Guide to Bootstrap your SaaS startup in 2019-2020

SaaS Startup in Indonesia. Yes 2 years ago I worked as VP engineer… | by Lukluk Luhuring Santoso | Medium

The growth trajectory which brands like Salesforce and Dropbox find themselves operating in year after year is the same that drives thousands of entrepreneurs to make an entry in the SaaS business.

In this event where Newton’s third law comes into play – success of the SaaS companies leading to more entrepreneurs willing to enter the segment – the end result is almost always the same – High Growth of SaaS market.

Software as a Service model – at the back of the plethora of benefits that it offers has reached a stage where the discussions around the benefits that they offer are negligible in front of the queries that surround How to bootstrap a SaaS startup.

We are here to answer the query and its several strings. All through our SaaS startup guide.

Let us take you through the stages that you would have to take to mark your SaaS startup growth strategies.

Stage 1: Create Traction

Seven ways to get traction for your early-stage product or startup | by Aytekin Tank | The Startup | Medium

Once you have gathered the details of individual user demand and have established what you need to offer in your SaaS product, the next step that comes is validating your idea.

Now idea validation would be your one stage where you will not just get the idea checked for its viability but would also get primary level attention from the prospective users.

The steps that you should follow in case of getting early-stage user traction can be somewhere in the lines of –

1. Posting and Promoting Your Idea on ProductHunt

How to Launch on Product Hunt ?. There are dozens of different articles… | by Product Hunt | Product Hunt

ProductHunt is a haven for entrepreneurs who are at the stage of testing out an idea. The community-like website is home to a number of entrepreneurs and investors who are looking to invest in up-and-coming ideas, along with a number of prospective users.

To get the early stage feedback, you can share your SaaS idea on ProductHunt and mark it open for the community to look into and ask questions about. In fact, seeing the benefits that ProductHunt presence can get to an entrepreneur, it can be a wise move to mark it as one of the best practice to grow early stage Saas startup.

2. Developing and Promoting Your Landing Pages

8 Event Landing Page Examples that Drive Interest and Ticket Sales

Your landing page which contains information related to your SaaS offering can be a great way to share your idea with the prospective users along with helping you build an email list.

The idea of a landing page is to have a space where you can show-off your product/service and use the emails collected to share regular updates about your SaaS offering to the users who showed interest in your offering.

3. Becoming Active in Business and Technology Communities

There are a number of communities present on the internet which discusses and dissects new software offerings which are developed and launched with the intent to making processes smoother and answer how to promote SaaS business.

At this stage when you are looking to get the right traction for your business these communities can be a good starting point to pass the message of your arrival along.

Stage 2: Design Prototype

Your Complete Guide to Prototyping — Stage Four Of Design Thinking

This is the stage which would start with you having an idea of what the users want from your SaaS product. You now know that the problem you identified actually affects masses and the world need answers to them.

And now that you have given the users a theoretical insight into what you are planning to offer, the next step would be to give them something to interact with.

This is the step of designing prototypes.

There are a number of prototyping tools and software that help you design prototypes if you plan on doing the work yourself.

Once you have the whole process of your idea having been converted into a prototype covered, the next step would be its promotion. While you can follow the route of social media and the ones we mentioned in the above mentioned points, a shortcut to get feedback would be to pass along your prototype to the users who showed interest in your SaaS product through eMailers.

You can even gather all the people who showed interest in your idea and do a meetup by making your prototype the center of attraction. It can even be a great place for you to invite investors if getting investment in your prototype is on your agenda.

We will talk about funding later in our SaaS startup guide. For now, let’s move our focus on the development part of it.

Stage 3: Development of a SaaS MVP

Choosing the Right Technology Stack for your SaaS startup

Now that you have the SaaS prototype which has been worked around according to the feedback shared by the prospective users, the next stage that you will be entering now is the Minimum Viable Product stage.

The idea of an MVP development is the creation of a working model of your SaaS offering – one that contains all the must-have and unique features that places your product at the top of the competitor’s.

Identification of the features that should be present in the MVP holds a crucial place in the whole development process and then in deciding the future of your business in the domain. Something that is handled by the development agency you will be partnering with to get the idea converted into a working model.

In fact, it is not just the features that have to be paid attention to at this stage but also the tech stack and the development approach that your partnered SaaS app development company would be working around.

When it comes to the right development approach, the one that should be followed in order to take out maximum efficiency off of the whole SaaS development process is Agile development.

The approach comes with a series of attached perks like timely delivery, quick response to changing demand, low cost of development, etc.

Leaving it on your partnered agency to walk you through the many perks of Agile approach of SaaS app development, let us turn our attention on the technology stack that you can rely on to give a great experience to your end-users and the investors alike.

While the focus of the development of a robust SaaS system almost always comes on how strong its backend development ecosystem is, there are other technical frameworks that comes into play as well. Frameworks that are not simply restricted to Firebase.

For a better understanding, let us look at the technology stack choice of some of the top SaaS companies operating in the world.

Once you have devised an MVP on the basis of the right set of technology stack, the next step that comes up in any SaaS startup guide is making the MVP live taking feedback.

Stage 4: Making MVP Live and Working on the Feedback

Why Creating MVP Is Important in Mobile App Development? - Top Digital Agency

Right after you have developed your SaaS MVP, the launch stage comes up.

This is the part where you make your SaaS app live for the users to work around and explore. At this stage your partnered agency will come in the picture again. They will work around the final testing of the MVP and making it live on the world wide web.

Once the MVP is made live, your promotion work will take the front seat. At this stage, you will have to look into getting it as many relevant eye-balls as possible.

The first agenda once your SaaS product is launched will be to connect with business reps and entrepreneurs for whom you have developed the software – an effort that would require a sales team. And persuade them to incorporate it in their everyday process.

Why Giving Feedback Matters to Your Employees | Lucidchart Blog

The second agenda would be to take feedback of their experience. You will have to make note of how they interacted with your offering’s features and what experience they had to share at the back of every individual session.

The success of the second agenda will be deemed fruitful when you ask your agency’s engineers to sit with your test group as they work around the software. This way the speed with which resolutions are attended to will increase by manifold. And your SaaS offering churn rate will also be several points behind what the industry’s statistics show.

Now the end result of this stage would be elements that would come in very handy in the next stage you will be entering now.

Step 5: Getting SaaS Startup Funding

When, How and Where to Get Funding For Your SaaS Startup

The outcome of stage four, which ended at you validating your MVP’s worth would have brought you at the updation stage – where your partnered SaaS developers worked on the feedback that your real users shared.

Now while updation is happening on the back stage, there are a few things you will have to get into control at the front stage – Funding and Deciding on the SaaS Business Model (latter coming in before the former).

As the engineers work on the technicalities, your team will have to work on the business side of the software – The SaaS pricing strategy, Set of features that would be offered sans any price tag, Markup of the recurrent cost, Scalability feasibility, etc.

The one thing that we would want to put an emphasis on here is the power of offering Freemium. Instead of keeping your product under the paid mode from day one, give users the freedom to enjoy the product before they are asked to spend a penny.

But since no two SaaS companies are same, it can get a little difficult to decide on the SaaS pricing strategy that would work for your business. But no matter how confusing it is, it is of prime importance that you settle on a pricing model for the absence of one can be a reason for your SaaS business failure.

Book a Free Consultation With Our Team of SaaS Consultants to Get Help With the Business Side of it all.

Best SaaS App Developer | SaaS Development Services - Global IT App

While we handle the business and technical side of your SaaS offering, you will have to move to the next important task at hand – Getting funds for your startup.

Until and unless you have a hefty bank balance (one that entrepreneurs generally don’t have), you will have to focus on getting investors interested and funding in your SaaS product.

The step of finding answers on how to get funding for SaaS startup, crucial as it is, is not easy to achieve. There are a number of equations that you would have to attend to in order to get money on your product. Equations that would mainly depend on how your targeted users responded to the app.

Along with the collection of numbers that your SaaS offering witnessed, you will have to look into the business model that you have set – ensuring it is what keeps you in a profit zone while not being too heavy on the pocket of your users.

Only when you have given the picture of stable profit and a positive user response, the investors will show an interest and give you funding and their experience, readily.

What follows now is the constant process of updation. You will have to constantly keep building on your SaaS software to ensure that the user experience is always kept on a high priority in your SaaS business model.

Well now that we have covered all the stages of setting up your SaaS business, let us give you a peek into the factors that went into defining the success of top SaaS companies across the globe, as the parting note.

With the secret of the top SaaS companies now at your fingertips, it is time for you to get on the path of success chart.

Improve AI Customer Experience Strategy [2019-2020 Guide]

ai in travel | How Artificial Intelligence is Reforming The Travel Industry

Artificial Intelligence is no longer science fiction. More and more businesses are showing interest in understanding the basic mechanisms of AI and ways to use the technology for enhancing customer engagement and experience.

But, is the technology really effective? And can it really make a difference in upgrading your customer experience strategy?

Let’s find answers in this article – starting from the very basic, i.e, why you should pay attention to Customer experience.

Table of Content

  1. Why Should Businesses Focus on Customer Experience?
  2. Role of AI In Customer Experience
  3. Different Industries Delivering Higher Customer Experience with AI
  4. Future of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience
  5. Steps to Use AI for Delivering Better Customer Experience
  6. Other Technologies that are Innovating Customer Experience in 2019 & Beyond
  7. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about AI in Customer Experience

Why Should Businesses Focus on Customer Experience?

How AI Improves Customer Experience: 6 Benefits - Acquire

“Customer Experience is the new battlefield” –  Chris Pemberton, Gartner

With people understanding the difference between User Experience and Customer Experience, the latter term is becoming the key to unlock unparalleled opportunities in the business market. It has become imperative to the process of understanding your customers and planning a marketing strategy using these insights to give a personalized experience. Thus becoming imperative to gain higher success in the marketplace.

And this can be clearly proven from the following statistics:-

Now as we have taken a glance of why to focus on customer experience, let’s jump directly into where AI stands in all of this. What does AI means to the CX world in 2019. Or better say, what are the advantages of using Artificial Intelligence in your Customer Experience strategy.

Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Customer Experience

1. Know Your Customer

5 ways to KYC your customer | Veri5Digital

One of the foremost reasons why you should use AI to improve customer experience strategy is that it serves you with ample real-time user data. It helps you gather and analyze user data in real-time and in this way, enable you to remain familiar with the change in their behavior and expectations.

2. Simplicity, Efficiency, and Productivity

Benefits of Simplicity to Productivity

Another reason for using AI to improve customer experience is that it adds simplicity, efficiency, and productivity to the business processes.

