Gen Y, The Internet Generation, Millennials. These are all names for the same thing; The Connected Generation. They have grown up with a Blackberry in their hand and an IPod in their ear. They can Google information in the blink of an eye, and are in constant (virtual) contact with their friends and family. So what happens when this generation gets into the board room? The following are 3 necessities that businesses are going to have to accept, or be left in the dust:

1. Business needs to be mobile & flexible 

Generation Y will want to always be continuously improving their business. They are used to the freedom that the internet and mobile devices have offered them. Monolithic software systems that require days of configuration just to make tiny changes aren’t going to cut it. These new boardroom occupants are going to demand that systems are; Available 24/7, accesible on a mobile device, and flexible enough to allow them to make quick and responsive adjustments according to changes in the business environment.

 2. Business Reporting & Analytics need to real-time

Millennials are used to having any information they want instantly at their fingertips. Weekly reporting and monthly summaries will no longer work. Business applications are going to need to be able to both operate normally, and feed real-time dashboards for management’s review. This will require a solution that has loose-coupling and seamless communication. To achieve this, business systems need to be approached in a different manner.

3.  IT teams will no longer be road-blocks

No longer will it be acceptable for an IT team to blindly say “can’t” to a manager that doesn’t know any better. The next generation is computer savvy, and they know what can and cannot be done. Combine this with the incredible user-friendliness of modern applications, and you have a situation where employees and managers are going to make end-runs to get around IT’s push-back.If the IT team cannot adapt to this, they are going to quickly find themselves left in the dust.

With the advent of cloud computing, the IT industry is set to change forever. The Cloud has created hundreds of new opportunities for companies, but what many fail to see, are the many problems that have also been created. Systems that were functioning fine in-house are now having to either migrate to, or integrate with the cloud. Cloud computing has revolutionized an entire industry, but to truly capture it’s potential, a company must be able to effectively communicate, deploy and integrate between servers and across processes.

Many software companies have identified this market pain, but they are attempting to solve the problem using the same old techniques. Using old techniques to solve a new problem is going to result in a “band-aid” approach to cloud computing. These solutions are going to last for maybe a couple years, and then they will quickly become out of date.

Cloud computing requires an entirely new approach to how we think about developing and integrating software. Systems need to be flexible and have the ability to move from in-house to the cloud quickly and without errors. Developers don’t want to be stuck working within the confines of a Visual Programming studio. They want freedom to code applications the same way they always have, while having an increased ability to quickly orchestrate, integrate and deploy those applications.

The Hub & Spoke model with point-to-point integrations is a convenient solution to a big problem, but it’s not the right solution. Nodally technologies has taken a brand new approach to this problem, and it’s one that is going to CHANGE THE WORLD!

In tough times, many manufacturing company’s will experience slow downs. Consumer confidence is low, which leads to lower demand at a retail level, and it all trickles down to affect the manufacturers. We are in one of these times right now. You hear it in conversations every day; “Business is slow, so we’re not taking on any new projects.” But, is this the right mindset for executives to have?

We would argue that when business is slower, it is the PERFECT time to INNOVATE! Key team members will have more time to take on projects that can help to better position the company to take advantage of the market when it speeds up again. Time and time again we’ve seen that the companies who down-size or allow slow-downs to control their improvement initiatives fail to take advantage of huge opportunities. The companies that use these times of slower business to invest in innovations and improvements, are able to capitalize on the opportunities much quicker and more effectively when the market begins to correct itself. Business is cyclical, but it doesn’t mean that company growth needs to be cyclical. By always re-investing to improve efficiency, companies can minimize the impact of market cycles on their bottom line.

What do you think? Should a slow marketplace or lower consumer confidence control a business, or should the decision be made to invest more heavily in innovations that will improve profitability in the long run?

Cloud Computing is the catalyst for the paradigm shift towards the need for flexible, distributed systems. It has created an incredible amount of possible solutions, but also a lot of new problems for companies. Many businesses have systems that were never made to be distributable, or to integrate with other applications. They were simply made to serve a specific need at a specific time, in-house. These legacy systems are out-dated, and companies are now realizing that the key to future success is going to be a move from “server-centric” to “service-centric.” (Accenture’s Technology Vision 2011) The traditional role of IT is no longer to simply maintain the existing systems, and ensure that no errors occur. They are now going to be tasked with becoming competitive-advantage creators, and will need to look to new techniques/technologies (such as cloud computing) to create these solutions.

