It seems like there is always a latest, greatest, end-all, be-all digital transformation going on that your company needs to get on board with or risk being relegated to the dustbin of history. We’ve all been there. Sometimes the hype is warranted, sometimes it isn’t. I think what has been dubbed The Great Replatforming is the real deal. In fact, the changes in business expectations coupled with the evolving infrastructure complexity created by best-of-breed products replacing suites of services and the advantages offered by cloud computing is one of the reasons I came to Redwood. I wanted to be in the heart of the revolution. Which, in my opinion, is end to end automation of mission critical business processes.
Regardless of industry, the main goal of any business is to succeed. To do so, organizations have always, and will forever look for ways to hone competitive advantages, enhance operational efficiency, and deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences - all while increasing profits and lowering costs. Technological advancement has always been a driving force behind the evolution of business. One of the big differences today is that businesses expect their technology investments to drive core business outcomes like closing their books in record time, translating orders to cash faster, or improving supply chain resiliency. The list goes on. This shift in perspective puts a new and more critical lens on how and why companies invest in technology.
Secondarily, the last decade or so has seen an absolute explosion in the number of applications driving mission critical business processes. While in many ways this has helped companies, it’s also created a real problem, especially for large enterprises, as their point solutions and legacy IT-only focused automation platforms do not have the ability to automate business processes end-to-end. Simply put, each of the applications may be doing a better job for their specific purpose, but the number of applications becomes unruly and aren’t working together seamlessly.
Taking it a step further, and to make things even more complicated, these applications are running on tech infrastructure that’s now constantly changing. So, fixing the situation isn’t just about lifting and shifting from on premise to the cloud. It needs to be a more considered choice. It requires a careful reassessment and refactoring of a company’s entire tech stack! This is essentially what The Great Replatforming is all about. But it’s more than just tearing down the monolith and refactoring your tech stack into a microservices architecture and putting everything in containers, including modernizing their CI/CD & DevOps pipelines for faster delivery.
Basically, when companies embrace this Great Replatforming, they start refactoring their entire application tech stack into microservices and containers that are spinning up and down on a massive scale. This isn’t something that can be done manually by humans anymore because it’s an N-Dimensional problem. The solution is immense amounts of automation that can work end to end across a company’s infrastructure. I believe this N-Dimensional Complexity creates an incredible driver for what Gartner calls Hyper-Automation - where automation will be the pervasive operating system fabric in today’s modern enterprise. Which is exactly why I think this is one of those digital transformations that every company needs to get on board with.
Already, I’ve seen some of the largest companies in the world standardizing on full stack automation platforms as they move into the cloud while consolidating vendors. This is more efficient in terms of time and money. As they move more workloads, more compute, more storage, more everything into the cloud, you will see more and more of them standardizing on automation platforms that are true SaaS architecture in order to help future-proof their automation fabrics going forward.
Another benefit companies will see is the ability to get insights about their customers, their business and their operations. These days, every enterprise is becoming a big data company. But the data doesn’t do anyone any good if it’s locked up in silos and difficult, if not practically impossible, to access and leverage. I’ve seen many companies that have moved to modern data stacks like Databricks and Snowflake which requires significant automation, as well as companies integrating with big data tech like Hadoop and Spark so they can transform their data into more effective business processes.
Finally, I see complex automation pipelines being built that fuel the new endpoints that Intelligent Automation will ultimately create for business users, as new artificial intelligence technologies like ChatGPT gain traction and play an increasing role including providing insights and a conversational interface suited for business users. AI models can help companies to focus on improving their business continuously by learning from every transaction automated, and uncovering key business and operational insights. In many ways, this is just one example of how The Great Replatforming is helping future proof a company’s infrastructure.
Delivering a superior customer and employee experience is the new battleground for enterprise businesses. The transactional data and business processes required to come together to drive these business outcomes requires coordination and automation across multiple applications working together in an automated fashion. Many companies have been operating on legacy systems for years, which can be difficult and expensive to maintain, and can limit their ability to innovate and compete in their markets. The Great Replatforming will make it easier and more cost-effective for companies to modernize their digital infrastructure, and set themselves up for success now, and the future.