The technology, in the form of Chatbots and self-driving software, automates repetitive processes which means the efforts and time required for performing repetitive tasks cut down to a half.

It also gathers and analyzes the user data in real-time to help you introduce the features and concepts that they want and in the way, they wish to interact with. Moreover, the inclusion of AI in quality assurance helps you to design an innovative mobile application with a higher scope of efficiency and simple structure.

Besides, these AI-powered bots and platforms perform most of the routine work and give the workforce an opportunity to perform other productive tasks.

3. Better Decision Making

Article: Backchannelling leads to better decision-making: Research — People Matters

Artificial Intelligence is also acting as the right companion for business in terms of the decision-making process. The technology looks into the user interaction history as well as the current market trends, which makes it easier for businesses to predict the future. This eventually provides them with clarity of what feature/functionality to introduce in their business solution for gaining huge momentum in the market.

4. Streamline Purchase Process

Streamline your Procurement Process | A Complete Guide - frevvo Blog

In the present scenario, various customers add products into their cart but never proceed due to slow loading, complicated check out process, and more. Artificial Intelligence, in this context, helps in understanding the challenges faced by the customers and deliver a seamless purchase experience – something that helps businesses to lower down app cart abandonment rate.

5. Fraud Detection

4 ways government program managers can solve the fraud Catch-22 -- GCN

One of the prime uses of Artificial intelligence in finance, retail, and other industries, in terms of customer experience, is that it helps in detecting fraud. The technology, using its potential to gather, store and compare user data in real-time, is making it easier to identify any change in the actions of users, and thus, helping with taking a timely preventive measures against frauds.

6. Customer Analytics

Developing a Comprehensive Customer Analytics Strategy - Wharton@Work

Artificial Intelligence is also showing a remarkable significance in the customer data analytics process. The AI-enabled tools and platforms are simplifying the process to gather a heap of user data from different sources and arrange them effectively as per the key factors.

Furthermore, Artificial Intelligence is making it possible to predict the context of user interactions and build better customer engagement strategies using the right use cases of the technology and insights gained from the data quickly and precisely.

7. Self-Service

An A – Z of IT Self-Service Success Tips | Joe The IT Guy

Many customers these days prefer doing everything on their own rather than hiring an agent or taking help from any machine. This is yet another reason why investing in AI is becoming the need of the hour.

Artificial Intelligence, as we already know, provides you with valuable insights about where customers get stuck and what doubts/queries make them connect with your support team. Using these insights, you can provide users with some options or FAQs that give them a feeling that they have found out the solution to their problem without any interaction, or better say, on their own.

8. Visual, Text, and Voice engagement

How to Use Visuals & Imagery to Improve Content Engagement — Setka Editor

AI-powered platforms are also providing the opportunity to deliver optimal customer experience to the targeted audience based upon their voice or facial expressions.

The technology, using Facial recognition and Virtual assistants, is making it easier to get an idea of the users’ emotions and sentiments at any particular time, and identify ways to deliver an instant positive effect to them through offers or refunds, etc. such that businesses gain long-term profits.

9. Predictive Personalized Experience

How Adobe Experience Platform Predictive Audiences Improves Personalized Experiences | by Jaemi Bremner | Adobe Tech Blog | Medium

Last but not least, AI is making it easier for startups and established brands to analyze the user interaction history and predict their next move and hence, use the information gained to provide them with a perfect marketing offer. And in this way, gaining higher customer engagement and profits.

While this is all about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) improves Customer experience in general, let’s figure out what the technology mean to different business verticals and their customer experience efforts in 2020 & beyond.

Different Industries Delivering Higher Customer Experience With AI

1. Retail

Disruption in Retail — AI, Machine Learning & Big Data | by Prannoiy Chandran | Towards Data Science

When talking about industries that AI is transforming, the very first business domain that comes into the limelight is Retail.

The technology, using a heap of transactional data and machine learning, is making it possible to track and analyze purchase history and behavior of customers, which in turn is helping with determining when and what promotional offer/message to be delivered for getting attention of customers and thus, gain higher ROI.

A clear evidence of the impact of AI in retail is that, as per a survey of 400 retail executives by Capgemini, it was highlighted that the technology will save around $340B annually for retailers by the year 2022.

The survey also revealed that the use of Artificial Intelligence in Retailing customer experience has resulted in a 9.4% increase in customer satisfaction and a 5.0% decrease in user churn rate. An example of how brands are focusing on the usage of AI for bettering customer experience can be seen in Nike’s acquisition of Celect for predicting users’ shopping behaviour.

2. Healthcare

10 Top Healthcare IT Certifications - Healthcare Management Degree Guide

AI is transforming healthcare in different ways – with customer experience being on the top.

The technology is proving to be the nervous system of the healthcare user experience ecosystem by making it easier to analyze the patient health history and come up with medical treatment (or surgery) that offers higher chances of success.

It is also helping healthcare organizations in providing the best assistance to every patient in the form of Virtual Nursing assistants and thus, taking care of everything – right form notifying about the medicine intake timings to sharing real-time health data with the corresponding doctors.

An impact of this is that the AI health market is predicted to cross $6.6B by the year 2021, with a CAGR of 40%.

3. Entertainment

At-home & indoor entertainment ideas - The Keyword

AI and its subset, Machine Learning are also leaving no stone unturned in delivering exemplary customer experience in the Entertainment domain. Clear evidence of which is Netflix.

The Entertainment platform is able to get a clear idea of the user behavior, needs, and expectations, and thus, showcase personalized options onto the screen. This is improving the customer retention rate as well as boosting customer loyalty – eventually resulting in higher profits.

To know further about the use of Artificial Intelligence in delivering impeccable customer experience on the Netflix platform, check out this video:-

4. Mobile Banking and Finance

Mobile Banking & Financial App Development Service Provider

Artificial Intelligence is also revamping user experience in mobile banking and finance apps. The technology, in the form of Chatbots, is providing 24×7 assistance to users and helping them in determining the right financial plan for themselves. It is also detecting and lowering down the risk of fraud in the processes – ultimately resulting in better customer engagement and retention rate.

As we have covered in this article so far, Artificial Intelligence is helping industries in revamping customer experience one way or the other. But, will this continue to happen in the future also? Will AI be a part of customer experience in upcoming years?

Let’s look into what is the future of AI in the field of Customer Experience to find definite answers to these questions.

Future of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience

Oracle Digital Assistant Version 18.4.3 Introduces Skill Chatbot Capability | The Oracle Mobile Platform Blog

The AI market has grown exponentially in the past few years. Over 1,500 companies including Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Amazon have invested their efforts into developing next gen apps for delivering higher customer experience and it is expected that many more will join the bandwagon. Many more companies will trust the AI’s ability to boost productivity and reduce the time and cost involved – something that can be predicted from the statistics shared below.

The technology will revolutionize the future of the business world and the customer experience in numerous ways, such as:-

  1. It will automate routine work and encourage humans to focus on creative things. It will help pay attention to their vision and not on every minor detail of production.
  2. It will make the business-customer interactions go from ‘one click’ to ‘zero click’ – giving a seamless and timeless experience to the target user base.
  3. AI will also leave a significant impact on connectivity networks. It will encourage the idea of pattern analysis to troubleshoot any problem, pull out important user information from multiple channels to quickly and effectively get an idea of what users need.
  4. Above all, Artificial Intelligence will also put the practice of gaining biased data to an end, eventually resulting in a better quality of information gained.

Now as we have covered what, when and how Artificial Intelligence drives customer experience, it’s the best time to head towards how businesses can integrate this technology to gain better insights and improve customer experience in 2020 and beyond.

Steps to Use AI for Delivering Better Customer Experience

1. Design a Customer Experience (CX) Strategy.

How to Build Customer Experience (CX) Strategy in 2021

Before looking into how AI improves customer experience, it is necessary to have a clear understanding of your CX vision and strategy. So, bring your team on board to discuss your ‘CX-based’ expectations and ways you follow to meet those expectations. And, based on the insights gained, create/update a robust Customer Experience strategy.

2. Plan and Analyze User Journeys

A Beginner's Guide To User Journey Mapping | by Nick Babich | UX Planet

Right from discovery to pre-sales, sales, customer support, and beyond, a user connects with your brand at different touchpoints and platforms. So, invest your time and effort into getting a comprehensive knowledge of all those connecting points, and deliver an AI-based omni-channel customer experience.

3. Have a Clear Understanding of AI solutions

We know ethics should inform AI. But which ethics? | World Economic Forum

The first step of AI project management lies in understanding that the technology can be used in different forms to improve customer experience strategy, such as Recommendation engines, Virtual assistants, Predictive search engines, Computer vision, Sentimental analyzing tools, etc. However, not all can be the right fit for your business needs and expectations.

So, the next step to employ AI in your Customer experience strategy is to determine what all forms of technology can be integrated into your business model.

4. Decide Whether to Create/Buy AI solutions

When Should You Not Invest in AI?

When talking about how to improve customer experience using AI, the next step to consider is to determine whether to integrate AI in your existing application or invest in a pre-made CX/AI solution.

Here, the former one will be the right option for your business, if you have a well-qualified AI expert team in-house or have a partnership with the right AI specialized mobile application development agency. Whereas going with the latter option can be a profitable deal when you have less time to develop an application and the vendor understands your customer issues and has the caliber to focus on critical points.

5. Track and Measure Success

Track these key metrics to measure success | by Deepshikha Yadav | Medium

Lastly, taking the backseat just after incorporating Artificial Intelligence in your CX strategy is not enough. It is imperative to keep a watch on key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to track the success ratio of combining Artificial Intelligence (AI) and customer experience. And hence, improve your strategy for a better future.

ALSO READ: Key Metrics to Evaluate Your Chatbot’s Performance

While this is all about how the use of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience can bring better outcomes and what steps to consider for implementing it in your strategy, let’s take this conversation further by exploring other possibilities.

Or better say, let’s look into what all other technologies can aid in the process to improve customer experience strategy in 2019-2020 and beyond.

Other Technologies That Are Innovating Customer Experience in 2019-2010 & Beyond

1. Internet of Things (IoT)

Internet Of Things (IoT) Security

In 2019-2020, the number of connected IoT devices will reach 26 billion. Besides, the 5G technology will become more significant in the market with high-speed, lower latency, and other such features.

This will open new doors for universal connectivity – making it possible for the companies to find better insights to understand customer behavior and lifestyle and thus, come with valuable data points and strategies to deliver memorable customer experience.

