: building future-ready consumer applications

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. The journey begins
  3. The evolution of today’s enterprise app
  4. Four key metrics
  5. Key takeaways
  6. Appendix 1: Case study: Engagency.com
  7. Appendix 2: Case study: CrazyForEducation.com
  8. About David Strom

1. Summary

The days when IT could tell end users which kinds of computing gear to purchase and use ended sometime in the 1990s, but for many years afterwards, IT retained a stranglehold on the deployment and maintenance of enterprise infrastructure, corporate-wide applications, and building data centers. Those days are quickly becoming another memory for IT departments, which have seen the evolution of customer-facing applications and the web- and cloud-based worlds that have arisen. These apps are changing the way that IT delivers its services, builds its enterprise architectures, and selects its systems.

This paper is intended for IT managers and department heads who are looking to evaluate their computing requirements and make the transition to cloud, mobile, and web-based apps. It will provide a framework for evaluating technology decisions from the perspective of customer experience and suggest metrics that can help businesses justify and benchmark the success of their future IT investments.

Key takeaways of our research include the following:

  • The mobile device (phone or tablet) has become the de facto computing endpoint.
  • The speed of app delivery is critical.
  • The rate of evolution varies tremendously for each business and for departments within each business.
  • No monolithic app can drive cloud or customer-facing infrastructure adoption.
  • There is also no monolithic or single cloud configuration.
  • IT will have to evolve away from installing servers and toward managing integrations, provisioning services, and negotiating vendor relationships.
  • Even old-style mainframe apps will become browser-based.
  • Availability and disaster recovery needs to be baked into everything on an app-by-app basis.
  • Self-service portals are critical.

 

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