As we exit 2021, we can look back on a year of tough challenges, as businesses came to terms with the impact of the pandemic. Remote and hybrid working, together with the growth of e-commerce, greatly accelerated the imperative to digital transformation. Enterprises realised the opportunities that digitalisation provided in terms of efficiency, cost-savings and enhanced customer relations.
During the year, there was increasing adoption among progressive companies of Digital Experience Platforms (DXP). DXP links the IT function, business processes and marketing, but its most critical role is to enable brands to create personalised digital journeys for their customers. This ability to personalise the customer experience is what makes market-leading companies stand out from their competitors. Businesses that implemented DXPs on cloud-based architectures were able to accommodate the integrated analytics, personalisation and optimisation that gave their marketing teams full visibility of all the segments, prospects and touchpoints they need to target visitors with impactful content.
Post-pandemic technology trends to anticipate in 2022 and beyond
The DXP market in 2022 to focus on composability
In the DXP market, terms such as composability and orchestration have been adopted readily by everyone who writes or talks about the digital experience. These concepts are the natural progression of solutions that must be nimble in the adoption and integration of new tools and the distribution to new channels. Anyone in the market for a DXP solution should pay attention, educate themselves, and read through entire analyst reports in detail to understand what level of headless capability they need, and their options for scalability.
Overall, we expect more businesses to embrace the composable DXP approach, replacing or redesigning modules of their current monolithic digital platform to gain efficiency and performance and accelerate transformation.
We are also confident that No Code/Low Code will get more attention. In today’s DXP market, API integration capability is essential, but it is no longer enough. Business users have become more sophisticated and expect to rely less on the DevOps teams. At the same time, developers are warming to the idea that ease of use shouldn’t just apply to the business user on the front end. Not all Low Code options offer the flexibility that will satisfy a developer, but when it’s done right, it’s magic.
AI and cloud to strengthen enterprise products
The enterprise software vendors that haven’t yet evolved their legacy products to be cloud-native, or strengthened with AI, will accelerate their customer churn in 2022.
What is not magic, but is still pretty great, is that real AI functionality is becoming accessible to everyone. In the same way that tagging of content became expected for content management, Customer Journey Mapping, central to any digital experience platform, is real and usable for 2022. It’s also an indication that buyers are getting educated and comfortable with advancing technology.
Data movement to require increased security
Last year, increasingly digitalised processes led to greater opportunities but inevitably also opened the door to increased cyber threats. In 2022, we will see an increase in the number of security breaches and cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure, and hackers will find new loopholes to exploit in some major systems. Organisations will be targeted not only due to the amount of data they process but also the value of that data.
One particular vulnerability is the file transfer process. In order to function, organisations have to move files among departments, partners, customers and systems, and while the data is on the move it is potentially open to attack. 2021 saw some serious intrusions into major organisations in Singapore and APAC, through the hacking of the File Transfer Appliance (FTA) file-sharing system.
Over the year, organisations increasingly replaced traditional methods of file transfer such as the FTP standard with Managed File Transfer (MFT) software. MFT solutions provide secure collaboration and automated file transfers of sensitive data and advanced workflow automation capabilities without the need for scripting. Encryption and activity tracking also enables compliance with regulations such as PCI, HIPAA, and GDPR – crucially important as organisations need to provide audit trails to protect themselves in the event of a data breach.
Network Monitoring to include end-user and application experience
In network monitoring, we’re also still seeing an ongoing evolution from infrastructure-oriented monitoring to monitoring focused on end-user and application experience (AX). Knowing that your servers are up isn’t good enough anymore; competitive organisations need to understand whether the services they’re providing are meeting the expectations of their end-users. Now there is more of an emphasis on network traffic and application performance monitoring so that these organisations can determine if response times are meeting their SLAs – and be alerted immediately if they’re not. A comprehensive network monitoring solution that can not only report the health of the network but also the health of the applications and traffic on that network is crucial. Putting it all in context so that administrators can easily determine the root cause of application slowdowns or traffic bottlenecks is the Holy Grail of the IT department.
Overall, it is clear that there will be plenty to keep IT departments busy throughout the coming year. No doubt 2022 will throw up surprises but for now, the crystal ball shows an intensification of last year’s trends.
The good news is that lessons learned in the exceptional circumstances of 2021 will provide enterprises with confidence in developing and implementing the solutions to the challenges of 2022.
This article was contributed by John Yang, Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan at Progress
About the author
John Yang is currently Vice President of Asia Pacific Japan. A veteran in the field of enterprise IT solutions, he is deeply rooted with the Asia-Pacific market, knowing equally well both North Asia and South Asia. Over the past decade, he has helped several global enterprise software companies enter and grow their businesses in the Pacific Rim. John enjoys travelling, collaborating with a geographically dispersed team to cover the dynamics of the APJ market, and meeting customers and partners from diverse cultures. He received his education from Fudan University and the National University of Singapore.