Or better say, it will help companies to work with facts and not just assumptions about customer needs and expectations, and eventually redefine their Customer experience strategy.

2. Machine Learning

What is the Definition of Machine Learning? | Expert.ai | Expert.ai

With a rise in IoT-based solutions, the volume of data points will also increase gradually. Clear evidence of which is that there will be around 45,000 Exabytes of data volume in the market the year 2020.

Now, with an increase in data volume, the process of gathering, optimizing, and operating data will become a challenge – something that Machine Learning will help with.

Machine learning, with its self-learning algorithms, will enable companies to perform better actions on the data and find new approaches to improve customer experience.

3. Blockchain

Why the Public Versus Private Blockchain Debate Is the Wrong Conversation - DevOps.com

Blockchain is also acting as a catalyst in the process of improving customer experience. The technology, with its key features like decentralization, transparency, and immutability, is making it possible for companies to store user behavioral and demographic data on blocks securely, make them portable and letting users decide with whom to share their immutable details with. The technology enables users to know what exactly is happening with their personal information and thus, experience a sense of security and trustability throughout the process.

4. Voice Technology

Voice Technology Is Not a Trend, But the New Shift of IT Paradigm | by Stfalcon.com | Chatbots Life

Not only Artificial Intelligence, but Voice technology will also be seen playing an indispensable role in improving customer experience.

The technology, in the form of Voice search and Digital assistants, will continue to help businesses in delivering a faster, seamless and flexible experience to their target audience. It will enable businesses to engage users in a profitable manner and facilitate them with better actions.

And this can be proven by a study by Pindrop, which states that around 28% of companies have already embraced voice technology in their CX strategy while 57% are planning to deploy in the next one year. Also, another 88% believe that voice technology will give a competitive advantage in enhancing user experience.

5. AR/VR

VR vs. AR Face-off | NextReality

Lastly, AR/VR is also one of the technologies that are reshaping the world of customer experience.

The technology takes users to the virtual world and enhance their customer journey effectively. It presents feedback form in different ways and increases the chances of getting a positive reply. And above all, it helps in product testing by exposing user/product to different situations and places.

With this, we have covered all about the process and use of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience. We have also unveiled what is the future of AI in the CX world as well as what all other technologies will disrupt the world of Customer Experience.

If you still have any doubts, feel free to check the FAQs shared below or directly get in touch with our AI mobility experts.

Frequently Asked Questions about AI in Customer Experience

1. What is the Role of AI in Customer Experience?

AI plays a crucial role in improving customer experience in the business domain in terms of automating repetitive tasks, streamlining processes, reducing the risk of fraud, and above all, delivering personalized options to every individual.

2. Why use AI to improve Customer Experience?

Artificial Intelligence, with its power to gather and analyze customer data in real-time, is helping in getting a better understanding of customer behavior and needs, and eventually creating a personalized customer experience strategy.

3. How AI and Machine Learning are improving Customer Experience?

AI and Machine learning are enhancing customer experience in multiple ways, including streamlining shopping experience, reducing the risk of fraud, and delivering personalized marketing schemes.

4. How to Start using AI to improve Customer Experience?

There are four steps to start using AI to improve customer experience:-

  • Design a Customer Experience (CX) Strategy
  • Plan and Analyze User Journeys
  • Have a Clear Understanding of AI solutions
  • Decide Whether to Create/Buy AI Solutions
  • Track and Measure Success

5. How AI will shift Customer Experience to the Next Level?

AI will bring a drastic shift in Customer experience in the future in the following ways:-

  • It will encourage users to focus more on their vision and creativity, rather than looking into minor details of production.
  • It will turn ‘One Click’ experience to ‘Zero Click’, providing target audience with a quick and seamless experience.
  • It will improve connectivity networks.
  • It will encourage the idea of gathering and employing unbiased society data and deliver quality to all.

Predictions for the Cloud service in 2019

Predictions for the cloud in 2020 - Information Age

2018 saw important technological advances in cloud computing that made businesses take a fresh look at how it could help them achieve their goals. In 2019, we are likely to see a further shift towards the collection and use of data, including that gathered from business processes and external data sets.

To enable businesses to make the most of this, we’ll see organisations move from standard infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solutions to cloud services with more advanced features, such as AI, machine learning, blockchain and analytics. Hand in hand with this, we are also going to see more organisations adopt hybrid and multi-cloud environments which provide them with a more effective infrastructure and a better set of tools to achieve their aims. As a result, here at Anteelo, we believe the cloud trends mentioned below will become increasingly widespread as more businesses continue to develop their use of cloud technology.

A shift to hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures

Why You Need To Shift To A Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure?

While many businesses have adopted cloud technology in some form or other, performance concerns and compliance requirement mean the majority of companies still run mission-critical applications and handle sensitive data in-house. In order to continue their move towards a cloud environment, companies will look at using a wider range of cloud options.

Public cloud will still be used as a cost-effective way to handle many processes, however, rather than rely on a single provider, many organisations will opt for a multi-cloud approach using a variety of hosting solutions for different purposes. At the same time, some workloads are more suited to private cloud networks and this means we’ll see an increase in the use of hybrid cloud infrastructures being developed.

While this mix of in-house, private cloud and public cloud architecture is obviously more complex, their integration will give enterprises the opportunity to build the most effective infrastructure it needs to drive the business forward.

A move towards open cloud technology

Reasons to Move to the Cloud. – ON – Belleville

The shift to hybrid, multi-cloud environments naturally leads to the adoption of open cloud technologies. Doing so helps companies avoid vendor lock-in and gives them greater freedom to choose the right solution providers. Indeed, using open cloud technology improves the interoperability of platforms, apps and data which is ideal for businesses looking to create diversely hosted infrastructures.

Increased adoption of containers

Turbocharge Your Cloud Transformation With Containers And Serverless Technology

Another consequence of companies moving towards a multi-cloud strategy is that they will want to deploy their apps across their multiple cloud platforms. This will lead to the increasing adoption of containers which will enable migration between various IT environments to take place easily and quickly. Key to this will be the use of the open source tool, Kubernetes, which enables the deployment and management of container-based applications.

An emphasis on security

Blog: Remote Work Places an Emphasis on Endpoint Security Solutions

Any move to a hybrid cloud setup means enterprises will need a more sophisticated approach to security. Using the services of multiple cloud providers means they will need to consistently manage all the threats to their applications and data across all vendors. An important aspect of this will be the need to get developers to integrate security features into their apps during development in order to ensure better app visibility, protection and control.

Skilling up

Why we will need up-skilling courses in 2019 to get successful careers - Education Today News

Adopting a hybrid, multi-cloud approach means IT teams will need to develop new skills and practices in the way they operate. While relying on managed services may still be appropriate in some situations, there will be an increased need for staff with skills in using cross-platform tools, automation and data integration.  The training up or recruitment of specialists, such as cloud architects, service brokers and automation engineers may be a necessity.

Rapid growth in edge computing

Growth of Edge Computing in Asia | Vertiv Insights

The huge rise in the numbers of connected devices and the emergence of 5G networks means that 2019 will see edge computing grow rapidly. Its use will enable companies to significantly benefit from the analysis of all the valuable data being harvested from sensors and other IoT devices in operation. Whether to gain customer insights, improve operation efficiency or for real-time condition monitoring, the use of interoperable technologies enables edge locations to remain synced with the company’s system to ensure it has a consistent overview of the wider network.

Conclusion

As you can see, the big development in 2019 is the move towards a hybrid, multi-cloud strategy where enterprises create bespoke IT solutions that combine public and private cloud service with in-house IT. Hand in hand with this will be a move to open source cloud technology, the increased adoption of containers, a stronger emphasis on security, the skilling up of IT teams and a rapid growth in the use of edge computing.

From iOS 1 to iOS 13: The Apple Evolution

Apple is compensating the 14-year-old who discovered major FaceTime security bug - The Verge

Apple has given the world – made of millions of iPhone and iPad users and an ever growing developer community – 13 innovative updates over the years. Updates which have constantly upped the bar of excellence on a YOY basis.

On an annual premise, Apple gives the world, especially the app entrepreneurs, reasons for why they should choose reliable iphone application development company to start their app entrepreneurship journey in. Reasons that are driven by the innovation that they keep on adding, packaged within their yearly updates.

These updates are not just something that the iOS app developers of  New York and entrepreneurs wait for but are also ones that Google waits to take inspiration from.

And now with the official iOS 13 release just around the corner, the waiting eyes have yet again turned towards Apple.

Talking of these innovative updates, let’s do a roundup of all the changes that iOS version history have seen over time, starting from the time when they were not even called ‘iOS versions’.

The Evolution of Apple iOS: The History of iOS from Version 1.0 to 13.0

iPhone OS 1

iPhone OS 1.0 - Where the Smartphone Began - YouTube

Released in 2007, Apple’s mobile operating system version was not even called iOS back then. It was iPhone OS – the FIRST iPhone OS. The exact stage where the comprehensive history of iOS started.

The breakthrough that the version brought is something that is very difficult to explain to the current modern-day iPhone users who have now become used to the shine of today’s iPhone and have little remembrance of where it all started.

It was the time when the features like Visual Voicemail, Multi-Touch Screen, and Integration of iTunes were considered a revolutionary advancement. A set of advancements that were brought around by Apple in iPhone OS 1.

Now although the iOS 1 was a major breakthrough in the iOS version history, it lacked elements that would in some year become an inherent part of the operating system – Photos, Calendar, Notes, Camera, Mail, support for third-party apps, etc. One that we would encounter as we continue to explore the evolution of Apple’s iOS.

iPhone OS 2

Is iPhone OS 2 Useful In 2017? - YouTube

Released in 2008, a year after the iPhone became a big hit in the world, Apple released iPhone OS 2.0 to sync in with the launch of its iPhone 3G, which marked the step in the evolution of Apple iOS.

The biggest feature introduced with iPhone OS 2 was the Apple App Store which came in with support for around 500 third-party and native apps.

Next in line of innovations that came with iPhone OS 2 was the iOS SDK. It was with the second version of the OS when Apple provided iOS app developers of New York and California with a kit to help develop iOS apps.

Lastly, along with a few updates to its current offering, iPhone OS 2 started the trend of introducing a range of features that were present on other platforms – one of which was giving full support to Microsoft Exchange for calendars, contact, and push emails. Apple also introduced contact search and multiple-selection for emails with iOS 2.

iPhone OS 3

Apple Updates iPhone OS To 3.1.3

The release of iPhone OS 3 was aligned with the launch of iPhone 3GS.

