Digital transformation has officially become the key to meeting modern customer expectations. Only two years ago, Don Butler, Executive Director of Connected Vehicle and Services at Ford, famously said, "We need to adopt more and more of a mindset of a software or services company.” And today, there is not a car manufacturer that is not actively trying to differentiate their brand based on the software systems available in their cars—software systems that engage with the customer.
Organizations actively focused on digital transformation are trying to add applications to improve the customer experience for almost everything. But, simply adding applications is not enough. Applications are now a proving ground for innovation, to enable better processes, enhance customer engagement, and streamline selling motions. To truly stand out in the marketplace, you need to customize your applications to showcase your value. Offer your customers a superior experience, and you can leap ahead of your competition.
So it is not surprising that the adoption of packaged applications is substantially down, and the growth of in-house applications is substantially up. Enterprises must participate in this new world. If not, they risk becoming irrelevant to their customers. It is evident that many enterprises are promptly responding to this paradigm shift. We see more spending on tools and infrastructure to support application development. And, there is growing interest in training, process improvement, and consulting services focused on agile software development, DevOps and digital transformation.
But, digitizalization requires more than just a killer application. Continuing the earlier example of digitizalization in the modern car industry, consumers are notified by their cars when it is time to change the oil, schedule regular maintenance, or seek immediate repairs. They get texts and emails, can go to a website to schedule their services, and can access data about their cars in the cloud. These interactions not only enhance the customer experience, but also create mountains of data that can allow car manufacturers to better plan parts production, inventory levels, and staffing requirements. This is what the impact of software development on the digital transformation of a product or service looks like, and enterprises require a responsive platform for the agile deployment of data intensive applications to make it work as designed.
The cloud is an ideal platform for agile deployment of data intensive applications. EDB has seen many of our customers begin their journey to digitalization by deploying new applications in cloud environments. Organizations who embrace agile development prefer to deploy to multiple clouds. They desire the choice and flexibility of deploying to a private cloud, such as OpenStack, or a public cloud, such as AWS, Google or Azure. This allows them to optimize for application life cycle considerations (development vs. production), time to market, cost, skill set and compliance requirements.
EDB provides various methods to help organizations easily deploy across cloud environments. We embraced the multi-cloud reality by bringing EDB Postgres Ark to market. EDB Postgres Ark is a database-as-a-service framework that gives organizations the flexibility to deploy Postgres in the cloud—with the ability for self-service provisioning, and highly available deployment in an automated fashion. Today, EDB Postgres Ark supports provisioning to environments based on OpenStack and AWS.
EDB can help your organization engage in digital transformation and leverage the cloud for agile development. Our goal is to put enterprises in a position to deploy Postgres in any environment that fits their business requirements. With EDB Postgres Ark, you'll be able to provision to the cloud of your choice. Better yet, you’ll be able to keep track of what databases you have deployed, and control where you want them provisioned. We give data management teams within IT organizations the agility to do what they want, without losing visibility and control.
For more information, watch this video, and then contact us for more information.
Marc Linster, Ph.D., is Senior Vice President, Product Development, EnterpriseDB.