By nature, people don’t like change, so it is often difficult for an IT team member to come forward with an idea that will change the way their systems are currently run. This fear of change has created a road-block to innovation in many organizations. IT staff might be able to get away with the status quo for now, but as the new generation of “connected” CEOs arrive in the boardroom and start demanding greater visibility and flexibility, IT will have to either adapt or be replaced.

The key is NOT to just use the same old techniques but transfer them to a new platform such as the cloud. This will only result in monolithic systems being stretched beyond their capabilities. IT needs to take a fundamentally new approach to how business systems are developed.

What do you think, is it time for the enterprise to re-think the function of IT? Is it time for IT staff to start giving more serious consideration to new techniques that may help companies achieve greater profitability in the future?

Too often, businesses are fettered by their business systems. If business visibility is low, or if small incremental changes can’t be made to systems, how will companies be able to continuously improve their business?

Our vision is the event driven enterprise. Xenodes will be running all throughout the enterprise; Extending legacy systems, forming new systems, collecting shop-floor data. It’s too common for a person to do valuable work within a company, and then have to turn around to tell a business system what they’ve done.

We should be able to automate data entry, across the entire enterprise, without having to worry about the compatibility of the inputted data with the existing monolithic business system. The enterprise should be driven by smaller, specific events, regardless of their format or context.

Each solution built with Xenograte is an investment in the future. These investments will organically build upon one another, and eventually a company will be left with a “perfect fit” enterprise system.

Over any integration specialists’ career, he or she will have to deal with integrations between systems on a case by case basis. People have, over the years, sought to come up with standards so that we can “all do it the same way,” or “let’s all use the same business processes.” The idea of these standards is that they will make it easier for software to all work together.

These standards, however, often do not fit particular integration scenarios. Many of these scenarios require custom built, specific-purpose code. If this code was easy to maintain, quick to build and affordable to own, everyone would use it because it is built to match the needs of the user perfectly. However, the traditional way of custom coding these applications is not easy, and definitely not in-expensive to own and maintain.

We have taken a completely different approach to solving the integration problem by looking at the way that software is built and deployed. Traditional software is monolithic by nature, and the more complex it is the more rigid it becomes. Data is sucked into the application, and can quickly become out of reach to un-related systems. You can transfer it via a database, but by this time it no longer has the context needed to get timely value from the data.

We have gone the opposite direction and have realized that smaller is easier to build, maintain, test and has a smaller point of possible failure. All of this creates a way of programming that minimizes the cost of ownership, gives better usability and creates a system that is able to quickly adapt to changing business needs. This agility also give use the ability to deploy any solution across server, networks and clouds. Simply, it allows us to build what we need, when and where we need it. All pieces, or Xenodes, are completely re-useable so our ROI grows with each implementation.

You may be thinking that this sounds similar to components, objects, services etc. This is not the case; you have to think of our technology as independent software robots that can run where ever they are needed, and can communicate seamlessly with each other regardless of where they are deployed. The key is to separate the data from the processing. I’m not talking about creating bigger databases, I am talking about keeping data and context together, and then allowing it to flow through and across processes. This is a brand new way to approach and view how solutions should be created.

Our new mindset coupled with our revolutionary technology has allowed us to flow data across simplified computing processes called Xenodes. These Xenodes can be orchestrated, by user interface based drag & drop, into a unified solution.

Instead of being a slave to your system and spending 80% of your IT budget on maintaining existing systems, take a new approach. Take an innovative stance and start reaping the benefits of a truly custom system without the legacy ball-and-chain that weighs down your budgets and your corporate agility.

Want more information? Have a problem that you feel Nodally can help with? Are you interested in working for Nodally?
Contact us Today! 

Welcome to the Nodally Technologies Blog! We at Nodally have come up with an incredible new integration technology. For a quick look at what we do, please visit our About page. The rest of the website explains, in more detail, the revolutionary approach we are taking to the development, extension and integration of systems.

We are blogging to help provide a different perspective to the industry, an alternative view to the status-quo. We are innovators and we want to share our new ideas with you. We will keep you up to date with product changes and improvements, and ask for your input on any ideas we have.

We will be blogging about many different topics. Everything from product updates to industry news. We will be posting our opinion on different issues, and we encourage everyone to comment and participate in the healthy debate. Disagree or agree with us, it doesn’t matter; We want to hear everyones opinion!

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