It came along with a slew of changes which would define Apple’s iOS through the years that were to come. The changes included a new copy-paste feature, spotlight search, support for MMS in Messages app and the capability to record videos through Camera application along with push notification functionality – which was launched in the market for the first time.

Another notable element of the version was its support to iPad, whose 1st generation was launched in 2010 – the same time around which iPhone OS 3.2 was released.

iPhone OS 3.2 set new UI paradigm for a larger screen – this was the time when skeuomorphism was introduced in the Apple world. New app designs were also introduced to incorporate the large real estate that was now present in Apple.

iOS 4

Apple love story에 있는 핀

The iOS that is up and active in today’s Apple ecosystem is what saw its foundations in 2010 with iOS 4. This was the stage where the complete evolution of Apple’s iOS started.

It was in iOS 4 when Apple shifted its focus on giving the power of multi-tasking to its users. Features like iBooks, FaceTime, Personal Hotspot, AirPrint, and AirPlay, which sees themselves to be a prominent part of Apple devices today were debuted back in 2010 with iOS 4.

Also, with iOS 4, Apple for the first time dropped support for a device, for iOS 4 was not compatible with the 1st generation iPod touch and original iPhone.

iOS 5

New Jailbreaker Tool for iOS 5 Platform; Does Not Support iPhone 4S or iPad 2 | ITProPortal

Apple replied to the rising trend of cloud computing and wirelessness with iOS 5 in 2011.

It was the first time when iCloud was launched in the Apple world along with the capability of activating iPhone wirelessly and also the feature of syncing with iTunes through Wi-Fi. Two other primal Apple features were introduced with iOS 5 in the face of Notification Center and iMessage.

The one breakthrough element of iOS 5 was replacing Voice Control with a virtual assistant known as Siri. The assistant, which has come to grow in the same popularity pool as that of iPhones was now giving answers to users’ questions ina natural language over both web and OS at a beta stage.

iOS 6

The iPhone 5 Is Incredible, But iOS 6 Is Holding It Back [Opinion] | Cult of Mac

Announced at the Apple’s Developer Conference in 2012, the new OS version came with a number of changes along with the revamp of one major app present on the platform – Maps.

It was in iOS 6 when Apple dropped the support for Google Maps – a feature that it was using since the beginning of 2007. A new revamped Maps was launched with iOS 6 which featured turn-by-turn navigations, Siri’s integration, and 3D Flyover mode.

Siri which was introduced at a Beta stage in iOS 5 now saw an upgrade in iOS 6. Through the version, users could now get answers to schedules, sports scores etc. Also, users could now directly use Yelp, Twitter, and Facebook (which was now integrated into Apple devices).

Next in the iOS 6 additions’ list was Passbook. While still a little immature in the mobile payment sector, the app was seen collecting payment types, coupons, tickets, boarding passes, and rewards cards and everything else with a barcode in one place.

There were a number of other enhancements that we saw with iOS 6, such as enhancements in the reading list, iCloud tabs,  FaceTime running over cellular and a much better Apple ID integration, etc.

iOS 7

Which Devices Will Run iOS 7? | PCMag

Released in 2013, iOS 7 was a result of the efforts that Jony Ive took upon taking the place of Scott Forstall who parted ways with Apple following the backlash that Apple Maps received in the last update.

It was the first time in Apple’s history when skeuomorphism was replaced by Flat Design which was termed to be an overly simplistic UI design founded on the idea of layering.

In addition to the new design, a series of new features were added while several enhancements were brought around in existing Apple feature set.

To start with, a new Control Center which allowed quick access to several apps like Wi-Fi, Do Not Disturb, Bluetooth, Sliders for brightness and volume, etc. with a swipe up from the bottom of the screen was launched.

In addition to Control Center, the AirDrop functionality was also launched by Apple for the first time in iOS 7. It allowed the users to share files and media with the people around them using iOS as well.

With the launch of iOS 7, the days of opening App Store to click on “update all” to update the applications were long gone. Users now got the option to choose Auto-Update without being reminded to update an application.

The last prominent introduction of iOS 7 version was the Touch ID, the feature that now let the users unlock devices using only their thumbprint.

In terms of enhancements, the multi-tasking ability of iOS 7 saw a massive improvement both in terms of implementation and interface. By double-clicking on the home button, the users now saw full-page previews of their active apps while it was equally easy to close them.

iOS 8

iOS 8 Supported Devices List | OSXDaily

While with iOS 7 brought around a massive amount of visual changes to the Apple platform, iOS 8 released in 2014, was a refinement of the designs with a special focus on expanding the feature set and improvement in the workflows.

The one impressive elements of iOS 8 were the interactivity that was now seen between iPhone/iPad and Mac computers.

Users were now able to seamlessly pass around information between desktops and mobile devices. AirDrop too allowed the users to transfer files wirelessly between the device types.

Users now even were able to send in messages and take calls from their Mac desktops as once limited to only mobile devices.

In iOS 8, Apple for the first time added the support for third-party widgets in the Notification Center that would offer real-time information to the users, specific to the stock information, weather updates, etc.

Besides these, iOS 8 was the first time Apple launched the idea of HomeKit and HealthKit in the market in addition to the Family Sharing functionalities.

HealthKit: Users could now save all their health data coming in from third-party fitness trackers in one place.

HomeKit: The feature made iPhones the remote that controlled the entire house, thanks to partnerships that Apple has now extended with several home automation products.

Family Sharing: The functionality allowed sharing of songs, TV shows, apps, etc between 6 different accounts linked with the same credit card.

Siri also faced several upgradations like activation through voice command and the possibility of making iTunes purchase through Siri interface, etc. All the enhancements brought Siri closer to what Apple had envisioned in its Virtual Assistant.

iOS 9

iOS 9: What You Need to Know About Ad Blocking on Mobile - Total Media

Released in 2015, iOS 9 was driven by the public demand on making the technical foundation of iOS stronger as compared to working on the design and feature side of it all.

And this is just what Apple did with iOS 9.

While a few features like Night Shift were added and apps like Notes app and Maps app were updated and Passbook became ‘Wallet’, the version focused mainly on solidifying the OS for the future to come.

A major round of improvements was made in the line of responsiveness, stability, speed, and performance. Several iOS 9 features like Low Power Mode were launched to ensure that the performance quality remains intact for the users even in case of low battery.

In addition to these, the official Public beta program was made open for the developers around the globe like iOS app developers of New York, California, and much more and users who wanted to experiment around new updates that came up in Apple.

iOS 10

iOS 10 will be available on September 13th - The Verge

The major features of iOS 10 which were released in 2016 were customization and interoperability.

Applications were now given the feasibility to interact with each other, allowing an app to use features of some other application, without even launching the second app. Siri also now became available for third-party app usage, while new apps were now being built in the iMessages. It was around this time when comparisons were drawn between iOS 10 and Android N.

Users now had new ways to customize their entire experience ranging from deleting built-in applications to adding new effects and animations in messages – known as emojis.

Maps also received a redesigned interface. The Home app now managed the HomeKit enabled accessories while Photos got introduced with an algorithmic search and media categorization known as ‘Memories’.

iOS 11

iOS11 Features: Say hello to iOS11! A new day for iPhone and iPad users around the world

Apple announced the release of iOS 11 in 2017 at the WWDC.

It was the first time when ‘Files’ was launched – the app which went on to become iPad users’ go-to app for searching, organizing, and browsing files on their devices from the Dropbox, iCloud Drive, and Box application.

A new dock feature also found itself being introduced in the users’ devices which now allowed users to open and switch applications instantly with one swipe.

There was a new Drag and Drop function which allowed users to move photos, files, and text from one application to another. The Notes app too got a new feature that allowed users to search for handwriting and gave them the capability to scan and mark documents.

A new prominent addition in the iOS 11 version was that of ARKit – a prominent part of the evolution of Apple iOS. It allowed the developers to introduce the power of AR to millions of iOS devices active across the world.

In terms of online payment, Apple Pay was integrated into Messages, making it easy for users to send money to their friends through messages. Apple also introduced an Apple Pay Cash Card to enable users to shop online and inside the application in addition to giving them the ease to transfer money to their personal bank accounts.

In addition to these, a series of enhancements were brought in such as App Store redesign, Siri getting a new voice, Maps and Control Center setting getting introduced with a newer set of features, etc. Additionally, iOS 11 has come with a series of new APIs like ML API, Vision API, and IdentityLookup. These new APIs are impacting businesses in a number of different ways.

The functionality set that iOS 11 brought along gave the mobility world new stances to draw a comparison between iOS 11 and Android O, one where iOS stood several points ahead of Android.

iOS 12

The best iOS 12 features that Apple didn't talk about onstage - The Verge

The iOS 12 feature set released in 2018 came up with the intent to make devices going as back as 2013 a lot more faster and responsive.

A lot was happening on the AR front in iOS 12. Users were working around AR compatible hardware for sharing experiences, object detection and image tracking functionalities were added to make apps more dynamic. Pixar was looped in to design a new file format for AR apps known as usdz – which would make it possible to experience AR through any iOS app.

In addition to these, the now-famous Memoji characters were introduced for the iPhone X users for the first time. In fact, Memoji went on to become the feature that kept the weightage on iOS 12 when comparisons were drawn between iOS 12 and Android P. Group FaceTime was opened up to 32 users at once through audio or video.

And keeping the focus on Digital Health intact, Apple introduced Screen Time – a feature that would show users the time they are spending on their devices interacting with applications.

iOS 13

The essential iOS 13 features you need to know about | WIRED UK

Announced at WWDC 2019, iOS 13 feature set is still on an elongation mode.

Both users and developers are getting news on probable features that would make their appearance on this Fall, every passing day.

But two of the biggest news attached with iOS 13 that are very concrete are – A. iPad will get its own OS – iPadOS and B. iTunes store is no longer operative.

Besides these two notable changes, there are another set of enhancements and new feature additions that iOS 13 is prepared to be launched with. Ones which places them right in front of Android Q in the iOS 13 vs Android Q debate.

Some of the new features that are set to be introduced in iOS 13 include –

  • Dark Mode
  • Quick device unlock through Face ID
  • Sign In with Apple in users’ account systems
  • New Portrait Lighting
  • Improved Siri voice
  • Look Around functionality in Map

While the real features of iOS 13 would only be revealed when we see its launch in the Fall of 2019, there is one surety – the level of innovation will remain intact. Just like the standard that Apple has maintained on an annual basis all throughout the iOS evolution 1-13.

