As the year comes to an end, the best way to make 2016 a better year is to reflect on this year.
I wish you a peaceful and prosperous holiday season and — till next year — here are a few macro-reflections and predictions that I’d like to share with you.
Focus on customers rather than growth
What happens when a company makes growth the main purpose?
“When Volkswagen announced a few years ago that it would become the world’s largest car company by 2017 (which just happened to be the year that Chairman Ferdinand Piech would be required to retire at age 80), I was pretty certain that the effort would come to a bad end.” — by Jim Womack — http://elast.co/Volkswagen-Scandal-Lean
“Company First” thinking, being “Number One”, is an objective that no customer — not one — cares about. The “Customer First” journey requires hard work every day and it is the most fulfilling.
Cloud is booming, and it is still day one
With Amazon’s cloud — AWS now a profitable $7 billion+ business, cloud is changing the technology and innovation landscape. It required relentless hard work, which has seen some fatalities:
- Private Cloud has failed and with it cloud movements such as OpenStack
- Rackspace and HP threw in the towel, and they’re trying to limit the massive damage by partnering with their former arch-rival
- The company that coined the term “cloud computing”, Google, is still figuring it out
The explosion of cloud, platforms and applications caused increased complexity, and managing that complexity is becoming more difficult. Simplifying those complex systems will be the new necessary trend to avoid implosion and protect your business and customers. Connecting the dots will increasingly create more value than creating the dots (e.g. APIs and Microservices).
E-Commerce Platforms
As retailers think about their e-commerce strategy for the next 3 to 5 years, choosing the right platform to achieve their ambition is becoming increasingly difficult. The pendulum keeps swinging, we see retailers moving from SaaS to a DIY approach and vice versa. Whatever choice they make they are never completely happy.
With the release of a more modular and modern Magento 2, running Magento on the Cloud and scaling at any level, will become a reality. Magento 2 will become a real contender for tier 1 and tier 2 online retailers. With the help of Akoova and top-notch development team/agency, such as one of our partners, Session Digital, having the best of both SaaS and DIY will become a reality. The best of both means having the ownership of the platform + complete freedom of creating the perfect user experience, without the hassle of managing the whole complexity.
Session Digital will be hosting a seminar with Magento and Akoova about Magento 2, in London on the 20th January 2016. It is an event for retailers, with speakers such as Rob Bostock, Director of Technology, Space.NK. Retailers who are interested to know more about Magento 2, please register your interest, places are limited: http://www.sessiondigital.com/magento-2-seminar-jan20/. The speakers will share valuable experience in launching the first two clients on Magento Enterprise Edition version 2: Byredo & Graze.
Be ready to embrace the inevitable
Today there are 5 billion devices, estimated to grow to 50 billion by 2020.
Do you have a sense for the magnitude of platform and infrastructure disruption that this will demand?
The ability to adapt quickly will beat predictions any time. This is why the Akoova team and I will continue to work hard to provide the very best solution and service, so our customers and their customers get the ultimate e-commerce site experience, and most importantly, be ready for the future, whatever it might bring.
