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SMAC IT TO THE TOP!
RAJESH RAJAN Associate Director – Technology Consulting, PwC India
The unique but complementary technologies of Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud can drive business transformation for a host of enterprises he last two years have seen businesses being exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder and uncertainty due to changes in global economic and market structures. These circumstances have forced CIOs to explore ‘disruptive technologies’ such as social media, mobility, big data analytics and cloud computing (also called social, mobile, analytics and cloud services [SMAC]) to effectively respond to customer demands. Though each of these technologies is unique, they complement each other and act as catalysts in driving business transformation. As businesses cope with these
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disruptions and try to settle down, they strive to emerge as ‘antifragile’. The term ‘antifragile’ has been coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. According to PwC’s Technology Forecast, solving the engineering productivity challenge, an antifragile system is one that responds positively to a shock. A fragile system is affected and suffers from volatility, but an antifragile system tends to emerge stronger from disruptions. The concept of antifragile is also different from stable or robust. While a robust system resists shock, it manages
to remain the same . But an antifragile system evolves positively and becomes less prone to future shocks or disruptions. We at PwC believe that for an enterprise to become antifragile, it has to evolve by continuously adopting technology. Along with SMAC, we see DevOps and the Internet of Things (IoT) as the other emerging technology trends that will drive business agility and innovation in the near future. Today, businesses need to be agile. As soon as an opportunity is identified, it must quickly tap into it with newer products and services to stay ahead of the competition. Traditional models of software delivery with lengthy and separate cycles for requirements, development, testing, and deployment fail to keep up with the pace of today’s fast-changing business scenario. DevOps, an approach to continuous delivery, can be an enabler for enterprises to achieve an antifragile state. Historically, the development and operations teams have been operating in silos. Dev+Ops=DevOps is a design to reduce this alienation and encourage closer collaboration between these two teams through extensive automation and redesign of traditional software development processes and workflows. In this model, developers frequently release or deploy small bits of code to the production environment in a manner that does not disrupt the environment. Each step in the entire software delivery process includes extensive monitoring, testing and a feedback loop. As a result, if there is any problem with the code that the developers have deployed, the system can be rolled back to the previous state with minimal disruption to business. On the other hand, if the code works fine, it results in a significant improvement in the user experience. Such a ‘deploy-andfail-fast’ mindset that constantly reacts to market changes can lay the base for antifragility. The IoT is another key trend that will shape the future and go a long way in making businesses antifragile. Historically, businesses have concentrated on the transactional aspect of their customers with the objective of JUNUARY 1-15, 2014