How/When to Add Geolocation in Your App: Guide

How geolocation and big data can be used to the advantage of your business apps

There was once a time when people used to think a million times before giving out their address to an unknown person or business. Today, people are more than willing to give out their addresses to businesses and applications if it would translate into them getting better services or a more personalized product offer. Such is the shift that the benefits of having a geolocation facility in the mobile apps have brought into their mindset.

In fact, it is not only the modern-day millennials who are open to the idea of their address and exact whereabouts being on the internet. It is also generation X that once took wary of the idea, who are now using it to a massive extent.

See how vastly location-based services are being used? But even amidst all this mass acceptance, there are still a number of businesses that have not yet accepted the reality of geolocation changing the business outlook. Businesses that are yet to realize the potential of Mobile Marketing and Geolocation partnership.

This article is for them – the businesses who are yet to realize the importance of adding geolocation in their apps and enjoying the advantages of location-based service. A guide to talk about the benefits of mobile geolocation in business and give them ways to integrate it into their current mobile app.

To make it extremely to the point, we have divided the whole guide into 3Ws and 1H – What. Why. Who. How.

Without further delay, let’s get started. Let’s see the whats and hows of using geolocation for targeted mobile marketing efforts.

The Whats.

The Difference in Geotagging, Geofencing, and Geotargeting

Location Marketing: When to Choose Geofencing, Geo-Targeting,… | Braze

When we talk about Geolocation in a holistic manner, three similar-sounding concepts shoot up.

Geotagging. Geofencing. Geotargeting.

The similarity is uncanny, no?

Let us look at all the three Geos and help you understand what separates them from each other going by the book-level definition.

Geotagging

Effective mobile geotagging services include the process of adding a location tag on an image or other media type in the form of metadata. This way, it becomes easy for users to tag an establishment or location and then promote it on their social channels.

Geofencing

Geofencing means creating a virtual barrier around a location using your IP address and GPS. This way, you are able to see ads whenever your device is near the area where geofencing functionality has been activated.

Geotargeting

Geotargeting is closely related to Geofencing – so all easier to be confused with. The technology is about targeting specific people out of those who have entered the fence. After all, not everyone who enters the vicinity would be interested in becoming your customer.

The Whys. 

The Benefits of Mobile Geolocation in Business

Get a Chance to Increase Your Business Revenue

18 Proven Ways to Increase Your Sales Funnel Conversion Rate

Location-based apps work on the funda that you will be able to attract your users at the exact moment of their need – when they cross your store or when you give the drivers the exact precise direction of their address.

By giving them the facility to let in their impulse buying personality take over, you open the chances of you generating greater revenue – thus giving you the direct answer to how geolocation apps for business will boost your profitability. The same is the case when the users see that you are able to send the service at their doorstep precisely, you become the brand that can be trusted for repeat transactions. And you are truly able to take the advantage of the true benefits of mobile geolocation in business.

Collect Customer Data

How to Collect, Manage and Extract Value from Your Customer Data

Collection of customer data becomes a breeze when you have integrated location-based service in your mobile app.

And when we say collecting data, we don’t just mean their physical address update but also their lifestyle update, in terms of places they go, the time they visit those places, etc. which ultimately opens more promotion avenues for you. Ultimately proving itself to be one of the biggest benefits of mobile geolocation in business.

Help-Link Your Offline and Online Business

Moving Your Business Online: Get Your Offline Business Online in 8 Steps

For businesses that have both brick-and-mortar establishment and digital presence, there is nothing more beneficial than a location-based service integrated into their application. In fact, it is the number one reason for how mobile geolocation can improve your business.

With the technology’s addition, you are able to give your customers the benefit of tagging your business in their social tags, especially when they visit your brick-and-mortar business. And this is something that has a direct impact on increasing your store’s footfall while creating a link between the store and its website or app version.

The Whos. 

Apps Categories That Can be a Soft Spot for Geolocation 

Social Networking Apps

101 Social Networking Sites You Need To Know About In 2021 in 2021 - Make A Website Hub

By adding location functionality in the social media applications, you will be able to give your users the ease to create, share, and discuss while tagging a location in it. While it is not one of the core functionalities of Instagram like app development, it is one that most definitely takes user experience to the next level.

Recommendation Apps

Do you know what is the best way of promoting a business?

It’s testimonials.

And almost every business operating in the world today understands it. And with this understanding intact, they shift their focus to recommendation apps. Apps that allow users to compare businesses and their offerings.

And, when your recommendation app gives the users the ease to refine the search on the basis of geography, its viability automatically increases. And with it, you get the ways to use geolocation to increase revenue.

Dating Apps

Top 10 Dating Apps in 2020. Mobile dating app market is full of… | by Mobindustry | mobindustry | Medium

The demand for dating apps is on an obvious high. There is a whole world of single people looking to find companionship in the world.

And what can be better than them finding their companion near the place they live or work? Nothing. So, when you give them the functionality to look for people whom they can connect with nearby their locality, you give them the opportunity to use your application with greater liking.

Health and Fitness Apps

Top 20 Best Health and Fitness Apps to Have on Your Phone

Geo-location-based services have found a special place in the list of services offered by mHealth app development companies. It does not just help the users keep a track of the distance covered but also helps them find the nearest medical practitioners at the time of emergency.

AR/VR Games

Top 5 Augmented Reality Games of 2016 | Marxent Labs

Although this comes as a little obvious, the need for adding geolocation service in an AR/VR application can expand your business offering to a great extent.

You will easily be able to take the combination – AR/VR and Geolocation and apply it in a number of use cases like Direction-based apps, Gaming apps, Travel-based apps, etc. The possibilities are endless.

The Hows. 

The Basics of How Geolocation Collects Location Data a.k.a How Does Mobile Geolocation Works

How to add Geolocation Feature In Your Application

There are multiple ways through which geolocation data of the users are collected by the app and non-mobile businesses. Ways that answers how does mobile geolocation works:

GPS:

These are one of the most common ways of how to use geolocation tracking for marketing. These are the global satellite systems whose receivers are built-in smartphones by default. These GPS satellites are all scattered on the geostationary orbits around Earth because of which the device’s location can be identified with a fair accuracy point.

The device finds out the user’s coordinates in the globe on the basis of the different visible satellites.

Cell ID:

The smartphone location can also be identified by the signals of cellular base stations to which it is connected to. This process of obtaining geographical coordinates relies heavily on the radio signals given out by the mobile operators.

Wi-Fi:

While it is difficult to find open access points when found, it can be a great way to get an accurate location. All users would have to do is keep their Wi-Fi option open on their phone – something that is a little challenging considering people usually keep their wi-fi on.

A-GPS:

The technology operates by supplementing the GPS positioning with the Wi-Fi geolocations and cellular, which allows them to reach higher accuracy levels.

On-Premise Position Technologies:

Technologies like Eddystone and iBeacon allow the collection of geolocation data inside of buildings. Using the data, users are able to navigate large-sized buildings through the notification system.

How to Add Geolocation in Mobile Apps

Importance of Adding Geolocation To Your Mobile App in 2021

When it comes to the groundwork of location-based app development, both Android and iOS give developers the feasibility of APIs that makes it possible for them to detect user’ locations and in developing a geolocation-based mobile app.

The presence of these APIs makes it possible for them to not concentrate on the coding of drawing maps or determining the location coordinates of objects. All they have to do is connect one or at max two APIs – one for finding out the user device and the second for drawing maps.

In the case of Geolocation based Android apps, you will have to make use of either Google Maps API or Android. Location in addition to MapView class.

While in the case of adding a Geolocation facility in your iPhone application, you will have to make use of Google Maps Geolocation API, iOS Maps, or the Core Location API.

So here was the starter pack of geolocation functionality for your app business – what it stands for and why it is necessary, and some statistics hinting at its market status in the mix.

The next logical step? Getting in touch with our team of mobile app developers and getting the feasibility added in your mobile app – simply to take advantage of all the benefits of geolocation marketing that other brands enjoy.

7 Proven Methods for Boosting Website Traffic

How to Get More Traffic to Your Website - Webify Geeks

According to retail analyst, GlobalData, over 50% of UK consumers now shop online, with spending predicted to grow 30% by 2024. Indeed, by 2021, Statista forecasts 93% of internet users in the UK will be shopping online. While this is fantastic news for online businesses, it comes hand in hand with a growth in competition as more companies launch websites: 84% had them in 2018 compared to 70% in 2007. To be successful in such a competitive marketplace, companies will need to find ways of increasing website traffic and in this post, we’ll explain some of the main ways to achieve this.

1. Online advertising

5 Hot Online Advertising Trends in Europe

For companies with new websites or those which struggle to get listed in search engine results, online advertising is often the chief method of attracting customers to your website. The main way to advertise is with Google and Bing, using paid search ads that appear in search results or display ads that appear on other websites. Alternatively, you can also advertise on social media sites. All of these options allow you to target specific audiences and track the progress of your campaign, helping to ensure your advertising budget is spent effectively. It can, however, be an expensive strategy.

2. Content marketing

Content and Content Marketing Are Not the Same. Here's How to Frame the Top 11 Content Formats.

Internet users aren’t always looking for products or services; quite often what they are seeking is information or ideas to help them solve problems. Providing content on your website which solves those problems can massively boost the number of people who visit as it can be found in search results and shared on social media. If that content subtly mentions and links to a product or service that you supply, it increases the chances of a sale. Take, for example, someone with a small garden looking for ideas to spruce it up. They find a blog article from a garden centre called ’10 ideas for revamping a small garden’ in which they find a picture of a table and chair set they like, together with a link to the product page. From this article, the visitor solves their problem and the garden centre makes a sale. This technique is widely used by businesses in all sectors.

3. Social media marketing

15 Awesome Examples of Social Media Marketing

If businesses don’t want to pay for advertising on social media, they can always use these sites to promote their brand, their web content and their products or services. Social media is great for posting links to your website and with the ability to use eye-catching images and video, it can be a highly effective way to increase traffic, especially as other users can spread the word by liking and sharing your posts.

4. Improve SEO

Improve Your SEO Work by Unleashing Your Creativity

Search engines are the main way consumers find the things they are looking for online, so optimising your website for them is vital if you want to improve the chances of your web pages ranking well in search results.

While the crucial factor in SEO is providing high-quality, fresh and relevant content on your pages, you must not overlook all the other key ingredients. These include having a well-structured, easily navigable website and placing relevant keywords in the titles, subheadings, meta descriptions and content.

