With the arrival of Black Friday and the expressive growth in the volume of purchases in this segment, preparing the companies' technological structure may be the key to a successful operation in this period
*by Cleyton Loyal
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the retail sector has been affected, either because of uncertainties in the volume of consumption, or because of changes quickly imposed by the “new normal”. According to a survey carried out by the Catholic University of Pelotas (UCPel), with businessmen in the sector, 32% revealed that they had difficulties in reacting to the changes generated by the pandemic in their companies.
Therefore, being technologically prepared to face adverse and unexpected situations becomes even more important and strategic. In this scenario, application modernization emerges as a solution to help companies update their systems, offer more efficient service to consumers and leverage their business. But how the modernization of applications Can you support the retail sector, especially in seasonal dates and unique circumstances?
Benefits of Application Modernization
Modern applications are resilient enough so that they can be scalable and used as needed, in addition to offering more flexibility, as it is characterized as a modern architecture, capable of adding its own or third-party components, to adapt to the proposed business needs . Organizations that modernize their applications obtain several gains, which can be called “competitive factors”, such as cost, quality, agility, flexibility and innovation.
With regard to costs, when modernizing applications, it is possible to use modern infrastructures or architectures that reduce application costs by an average of 40% to 50%, with cases of reduction of up to 70% in expenses. With regard to quality, operational activities are automated, allowing employees' time to be invested in other strategic tasks.
When it comes to agility, application modernization not only simplifies the process of deploying new features, it supports agile technology strategies and speeds up business delivery. While flexibility, it guarantees, regardless of the situation, adaptation without worrying about dependencies, that is, change and grow with market and company transformations.
Finally, the last benefit, innovation, becomes possible because modern applications allow connection with other applications, in addition to carrying out information searches on social networks and customization for the customer.
Application Modernization x Black Friday
The last Friday of November takes place Black Friday, a day known worldwide for offering consumers the greatest discounts and opening the shopping season for Christmas. Thus, the volume of purchases increases significantly on this date, being a period of extreme importance for the retail sector, which must be prepared, especially in the technological area, with its modernized applications.
With a modern application structure, the infrastructure is used as code and automatically scales in a very agile way so that the application continues to operate in a resilient way. In addition, application modernization ensures continuous monitoring of traffic as well as getting and accessing all the data to see if anything out of the ordinary is going on.
If a company is working with an old application, it is essential to scale the entire infrastructure to support the growth in demand, that is, to include all components: e-commerce, sales and finance. Unlike the modern application, which scales one component at a time, ensuring a cost reduction in scalability and increased speed, in addition to having automations to scale on demand.
Main Challenges of Application Modernization in Retail
Companies in the retail segment should have no doubts: modernizing their applications is the ideal way to at least start leveraging their business. However, there are some challenges in this process, the first one being the lack of expertise about the process. That is, organizations know that it is important to modernize, but not where and how to start.
In addition, there is an absence of investment capacity, both in terms of resources and manpower. Today, many organizations are still struggling with an IT skills gap and a shortage of specialized professionals in the market. Finally, with the aging of some technologies, companies also suffer from a lack of support from application providers not prepared to advise on a particular modernization.
More than ever, it's critical to consider a qualified partner to lead the application modernization process, one that is prepared to provide the support you need during any situation, especially on seasonal dates like Black Friday. If the pace of innovation is increasing by leaps and bounds, application modernization could be the strategic differentiator to ensure companies return on investment, keeping them competitive and attractive in the market.
*Cleyton Leal is Application Services Leader at SoftwareONE , a leading global provider of end-to-end solutions for software and cloud technology.
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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