PlanetNTF

The commerce world held its collective breath as Forrester prepared its annual predictions for the 2023 market — and with good reason. 2022 brought new levels of market volatility, and the new year seems to promise more of the same, with shortages and supply-chain complications still topping the list of concerns.

The sub-title of Forrester’s future-facing report for commerce predictions 2023 is blunt: “Commerce Operations Will Take Center Stage as Digital Businesses Dial Back Their Promises” — and its findings set the tone for the new year with a predicted shift in the way companies do business.

Forrester expects companies to “prioritize commerce moments they can prove work” and to “rethink technology investments to optimize experiences as well as inventory and fulfillment” in protecting their bottom lines in the new year.

Buyer’s remorse (executive remix)

Forrester’s take on the factors behind this rethinking is instructive­­. In Forrester’s succinct estimation, “One-third of digital businesses will regret playing ‘software company’” in 2023.

This may sound like snark, but it’s deadly accurate. Businesses survived the pandemic by investing in technologies that addressed the crisis of the moment, with system sustainability a distant second on the list of careabouts. Now that the sky has cleared, those urgent-care remedies may no longer be an ideal fit — and over time, the high initial cost may go even higher.

As a result, “nearly half (44%) of software decision-makers whose organization has or plans to adopt B2C commerce solutions tell [Forrester] they are evaluating or plan to replace their commerce platforms.” In 2023, Forrester adds, “a third of digital businesses will abandon or restructure midstream projects that prove too complex to execute or maintain.” So, if you’re a decision-maker who is now rethinking your B2B and B2C solutions, welcome to the club.

The fact is that many businesses can no longer afford to staff up an entire IT department to churn out code, customize platforms, deploy hot fixes, and generally act as an independent software company to keep customers happy in real-time. Resources are scarce, monolithic platform solutions are on life support, and finding IT hires to maintain pieced-together solutions is a never-ending challenge. The hour of reckoning has come, and decision-makers are looking for a new path that solves the business problems of today without the costs and concerns of pandemic-era approaches.

Refocusing on business fundamentals

So, what’s the solution?

As Forrester points out, swinging between extremes can be a massively costly mistake. “Some digital businesses are overcorrecting as they abandon proprietary and legacy tech to embrace the most custom and flexible — but massively complex — commerce tech ecosystems,” the report notes. “From custom user interfaces (UIs) to innumerable integrations, these systems require firms to orchestrate — and maintain — every aspect of their tech ecosystem.”

That sort of overreach will have painful consequences, Forrester predicts — consequences that could prove business-critical for many organizations: “In their second and third years, new implementations will fail, and custom UIs will crumble from post-launch neglect.” Not a pretty picture, to say the least.

In a word, implies Forrester, the key is balance. According to the Forrester report, “digital businesses will pivot to reengage with commerce solutions that balance ecosystem management, business user experiences, and Function-First Tech Buying enablement.”

In HCL’s opinion, this sort of balanced approach — one that accounts for customers who expect one-touch digital simplicity as well as key business drivers like system sustainability, data security, and ROI — enables organizations to refocus on the core capabilities and assets that make them profitable. Adopting such an approach means moving past the crisis-driven “just get it done” model of years past and looking forward to a new emphasis on business fundamentals.

Businesses need the tools and resources to get the job done right and meet their customers where they are — sustainably, securely, and profitably. With e-commerce logistics setting a new tone, HCLSoftware can help you make the shift to a custom-fit tech solution that works for you — and make 2023 a wonderful new year.

Find out more about HCL Commerce here.

Cloud-native computing is revolutionizing software delivery, implementation and maintenance — and the benefits to organizations are too compelling to ignore. HCL Digital Experience is on a mission to free businesses to focus on driving business value from their digital experience software investments, not spending resources on intensive and high-cost development teams. 

One major area HCL Digital Experience is focusing on is making installing, running, and upgrading your digital experience software faster and easier, but without sacrificing the reliability, scalability, performance, security and integration breadth you need to digitize the business processes necessary for business-critical digital experiences

On June 25, HCL Digital Experience is going further “cloud-native.”  The benefits of cloud-native are many and compelling — both for the IT organization and the business — and dramatically reduce TCO.

Why are cloud native digital experiences important?

When companies build and operate applications in a cloud-native fashion, they bring new ideas to market faster and respond more quickly to customer demands.

The rise of cloud-native computing platforms has been driven by the broad adoption of Docker and Kubernetes. Docker is a container platform which provides the ability to package and distribute containerized applications.  This means rapid install, on virtually any platform, a smaller footprint and code isolation that makes software updates a snap.  Kubernetes is used for the orchestration of containers — automating deployment, scheduling and scaling of these containerized applications. 

Why is that important? As an analogy, think about a taxi company. A taxi is a like a container and the dispatch center is Kubernetes — providing valued orchestration so individual taxis can get where they need to efficiently. Kubernetes provides scheduling of container pods and nodes, autoscaling and load balancing as load changes, self-healing of problematic/expired containers, container roll forward and rollback, and much, much more.

Docker plus Kubernetes delivers the ability to rapidly adapt in a digital world, which is fundamental to organizations that need to continuously grow, compete, and operate applications at scale and with high velocity.

HCL Digital Experience offers broad cloud-native platform support

With the latest update of HCL Digital Experience, support has been added for Microsoft Azure AKS – joining previously announced support for RedHat Open Shift and Amazon EKS – providing customers the broadest set of cloud computing platform options for a DX solution.   The means customers have the flexibility and portability to deploy where, when and how it makes the most sense for their technical objectives; of course, because HCL Digital Experience is dockerized, initial deployment installation on any platform is now up to 10 times faster — meaning mere minutes, not hours, and updates delivered continually, with NO disruptive migrations, for improved TCO. 

Further, once deployed, HCL Digital Experience leverages all the power of Kubernetes for even more benefit, including:

• • Automated scheduling of containers as required
  • Horizontal scaling so apps can auto-scale up and down based on the requirement
  • Self-healing to manage the reschedule, replacement, and restart of nodes that are expired to avoid disruption
  • And automatic roll forward and rollbacks

What else is new?

Being “cloud-native” also allows HCL to deliver features and capabilities modularly, such as the new HCL Digital Asset Management capability also available (out-of-the-box at no additional charge!) in the latest HCL DX update.  In addition, a new Content Composer content manage experience is available now – helping business users dramatically reduce the time needed to create and maintain compelling digital content and experiences.  

Our approach to cloud-native provides all the benefits of a traditional on-premises setup for local control — important to many enterprises for security and performance reasons — but now with the economic benefits of the cloud with instant updates and minimal developer involvement. For our customers, this means reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) and a massive return on investment (ROI). 

Join us on June 25th when we unveil the latest capabilities of our platform and demonstrate in real time the new power we provide. We continue to deliver on providing the cloud-native platform you can rely on to digitize your critical business processes.

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