5. A mobile-friendly website

Why Having a Mobile-Friendly Website Matters | D Custom

A mobile-friendly or responsive website is a necessity in today’s online market. The main reason for this is the fact that users spend more time online on their phones than they do on laptops or other devices. Increasingly, users are also shopping more on mobiles too. According to Statista, at the end of 2018, smartphones generated the largest share of online retail revenue in the UK with many sources predicting the amount spent using mobile devices would double over the next few years to around £40 billion.

There are many reasons for this growth: there are more phone users, there is better internet access away from home, there are easier ways for people to pay using their phones and, importantly, more companies are providing mobile-friendly websites. For businesses, the last point is crucial, as without a mobile-friendly site, the growing market of smartphone shoppers won’t be able to fully access your store. That’s an issue which also makes search engines downrank sites which aren’t mobile-friendly.

6. Make use of email marketing

How To Make Use of Email Marketing To Successfully Communicate with Prospects and Clients - Tomo360

Email marketing has the highest ROI of any marketing technique and is very inexpensive to implement. There are various ways to grow an email list, such as using a pop-up that offers an incentive to sign up (e.g. 10% off your first order) or asking customers to sign up during the checkout process (e.g. ‘Get updates of our new products and latest offers’).

Once visitors have signed up, you can send marketing emails to them for free with links to your website included. Today, many companies combine email marketing with the use of personalised product recommendation software which tracks what a visitor has been looking at on the website and sends out emails with links to relevant products. This personalised form of email marketing can significantly increase traffic to your site.

7. Security and speed

What Happens When You Sacrifice Security for Speed (And Common Ways Security Gets Sacrificed) | Threat Stack

Two other factors which can affect traffic numbers are security and speed. If your website is marked as ‘not secure’ on browsers, many users will not visit even if it appears in search results. Additionally, according to Google, 53% of visitors will abandon the site if it takes over three seconds to load on their devices. Solving these problems requires the installation of an SSL certificate on your website to make it secure and ensuring that the site is optimised to make it faster. Speed can also be increased by ensuring that your site is hosted on high-performance servers and that your hosting package provides all the resources to cater for the traffic your site needs.

Conclusion

The first step to increasing online sales is getting more people to visit your website. This has become increasingly difficult to achieve as growing numbers of businesses go online and compete for customers. That said, the internet market continues to grow, with more people spending more money online. Hopefully, the ideas presented here will help your business generate more online traffic.

AI Carrying an Impact On Your Business, Across Domains-How?

Where is AI used today? - Brought to you by ITChronicles

Artificial Intelligence can Revolutionize Your Business. The AI impact on business can help you streamline your processes across all domains in a way that every outcome is real-time and efficient.

While the world is filled with instances of how Artificial Intelligence can transform even the most traditional of the areas like Education or Real Estate, the general impression that has gotten created is that AI is for the industries and businesses that work in multi-million revenue cycle and a team size of hundreds of employees divided into the fifties of the team.

But, what we aim to achieve here today is that AI is not just a rich man’s dream of expansion, it is something that businesses of all sizes can employ in their process and make themselves more efficient and over time add them into the league of the leaders – a reason why you should start your search for AI development companies.

In this article, we will look at what AI’ impact on business is, how AI can fit into every single domain of your business and make it better.

Let’s begin and help you understand what makes AI the need of the hour for making businesses become efficient and intelligent by looking into the role of AI in business domains.

But before we look into how AI helps businesses, let us look into a holistic level view of the benefits of artificial intelligence in business.

What Is Leading To The Growing Impact Of AI On Business?

How the Future of AI Will Impact Business - Salesforce Blog

  • Customer and market insights – Whether it’s coming from your system matrix, social media, or web matrix, there is no limitation of the data about your customer and market. The data act as raw materials needed to make AI systems efficient, which in turn helps make crucial decisions about your business and product marketing.
  • Process automation – Automation of tasks that takes up crucial manpower resources is one of the biggest AI benefits in business. Across industries, businesses have been using automation capabilities to not just lower the workload on their employees but also prevent the chances of data entry issues.
  • Better customer experience – The role of AI in business goes beyond automation and process efficiency. Technology plays a huge contributory role in bettering the customer experience. Some of the benefits of AI in business in the customer experience front can be seen in:
  • Personalization
  • Streamlining of the purchase process
  • Fraud detection
  • Effective self-service
  • Real-time text, visual, and voice engagement

Now that we have looked into the many ways how AI can benefit businesses and why should businesses hire AI developers on an asap mode, the next part is to dive into the answer of how AI is changing businesses across domains. We will be looking into the use of AI in business across HR, Finance, Operations, and Marketing processes.

Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Human Resources and Recruitment

Talent Acquisition

Do you understand the concept of talent acquisition?

The artificial intelligence impact on business most visible in the field of talent acquisition as compared to any other field. Artificial Intelligence is being used in a number of areas falling in the Talent Acquisition superset like – sourcing the candidates, screening their resumes, employing chatbots to engage with the candidates, and then using face recognition AI-powered software to recognize the emotion that the candidate is showing.

Employee Engagement

State of Employee Engagement in 2019: 4 Key Points

With the advent of NLP, chatbot technology, and sentiment analysis, it is now a lot easier for companies to analyze and get real-time feedback from their employees in terms of taking the right action. All the while answering how can AI be adopted in business.

Talking of employee engagement, one of the biggest concerns that employees tend to show on this front is in terms of them meeting their reporting managers once a year to discuss how the work is going and discuss their performance. A solution to this concern is given by Peakon, an AI-based software that enables all employees to reach their fullest potential.

HR Management

What is HR Management Software?

There are a number of AI products in the market today to help HRs in the management of administrative tasks. Personnel teams around the globe are now using Chatbots to answer employee queries and using Big Data to develop employee schedules, which in turn are helping businesses with prediction and meeting of demand via fair and effective staff rotas.

Career Management

Career Management: Meaning, Process and Objectives | Marketing91

When talking of the usage of AI for learning and development, there are a number of applications that come up – career pathing, personalized training recommendation, coaching delivered by the chatbots, and manager development led by real-time feedback from the team.

An example of AI for bettering learning and development can be seen through Gweek. The platform helps improve the presentation and communication skills of the users. There is another site called Sidekick that enables confidential coaching for the employees through the medium of messaging platforms.

Performance Management

10 Step Checklist for Choosing Performance Management System in 2019

Because the AI-driven assessments happen instantaneously, in real-time (with algorithms monitoring the quotas, targets, and how they are varying on a day to day basis for every employee), it becomes a lot easier to note all the good and the poor performances instances, ultimately helping in the correct measure of performance and giving an answer to how will AI benefit business internally.

The real-time access and monitoring also help in flagging the shortcomings on a per-day basis, enabling businesses to take action before a problem worsens.

Impact of AI on Marketing and Sales

Research and Development 

How to get the most out of your R&D budget | plasticstoday.com

Artificial Intelligence comes loaded with the ability to develop a deep understanding of a range of different industries and customer bases. By gathering and analyzing the humungous amount of data that floats about a business and market helps businesses research issues and build solutions that weren’t thought of before.

In addition to automating tasks, AI can open avenues for new discoveries, methods of product improvement, and finding ways to accomplish a task better.

Customer Support

The Importance of 24×7 Customer Service for Your Business

The most common answer to how is artificial intelligence used in a business environment lies in Chatbots. Deep Learning powered AI-powered Chatbots allows businesses to access the layers of data from the neural networks such as customer data and information, which have been built up over time.

When filled with real-time access to the preferences that customers come with and their purchase history, gives chatbots an edge over the human counterpart.

Content Creation

What is Content Creation? 3 Steps to Creating Web Content

There is a chatbot for every content marketer who is bored of developing the monthly content across spreadsheets. There is a software, Wordsmith, which is known to transform a series of structured data in the written doc, with great success.

While at present the use case of AI in content creation is limited to articles having a rigorous format, there are a few agencies that have used platforms like Wordsmith for the development of content for fantasy football drafts.

Heightened User Experience

James Kirkup | Web design, Design reference, Ux design

The answer to why is artificial intelligence good for business lies in this one statement – Your customers and consumers are a lot more demanding than they were ever before. They need a huge amount of products, information, and services – all at a real-time and lightning speed mode – all in one place. And when using AI, you offer all the services in one place in an instantaneous mode, which ultimately helps in elevating your users’ experiences.

Another thing that AI makes possible is Personalization. By incorporating artificial intelligence in mobile app development, businesses get a chance to study the customers’ preferences. AI technology makes it possible for marketers is to send personalized content in time and space that suits the customers. And there is nothing more user experience elevating in the world of marketing than personalization.

Emotion Recognition

Introduction to Emotion Recognition 2021 | RecFaces

The capability to identify human emotions is known to be the biggest challenge for an AI – a question that is solved by the answer of how is AI helping businesses. When an AI-powered Chatbot when backed by the NLP facility can gauge when someone is getting frustrated and can adjust its offering and tone automatically – by either giving them a discount or forwarding the call to a human consultant.

Sales Forecasting

How to Build a Sales Forecast Model

Prediction is a forte of Artificial Intelligence. By analyzing the past sales performance and trends, it can help predict what would the sales figure be this time around or what deals would work and which won’t. Ultimately, an inclusion of predictive AI in app development made around the sales domain will help the sales professionals plan their tactics between upselling and downwelling based on qualified data coming in from their past trends.

Optimization of Lead Generation

Optimizing Your WordPress Site for Lead Generation - WPExplorer

Rather than someone from your sales team going through the potential clients’ on Google, or social media, you can incorporate Artificial Intelligence to review them for you.

In addition to reviewing the prospects, you can use AI for two more crucial sales tasks: A. To identify the right job title and brands to target and B. To analyze sentiments made on competitor’s sentiments made on email or social media. It means that AI-powered intelligent mobile apps can help identify the unhappy set of clients while giving you insights into whether the client is unhappy with the service they are getting from the competitor or are seeking something new from the market.

When you get a database of prospects who are unhappy with the service they are being offered by someone else, the probability of your closing the deal by offering them what they need, increases by manifold.

Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Finance

Accounts Payable

How SMEs Can Optimize their Accounts Payable to Drive Down Back-Office Costs - FEI

There are a number of AI-based invoice management system that makes invoice processing a lot more streamlined because of the digital workflows which are implemented. To achieve this, the machine learning algorithms are designed in a way to learn accounting codes that are appropriate for invoice creation and management.

Supplier Onboarding

Digitalization of Vendor Onboarding and Compliance | IQX Business Solutions

Through the combined power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, AI development companies can help businesses shortlist suppliers on the basis of their tax information and credit scores and set them in systems without any human intervention.

