Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Total Experience Orchestration

What if I were to tell you that applications would scale and self-heal based on the understanding of the Total Experience of the users, and it could do so proactively before anyone complained? The past two years have required businesses to rethink how they interact and serve customers as well as how they ensure employees are productive and effective, regardless of their location. Habits of customers and employees have changed, and an entire day of digital interaction is commonplace. Many experts claim interacting digitally will continue to be our primary method of interaction, and regardless of what we desire, times have changed.  Many CIOs are credited with saving the day by acting quickly to such adverse conditions, however, if you ask these same CIO's (in a private conversation) how they did it, they will tell you that all they did was go to the file cabinet and open file 13 - all of those great ideas that would propel the company in to the future that were continually ignored or not funded. In many ways, 2020 and 2021 were an absolute dream for those in IT, as it allowed them to progress the company into the future at an incredible pace, and interestingly enough, not a lot of new technology was required; it was just a matter of using what was commonly available.

Many in IT will tell you that the past couple of years have been a dream and a nightmare all rolled into one. They finally did the things they wanted to without having to justify some ridiculous 6-month return on investment, but they had to do so, without being able to leave their house, and with their kids and pets crawling in and around their feet. Not a building too tall for a superhero, of course, which is what many of these teams are. The result of all of this: 17% of CIO's claim their infrastructure is not fit for the future and 80% claim they have no visibility into their new infrastructure, most of which is publicly hosted.  Add to this challenge, an insatiable appetite of consumers and employees to embrace this new world of digital interactions using new technologies like alternative or virtual reality - now we're talking. The result: the Band-Aids applied over the past two years must be removed while these new methods of digital interaction are deployed, along with all of the supporting infrastructure.  Now that sounds like fun!

Monolithic applications of the past are long gone, and rapid development using micro-services allowing for elastic scale and fault isolation are the norm.  Cross-cloud is no longer just a sweet idea but a reality and Multi-access Edge Compute is bringing the Cloud closer and closer to the user. The CI/CD Pipeline now includes the notion of infrastructure deployment with declarative models for scale, dependencies, and security.  But wait, what about infrastructure deployment and elastic scale that includes a declarative model for Total Experience? Well, that is my prediction for 2022. The CI/CD Pipeline will expand and include declarative models for user experience that determine deployment to new markets, elastic scale of the application, and what will come to be known as the...wait for it, Total Experience.  What has become evident over the past couple of years is that digital experience is paramount to the success of a service and everything is digital.  Heck, even my parents invested in smartphones, not so they could FaceTime me, but so they could go shopping, go to the doctor (virtually), and even go to the library. 

You will read many predictions about automation, AR/VR, cross-cloud scaling, and several other really neat technologies. I agree with them all. Creating an application and putting it on the internet is no longer enough.  Subscribing to a SaaS service and telling your employees, good luck with that, isn't going to work.  The consumer or employees' total experience is paramount to success, the success of the business. Proactive analytics representing the digital experience of users from every market around the globe along with real-time analytics feeding the Total Experience declarative models of the CI/CD Pipeline, controlling the scale of the application in real-time to ensure the absolute best Total Experience - nope, that is not a bridge too far; it is totally achievable over the next 12 months.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steve has a passion for matching technology to business solutions and leading Catchpoint's corporate strategy, Steve is responsible for development and implementation of Catchpoint's overall corporate strategy, business development, partnerships, strategic investments and acquisitions. With a long career in technology, Steve spent 12 years at Riverbed through the acquisition of Mazu Networks, and as the VP, Innovation & Strategy, he developed and led major initiatives to drive strategic partnerships enabling exceptional business growth.