2016 brought a lot of chatter about smart tools, predictive analytics and cloud offerings. 2017 is about launching those solutions in companies across a range of industries, helping businesses better connect with their users. Whether customers are at the office, the store or the doctor’s office, custom software development solutions facilitate connection on a more personal level and improve the customer experience. These smart solutions, which are becoming standard tools everywhere, bridge the gap between humans and computers, more closely resembling the role of humans, and in some cases replacing them.
Today’s companies are faced with an excessive amount of data thanks to the IoT (Internet of things), yet they often don’t know what to do with it. Smarts apps give companies a way to get actionable insights from this data, which is then applied to streamline core processes and better serve customers.
A key contributor to the growth of smart apps is the increasing popularity of chatbots. These customer-facing, intelligent bots are providing a new level of communication. As these cognitive tools and bots read facial expressions, understand human emotion, and learn new skills they are beginning to blur the line between human and computer operators.
The challenge for custom software developers in 2017 is to integrate and manage the surplus of different IoT technologies, data, endpoints, platforms, and back-end systems at a rate that keeps pace with innovation. It also requires specialized expertise of data specialists whose availability can be limited in today’s marketplace.
Data Scientists Take the Lead
Data is critical across all industries. Advanced predictive analytics tools enable companies to not only measure past data, but as they learn from previous interactions, they can also effectively create a roadmap for future decisions. Since these solutions are only as good as the data they accumulate, the roles of analysts and scientists are as critical as the role of a HR manager, marketing head or CIO.
Platform as a Service
For a remote and highly mobile workforce, the cloud, which only requires an Internet connection, has become an attractive delivery model. Yet, PaaS solutions are the key accelerators of a new level of cloud growth. They provide a platform for customers to run and manage their applications without the complexity of building infrastructure or algorithms.
As AI-based predictive analytics and other complex solutions continue to emerge, companies realize the complexity of developing these in house and they increasingly rely on PaaS-based solutions.
The Year of the Business User
A consumer-led, digital-focused market has made customer experience a must for business users. They expect the same type of experience they have with digital technology in the consumer world, in their business environment. Because of this, 2017 focuses on new solutions that improve the business-user experience, including intelligent apps which make it easier to perform every-day tasks in the office. Technologies, such as virtual personal assistants, security solutions and marketing solutions deliver this new level of business-user functionality by incorporating cognitive learning and robotic process automation.
[Read also: How to Make Custom Software development Easier]
[Image via: Google Images]