Procurement

Procurement Process | Manage your Procurement Process Flow | Cflow

The purchase and procurement process of organizations is generally filled with a lot of paperwork and make use of different files and systems which more often than not are not compatible with each other. By taking the help of the combination of APIs and AI to integrate and process the unstructured data through AI powered mobile apps, the procurement process will become a lot more paperless and would call for less human intervention.

Audits

Microsoft software audits spark the fear

The digitalization of the audit process helps in increasing security by allowing a digital trail of when the file was accessed and by whom.

Using Artificial Intelligence, auditors will get real-time access to the digital files, thus removing the need to search the file cabinet for documentation – something which not just lowers the time gap in getting access to the information but also makes the whole process a lot more efficient. To make your audit process intelligent, you should get in touch with an AI app development company that specializes in the whole powered Audit processes.

Expense Management

Expense Software Functionalities | What to look for in a Software

Review and approval of expenses in a way that it is ensured that they are compliant with the organization’s policies is a time-consuming task for any accounting team. While though AI, people can employ machines to read the receipts, audit the expense, and then alert the finance team in case there’s any discrepancy.

Impact of AI in Operations Management

Log Analysis

Log Analysis Best Practices and Tools | Loggly

Analysis of log is the biggest use case of AI-powered Operations. Every layer of the stack – operating system, server, hardware, and applications – leaves traces of data stream which can be gathered, stored, processed, and then analyzed by the Machine Learning algorithms. The data then is used for performing root cause analysis of events.

By incorporating the power of AI in Log Analysis systems, businesses can find lacks in the system even before a failure happens, marking a use case of AI benefits for business.

Capacity Planning

What is Capacity Planning & Why it is Important in 2021? (Updated)

IT Architects spend a lot of time planning the resource needs of the applications. It can be very challenging for them to define server complications for the development of a multi-tier, complex application. Every physical layer of application should be matched with CPU cores, the amount of storage capacity, ROM, and the network bandwidth.

Artificial Intelligence comes in handy here by helping architects define the right specification of the hardware or for selecting the right instance type in the public cloud. These algorithms tend to study the present deployment and performances for recommending an optimal configuration for every workload.

Infrastructure Scaling

Auto Scaling can be configured to be reactive and proactive. Under the reactive mode, the monitoring infrastructure will be able to track the key metrics like memory usage and CPU utilization for initiating scale-out operations. And when load returns to normalcy, the scale-in operation takes place bringing the infrastructure back to its original form.

In the proactive mode, admins schedule scale-out the operation before an event.

One of the AI benefits for business lies in the fact that through Artificial Intelligence, IT administrators can configure the predictive scaling which learns from previous usage pattern and load conditions. This way, the system becomes intelligent to decide when it should scale with no mentioned rules. This new mechanism complements capacity planning through adjustment of runtime infrastructure needs.

Cost Management

SteadWay - Cost Management Services

Assessment of infrastructure cost plays an important role in the IT architecture. And when you work with a public cloud mechanism, the forecast and cost analysis becomes a lot more difficult and cloud providers tend to charge for a number of components like – VMs usage, storage capacity, external and internal bandwidth, API calls made through apps, and IOPS.

Through the analysis of workload and the usage patterns, Artificial Intelligence can estimate the cost of infrastructure by offering cost breakup around a number of applications, components, subscription amounts, and departments – something which would help the operation unit in securing the IT budgets accurately.

Performance Tuning

Optimize Website With Sitecore Performance Tuning | Altudo

Once the application gets deployed in the production, a good amount of time is then spent in tuning the performance, specifically in the case of the database engines which deal with a good amount of transactions as they experience the most reduction in performance over time.

By analyzing logs and time utilized in attending to tasks like processing of a query or responding to request, Artificial Intelligence algorithms developed by a sound AI software development company can offer an exact fix to the issues. It comes very handy in augmenting log management through taking respective action in place of escalating issues to the operations team, which have a direct impact on the cost of support and on running the enterprise IT help desks.

Building Maintenance

The last point in our list of the benefits of AI in business operations is the help it offers with building maintenance. The technology can help facilities managers better the energy use while keeping their occupants’ comfort into consideration.

One example of this can be seen in the building automation services that an AI development company offers. In this, AI is merged with IoT to help manage the buildings’ equipment, light, cooling/heating system, etc. in addition to using computer vision for monitoring the building.

So here were the four domains which are considered to be the pillars of any business. The domains that the AI development services providers believe can have a massive impact on and can make more efficient. If you too wish to reap the benefits of AI by making your processes efficient, streamlined, and high revenue-generating, contact our team of AI Developers today.

Cloud-automated IT eliminates shorcomings of Traditional IT model

Cloud Computing Risks, Challenges & Problems Businesses Are Facing

For small and medium-sized companies, the traditional IT model of an on-premises network built and operated with an in-house IT staff is often fraught with problems.  IT teams are stretched to capacity simply keeping the lights on and there are always going to be issues with systems performance, network reliability, end user productivity, data recovery, security and the help desk.  Staffing is another constant challenge. And if companies decide to outsource some IT functions, they end up with multiple service providers, which creates additional headaches.

The problem is highlighted in the 2018 State of the CIO survey conducted by CIO Magazine, in which CIOs said their role is becoming more digital and innovation focused, but they don’t have time to address those pressing needs because they are bogged down with functional duties.

The common business challenges reported in the survey are often symptoms of needs that are misaligned with technologies and service providers, plus the lack of budget to address the problems.  Those challenges typically revolve around:

  • security and disaster recovery
  • lost productivity due to downtime and end users waiting for support
  • shadow IT and users not following security training
  • escalating or unpredictable costs
  • outdated infrastructure
  • shortage of talent
  • multiple tech providers and systems working at cross-purposes

Smaller businesses that may have turned to traditional managed service providers quickly discover these services lack seamlessness and result in reactive support challenges. According to the Ponemon Institute’s State of Endpoint Security Risk Report, 80% of these reactive issues can be eliminated through standardization and automation.

Moving to a cloud-based IT infrastructure

Why Your Business Should Be Adopting Cloud-Based IT Services - Consolidated Technologies, Inc.

Cloud-automated IT services can address these challenges and free up IT teams so they can align their strategies with the business.  Cloud-automated IT does all this by providing seamless, proactive support, enterprise-level security and compliance, redundant systems, highly available virtual desktops, continuous upgrades, predictable costs and improved end user productivity. The cloud-based IT infrastructure is managed by a team of experienced, knowledgeable, highly trained professionals who apply industry best practices.

Aligning the technologies in the IT infrastructure and having experts managing them delivers several key benefits:

  • Cost predictability: Not only are ongoing costs for an IT infrastructure that supports the business predictable and easy to budget for, surprise costs for disasters like outages, ransomware and security breaches are essentially eliminated.

Cyberlink - Reduce Variable Costs with Predictable Pricing Icon [9.27.17]-01 - CyberlinkASP

  • Reduced Friction and Risk: By standardizing on best-in-class, constantly updated technologies, friction is reduced between equipment, vendors, integration points, and service providers. This results in stronger security, performance, and ease of use.

Reduce Operational Risk with Effective Workflow Management

  • User Satisfaction and Productivity: If you’ve ever muddled through a few days of work on a loaner laptop you understand how important the user experience is to employee satisfaction and productivity. VDI and proactive management deliver a better computing experience and increased productivity. Instances can be refreshed just like you would with a cell phone.

60+ Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions You Can Borrow

With cloud-automated IT, the entire IT infrastructure moves to the cloud in a well-planned, efficient manner. The service provider helps create a personalized upgrade plan based on the specific needs of the organization, does a health check on existing applications, makes sure everything is configured properly and updates applications to the latest releases.

And cloud-automated IT goes far beyond simply lifting and shifting existing systems to the cloud. It is a holistic approach that aligns cutting-edge technologies and fully managed services to provide smaller companies enterprise-grade IT that can make a significant impact on the security and effectiveness of the business.

In 2019, new cyber security threats are predicted to emerge.

11 Emerging Cybersecurity Trends in 2021 - Panda Security

Cyber security remains a major issue for all organisations and 2019 will continue to prove challenging. Expect to see more large-scale data breaches, new forms of malware and the continuing plague of ransomware attacks. In addition, we need to prepare for threats to Internet of Things devices and attacks on infrastructure, such as banking and payment systems and public transport. Perhaps more worrying than these are the unknown, emerging threats that are on the horizon. Here we’ll look at four you should be wary of.

AI versus AI attacks

Artificial Intelligence vs. Machine Learning in Cybersecurity | Varonis

Artificial intelligence is being increasingly used by all manner of businesses and in a wide range of ways. Crucially, it is a key tool for cyber security firms which use AI models to find better ways to defend our systems.

Unfortunately, AI is also available to cybercriminals who now use it to counteract the work done by security companies. This is carried out using a generative adversarial network (GAN) which creates a situation where two neural networks compete against each other to discover the AI algorithms each is using. If the cybercriminals discover the algorithms being used by cyber security companies, it gives them a much better understanding of how to evade being detected.

Indeed, these increasingly sophisticated hackers can use AI and machine learning to infiltrate the data sets used by security companies, for example, injecting malicious code and modifying labels, so that threats can be re-identified as safe.

Fake media exploitation

Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It - Scientific American

Most people are now aware of the problem of phishing emails where criminals send fake messages to employees in the hope of conning them into giving away important data, access details or, in some cases, getting them to transfer money to the criminals’ accounts.

While many of us have learnt to spot the tell-tale signs of most fake emails, advances in artificial intelligence have now produced an entirely new and potentially much more difficult to spot threat – fake video and audio messages. Simply by analysing online images, video and voice recordings, AI-enhanced software is now able to create highly realistic video and audio that can fool even the most cautious of viewers. In the video below, you’ll see how this is done.

As you can see from the video, even the creator of this technology has concerns about how it can be used for malign reasons. Cybercriminals with access to it can deliberately spread misinformation that can have a devastating impact, for example, making statements purporting to be from a leading CEO that affects stock market volatility. Criminals can also use the technology to send fake video and audio messages to employees and customers that con them far more easily than a phishing email.

For now, this technology is difficult to use and expensive to own. However, it won’t take long before it’s available for use on the average laptop or even as a phone app. Luckily, as the video shows, there are efforts in place to develop technology that can detect these fake videos. For the time being, it is important to remain vigilant.

