Over the past few years, there have been several trends in our industry that will both benefit our customers, and that are changing the way we design and develop our web-based ERP products and services. Everything that Tensoft produces is carefully designed to support changes in the industry, so we watch these trends closely so that we can anticipate and respond ahead of the curve.
One recent development that will have a positive effect of our web-based ERP customers is that Microsoft is pushing more “peripheral” products to the cloud. Now, they are starting to offer business intelligence and data analytics applications – such as Microsoft Power BI and Power BI Pro – online. We expect that these new cloud offerings will make these applications more accessible to a wider variety of customers, since they’re subscription-based and now have smaller infrastructure hurdles to overcome. In addition, these applications are becoming more accepted as reporting tools and will shorten reporting cycles. Before, users had to request reports from IT and the entire process could take weeks. With these tools, it will take less time to dig through data and find solutions, shortening and improving information analysis. Currently, Microsoft is hosting these applications, but they have indicated the Power BI service will be available for on-premise installations or through private cloud service providers like Tensoft. With this in mind, we are looking at the best ways to provide these services for our customers.
There have also been several improvements in data hosting that are working behind the scenes to improve user experience for our web-based ERP customers. Most notably, the quality of virtual servers has improved dramatically over the past few years. There used to be a substantial performance gap between virtual servers and their physical counterparts. Now this gap has closed with equal performance and stability for both types of servers, with proper hosting infrastructure. With virtual servers like Microsoft’s Hyper-V, customers have the additional benefits of having simple backup and recovery plans, the ability to migrate to more powerful host servers for scalability, and server checkpoint/rollback capabilities for change management, to avoid problems caused by software updates. Shared infrastructure is also a huge benefit. A server configured to support large numbers of customers has huge amounts of CPU and RAM, and can offer customers solutions that they would not otherwise have been as affordable, due to expensive infrastructure and IT support. As your business grows and demand increases on the server, with virtualization, more CPU and RAM can be allocated to insure performance levels for your users. Most end users probably won’t even notice these changes, since most of us don’t tend to even think about performance unless there’s a problem.
Of course, some of the most notable trends today are around the ubiquity of mobile devices. Optimizing for mobile can mean many things. When people think of mobile, they think of phones and tablets. That’s part of it, of course, but think about the convergence of capabilities that the transformation of mobile devices into our primary devices has created. What we are seeing is more of a conceptual shift in mobile trends, from peripheral device to primary device, and from accessory to business tool. The bigger picture is more than the device itself. Trends in mobile are around how users are accessing cloud services and their expectations around this experience.
Smart phones and tablets have become mainstream and everyday tools that have comparable computing power to traditional desktops. Customers expect to be able to use any device for their solutions. Mobile devices are becoming more powerful, and we are witnessing a convergence of mobile and desktop. Moving forward, we are looking at how to deliver software solutions to work on all platforms – one of our core goals is to provide easily accessible solutions to all users. We’ve been committed to delivering as web-based ERP and other solutions since Tensoft started, so an increased focus on delivery to mobile devices is a natural step for us.
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