(Original creator: jhuggins1)
This week, Uniface exhibited at the Gartner Symposium held in Barcelona. Our team was composed of representatives from marketing, sales and management, with the aim to promote Uniface, whilst also attending sessions held by Gartner and its sponsors. We also took the opportunity to interact with many other organizations that were exhibiting. We embraced the chance to speak to strategic decision makers, during which we had a number of very good conversations, illustrating the unparalleled strength of the Uniface platform and how it addresses the ‘challenges that keep CIOs up at night’.
We met many new organizations and partner prospects as well as existing customers, and lots of people who are part of the Uniface ecosystem. Some of those we met started their careers as Uniface professionals, a selection of which were over 20 years ago. They remained happy to see us going from strength to strength. We also met a world famous footballer!
Do you recognize this world famous footballer?
Having spoken to one Gartner analyst, a key message that came across showed that the world is reacting to the concept of 'business/mobile moments', which manifests itself as having smaller focused apps that do one thing well. The huge monolithic applications we know today will transition to API services (i.e. a strong integrated backend) and there will be more targeted single function mobile apps. These will compose the enterprise mobile solutions of the near future. This significant change is touching many parts of the IT industry and the way consumers interact with technology.
To achieve this goal, it is important for organizations to explore and embrace modern approaches, including topics such as Agile, DevOps, Continuous Delivery etc..., all with the goal to improve software quality and the velocity of delivery. Annual release cycles of new solutions have become less desirable, with our industry tending to move to small incremental releases, regularly. Consumers are not worried about version numbers, they just want continual improvement. Given the proposed small changes with each regular release, solution adoption will be better accepted, because each change, although continual, will be gradual. Things will 'feel' familiar and evolutionary, rather than creating potential rejection through revolutionary change. This does not suggest the complete end to significant updates by the way.
Now this may sound like a big change to an organization's way of working.....it is. So how do we address this is a sensible way? One answer is to take Gartner’s bimodal approach. We work in the new way for all new development and innovations, while at the same time continuing in the more traditional modes for existing items, then transition this old style over time. I've simplified bi-modal somewhat, however I hope you get the basic idea.
Demoing Uniface to Gartner Analyst
I spoke to a second analyst who also provided some good common sense reminders we all forget from time to time e.g. "What is the best reason to try and reduce the cost of IT?" Some would say "to improve profits." This seems like a sensible answer and can be, however, it is flawed. A better answer is "to allocate more of the IT budget to new innovation instead of regular maintenance." Studies suggest up to 92% of resources goes into maintenance, leaving only 8% for innovation. It is innovation that makes the difference and yields success.
In a conversation with a third analyst, more aspects about future directions were discussed. Hot topics that came up were API’s (…second nature for Uniface), legacy integration/reuse (…another walk in the park for Uniface), web and mobile development (…please give me a challenge) and aPaaS (…you got me!). The last topic is very interesting and something for us to really think about. The market still faces challenges in this area and CIOs are also ‘kept awake at night’ by this. We also talked about the transition from traditional desktop GUI’s to web based and mobile. The trend is rapidly accelerating with the vast majority of new projects now being targeted at API services & mobile, whether that be phones, tablets, wearables or web.
Given the four days spent interacting with many new analysts & organizations, I could write endlessly, so I will stop now and save some for another day. In the meantime, enjoy some pictures.
Uniface at Gartner Symposium