A quantum leap in encryption cracking

Quantum Leap: This tech will boost communication security | Hyderabad News - Times of India

Understanding the bizarre world of quantum physics is a challenge even for the most gifted of scientists. However, we are now at a stage where quantum computers are being developed that have the processing power far beyond that which we have ever been able to produce before.

With such potent technology, experts believe that cybercriminals with access to quantum computers would be able to crack the encryption we currently use to protect data. While it is possible to create even more secure encryption to combat this in the future, the problem lies with technology that is already in use. Products like TVs, vehicles and phones, together with many IoT devices, which are going to be around for quite a few years and which have today’s levels of encryption built in, may become far easier to hack in the future.

Smart contract hacks

Smart contract hacks cost millions — this company wants to fix it

Blockchain technology is increasingly used in business because it offers both transparency and the security brought by encryption. One way in which it is used is for smart contracts, where apps housed on blockchain automate processes when the right conditions are met, for example, carrying out financial transactions or delivering intellectual property.

While blockchain has a potentially very useful role to play, this relatively new technology still has issues. One of the concerns is that the inbuilt transparency of blockchain makes it difficult to keep smart contract data private. This vulnerability has already been exploited by cybercriminals who have used it to get their hands on large amounts of cryptocurrencies.

Conclusion

As you can see, in 2019, the new cyber security threats are far more sophisticated than ever before, using technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and quantum computers to launch their attacks. They are also finding new things to attack, such as the media, blockchain and even other AI models. With this in mind, 2019 is certainly a year to keep security threats as a priority in your organisation.

Expectations vs Reality of Enterprise Application Development

The 7 Stages of Enterprise Application Software Development

Every time there is a mention of new technology, the first impression that is made on the non-technical population is that it is identically Magic. Enterprise applications are the same. People expect them to glide over in functions and perform flawlessly – like magic. But do they tend to this expectation as well as they can?

In the next 7 minutes, we will find out the answer to this question. But before we move over the deets of our magical expectations from enterprise apps and the reality of their working, we need to dig into the answers to What are Enterprise Apps and what is Enterprise App development?

What Are Enterprise Apps?

Enterprise Apps: The Present and Future of Business Technology - Bizness Apps

As per the definition from Techopedia, An enterprise application or EA is a specially designed (and large) software system platform that operates in a corporate environment like a local, state, or federal government body, a medium to large business, Schooling systems, or districts, non-profit groups, etc.

Though there is no defined set of properties that Enterprise apps or software should have, there are some characteristics that are found common across different enterprise applications, such as:

  • Central management
  • Scalability
  • Robustness
  • Business-orientation
  • Critical for the vision and mission of the enterprise
  • The built-in ability or communicate over interfaces of other enterprise software.

These characteristics are what make an Enterprise app better than normal applications. And As it can be made out that Enterprise app Development is becoming More evolved in order to become more collaborative and Agile.

Also, it has been made possible due to the prompt adoption of cloud-based technologies. IT sector around the globe is working in a collaborative way to build mobile applications with, both, internal business teams and external agencies that a company depends upon. With the availability of services and solutions through online mode, enterprise software development services in California or anywhere else focus on an approach to business transformation that puts people first.

And when we say “Enterprise App Development”, we are enclosing all the unique requirements there are in order to build an Enterprise app, such as:

  • Having multiple users with identical requirements that have to use the same app
  • A need for the said application to deliver value consistently and at scale.
  • Mammoth reserves of data to manage and integrate (sometimes at multiple levels).
  • Following all the above-mentioned conditions along with industry-specific guidelines and strict regulations, for instance, the Financial sector or healthcare.
  • Catering to Forever evolving and changing roles and responsibilities.

For all of these reasons combined, there is always a gap being created between what the customers expect and what is being delivered to them. And thus, Enterprise app development is a gargantuan task and people often fail to either understand the customer needs or to deliver them well. For a better understanding, let us take a trip of the user expectations from Enterprise apps.

How Enterprise App development should work?

An Enterprise App Development task is almost always taken upon by a well-managed enterprise mobile App Development company. And a team is designated for this purpose, wherein, everyone in the team has specific tasks to attend to. And thus, depending upon the role assigned to different people, they end up having a different vision about what the Enterprise mobile app development process should look like.

This is where the first loophole is created when the vision of the team is not aligned. Nevertheless, whether your role in the team is of a developer, tester, or deployer, there are some key values where we can linearly define our visions. So, in the end, we all want the process of Mobile Enterprise app development to be:

User-Focused:

5 User-Focused Reasons UX is Important for Your Ecommerce Site - Trackmind

This goes without saying that  Enterprise App Development must be User-Centric. Every user expects the mobile apps (Enterprise Applications, here) to provide them with a high, consumer-grade user experience. And besides, the primary intention of all mobile app developers and designers to build applications that actually get used by as many people as possible and thus help both, their external and internal clients. Only then will they be able to meet their ultimate goals.

Highly secure:

See what makes our portals highly secure! - C1 India

Before the commencement of the Enterprise App development process, the primary question from the client’s side will be raised about the safety and security of the app or in other words, the security of their own data fed into the app. In the present world, the media reports are filled with the news of security breaches, even in the highest level of company software. In such scenarios, it is crucial for enterprise app developers to pay attention to safeguarding the valuable user data that is stored in the app.

Integration and connection:

Communication connection integration interaction it network icon - Business Process 1

The unique thing about Enterprises is that they use a number of software and applications that can be built independently as the need arises. But, it is one of the main requirements of enterprise app development that every new software or application must be able to seamlessly connect with all the existing data sources. This ensures better user experience and eliminates the extra work for software integrations.

Speed:

Netflix's speed test tool is now on iOS and Android - The Verge

With the release plan of 5G technology in the world, it is only obvious that today, digital technology users give utmost priority to the high speed of networks and applications. Gone are the days when people were patient enough to watch their web pages load in the dial-up internet service. And besides, with the ever-rising backlog of data, the developers are more concerned with working on critical projects, rather than writing and rewriting front-end and back-end codes. After all, the business leaders require the updated technologies to be delivered to them as quickly as their business plans need change.

These four characteristics make up the foundation of an ideal enterprise app development process. But as we all can guess, the reality may not always align with our expectations of the ideal scenario. So, let us take a look at how the Enterprise app development actually works.

How Enterprise App development actually works?

There might be a few myths around Enterprise app development that are circling around the world, In all reality, there’s a diametrical difference between the ideal and the real scenario of Enterprise app development. Let us take a look at what the actual process goes like:

Project-Focused:

A project-focused approach to operations will help managers deliver the best results – European CEO

Even though all the developers and other people involved in Enterprise application development projects are well aware of the need that every app should be made keeping the end-user requirements in mind, too often, the teams working upon mobile app development for Enterprises with all the other enterprise mobility solutions, the reality-check says otherwise. In actuality, the apps are siloed and the enterprise ends up on multiple disengaged and stand-alone databases stored in different digital systems which are either impossible to integrate or are an extra burden for the enterprise’s IT team.

Slow:

5 Reasons Why Your WordPress Website Is Too Damn Slow

Yes, even in today’s forever-rushing, technologically advanced world, custom enterprise application development is a tough task. Hence the project of enterprise app development ends up taking longer than contracted. Somehow, there are never enough man-hours available for timely delivery.

But of course, the blame can not be put on the app development team alone. Enterprise app development is a big task and there are significant challenges attached to it.

Key challenges in Enterprise application development:

Data Encryption:

Data Encryption Methods to Secure Your Cloud - Agile IT

One of the biggest challenges faced in enterprise application development is the proper and secure encryption of sensitive data stored on smartphones. And as mLearning is getting more and more popular at workplaces, the concept of BYOD (Bring your own device) is making it more difficult for app developers to keep the data encrypted. Nevertheless, encryption and secure containment of data are crucial for enterprise app development because they can save the data from leakage in case of device theft.

Access to data:

Using Active Directory for Data Access Governance | Itergy

Mobile applications for enterprises have a number of challenges that are faced by developers at different degrees. One of the most crucial and common problems is offline access to data. This has become one of the biggest challenges that are faced by mobile app development companies, especially in big enterprises that see a need for urgent access to data even when there is no connection to any online portal.

Device Fragmentation – BYOD

What is BYOD Bring Your Own Device? | How BYOD Helps to Enterprise?

BYOD is sure the talk of the town but it has shown an equal amount of challenge to the developers. With the rise in “bring your own device” policies across multiple enterprises, mobile app developers are facing the challenge of accommodating a plethora of mobile devices in their enterprise applications. Previously, developers had to focus on only a few kinds of operating systems and mobile devices which is not the case with BYOD. This scenario has given rise to the challenge of device fragmentation because of the adoption of “one size fits all” technique for the development of Enterprise mobility solutions.

There are numerous ways to increase the chances of your enterprise app failure, But the good thing is that every challenge has a solution. It might not be the best solution but it can substantially decrease the problem that was being faced initially so as to make matters simpler. For instance, we, at Anteelo, ensure that these issues don’t show up in your enterprise app dev.

Overcoming the Challenges in Enterprise App development

Design trends in mobile applications anticipated in 2020

  • There is a major requirement of a strong defense system in place for all the digital devices that comprises data encryption, firewalls for individual applications, and at the host and network levels.
  • Since the data stored in an enterprise mobile app is highly crucial to the enterprise. Therefore, the use of competent security software in place to make the data security is required. Along with other data, the privacy of sensitive user data and information is to be protected.
  • Web applications and mobile applications which are cloud-based are highly prone to cyber-attacks. Therefore, in order to safeguard the data of this software, the security software must be competent and updated which the latest security patches.
  • Application vulnerability tests must be held on a periodic basis.
  • The environment that includes multiple systems must ensure careful designing keeping in mind the diversity of devices.
  • To avoid the problem of device fragmentation, developers must recognize the most common digital system or device in order to make the enterprise mobile app compatible with a maximum of devices.
  • A smart link can be established between applications that are using a similar set of data in order to achieve optimization.

Of course, there is a gap being created in the enterprise app development process. The reality of the scenario is much different from the one we expect in reality. However, every loophole can be fixed with careful operations and systems in place. Hence, it is safe to say that even though there is a gap in the app development process, there is enough room for improvement as well.

We, at Anteelo, as an Enterprise mobile app development company are working towards a standardized procedure to minimise all the possible gap in these processes. But, the roadmap to being a successful app startup company consists of more than just following the SOP.

And we all are aware that the enterprise software development services in California and around the world have created some very intricate and reliable mobile applications for big enterprises which can only be cited as a development in the course if nothing else.

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