Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Claus Jepsen, Deputy CTO at Unit4
The Year Ahead for the ERP Market
As we transition from one year to another, it is customary
to look back on the past year and begin to consider what might unfold in the
year ahead. We are in a period of massive technology-driven disruption in the
ERP market and this past year will undoubtedly be remembered as the year of
artificial intelligence and chatbots. However, when it comes to developing
technologies that truly change the way organizations operate, the hype of the
simplistic call-and-response chatbots we saw this year will likely be just a
small blip on a much longer journey towards true AI. Here are some thoughts
from Unit4 on what the ERP market can expect in 2019:
Businesses will start to leverage their employees to take
advantage of low-code/no-code applications.
Citizen developers represent a new generation in the
workforce. They see technology as a way to create value in their work, opening
doors to innovation and higher efficiency, and providing new ways of
accomplishing goals. Tools are now emerging that allow them to quickly develop
front-end applications that map exactly to the processes used by their
organizations and their teams, taking advantage of business data and
intelligence that was once relegated to the back office. Vendors are
redesigning the software architectures to support this change, enabling
customers to build out from the core using loosely coupled microservices so
employees can create service-enhancing ERP extensions in their own image. The
citizen developer market will be huge in the coming years, but this growth will
be driven by citizen developers - not software vendors.
Edge Computing will change how we process data.
We'll
see a higher degree of computing happening at initial data capture to remove
processing workload from the server side. This is essentially what's already
happening with IoT; however, in the future, we'll see this in other non-IoT
uses cases as well, like ensuring financial compliance locally instead of in a
central data center. Edge computing take advantage of microservices
architectures where chunks of application functionality can be sent to edge
devices. This expands computing power indefinitely, and is an exciting trend to
watch in 2019.
As the AI market matures, chatbot consolidation
will begin.
Everyone and their
mother's company is building chatbots - and there simply isn't enough room for
them all. Consumers won't want to ask one chatbot how many PTO days they
have left, call up another to find out their current credit card balance, and
talk to a third to book a flight to Europe. Having a different chatbot for
everything under the sun isn't good UX. As the market matures, chatbot
consolidation will begin. The code needed for a chatbot to perform its
dedicated task on the backend will be still be valuable - chatbots will instead
be recoded as the go-between with a customer-facing chatbot and the enabling
backend software. This means the user will ask Cortana (for example) to perform
a task, Cortana will ask the bot, the bot will perform the task, and Cortana
will inform the user that the task is complete. Chatbots that perform useful
and unique tasks won't disappear, they'll just become part of a larger
ecosystem that's one step removed from the consumer, where they interface with
other solutions such as banks, airlines, ERP software, pizza parlors -
literally everything.
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About the Author
At Unit4, Claus
Jepsen builds cloud-based, super-scalable solutions and brings innovative
technologies such as AI, chatbots, and predictive analytics to ERP. Claus is a
strong believer that having access to vast amounts of data allows us to
construct better, non-intrusive and pervasive solutions to improve our
experiences, relieve us from tedious chores, and allow us focus on what we as
individuals really love doing.