“Business must provide satisfying, responsive and differentiated experiences for customers, partners, and employees. DXPs are evolving as technologies converge to fulfill these needs. DXP technology strategic planners must work on brand revitalization and focus on integration and interoperatility.”
~Gartner Forecast Snapshot: Digital Experience Platforms , Worldwide, 2017
In today’s rapidly evolving “technological revolution” – a time of fast change with companies popping up (and down) daily – enterprises must consider both modern progressive strategies and the wisdom of experience, breadth, hard-knocks, and stability.
In an ideal world, logical high-valued and easily deployable enterprise-grade integrated digital experiences – for focused audiences driven by business outcomes – would “just work” securely, seamlessly, functionally, and with delightful user experiences. Similarly, in an ideal world, platform product vendors would reliably prioritize and deliver deep productized 3rd -party integrations with commonly-used other platforms or systems inclusive, or at a minimum, consistently have extensibility APIs or a well-trodden SDK included with their product.
It is not an ideal world, yet – but there is at least one vendor actively working towards this ideal: AppFusions, with holistic integrated digital experience solutions.
Best of Breed: Focused Productized Immersive Integration Experiences
Truth be told, even in 2018 with technology reaching new levels of industry maturity – it’s still not so easy for corporations to quickly procure and deploy enterprise integrations. In general, platform vendors’ reliably do not prioritize productized, thorough, and UX immersive 3rd-party integrations, and instead, vendors reliably sell more silos (via their platform as one) into the enterprise, causing even more integration demand in the industry.
Since 2010, AppFusions began productizing holistic integrated solutions, bringing together old and new systems, processes, data, and people within common platforms via deep, vetted, and proven workflow integration solutions. By solutions, AppFusions have three main product-lines:
- AppSpokes integration app services, an iPaaS architecture and family (25+) of end-to-end packaged integrated app “services” that can be securely made available in <any web-app> platform.
- AlohaDXP, a no-code/low-code integrated digital experiences and workplace platform that brings together content, data, and disparate 3rdparty system experiences (via AppSpokes) into unlimited contextual mix-and-match purpose-driven spaces or portals (depending on the use-case).
- Atlassian-server-based integration apps, AppFusions’ flagship and sustained solution apps that have withstood the test of time (since 2010, ongoing). In fact, these initial products served as key PM experience and design inputs to the later AppSpokes and AlohaDXP micro-services solutions.
In fact, all of these solutions have complemented AppFusions’ vision, plans, and evolved trajectory, and common mission: “to bridge business, engineering, and collaboration systems with mixed-technology and contextual integrated application solutions to allow enterprises to work better, together.”
Via AppSpokes and AlohaDXP, AppFusions mixes multiple system workflow experiences into real-time “single pane of glass” contextual interfaces. The host-platform of “the glass” could be AlohaDXP or others (e.g., IBM Connections, IBM Commerce or DX, or others). The growing inter-mixed application flavors include apps by IBM, Microsoft, Atlassian (Jira and Confluence), Salesforce, Dropbox, Box, Google, GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Alfresco, Zendesk, ServiceNow, and more.
Below the surface, AppFusions’ technologies run continually in the IBM Cloud, allowing for secure scalable data center distributions to customers world-wide. Their solutions can be deployed via different models, based on a customer’s needs or requirements:
- a multi-tenant public cloud environment, or
- a large-scale private dedicated cloud environment, or
- a same-codebase containerized versions of the services for local installs in a corporation’s own data center environment.
Mainstream Ubiquitous Distribution for <Any Web-App> at Scale
Since the earliest days of AppFusions, their target was for packaged integrations to be mainstream across the industry. To achieve this, while technical aspects are key and important, almost more important is sustainability, ease of deployments, and security.
AppFusions’ optimized “cloud-first and mobile-ready” technology design with a ubiquitous spread for any web-app platform, and also being able to sustainably support multiple deployment models is a key design differentiator for AppFusions. Supporting all three models with a single-code base and developer extensibility objective is a hard path to follow. But AppFusions never wavers from this key goal.
IBM Cloud: An Enterprise-Grade Cloud
When asked why AppFusions’ built and based their solutions in the IBM cloud, Ellen Feaheny, CEO, stated an objective for secure enterprise-grade backend continuance. She continued with:
“IBM has driven and succeeded at very large high-security requirements IT solution deployments over the years. Banks have been IBM’s “sweetspot” worldwide, and while AppFusions solutions serve all industries, it is the high scale security rigor that AppFusions appreciates most in terms of being applied to our own integrated solution. IBM Cloud sets a bar that is inherently unique and special via IBM experiences.”
In addition to scale and security, AppFusions’ AlohaDXP platform natively leverages other IBM products. IBM Cloud services, like ElasticSearch, Compose.io, and IBM Watson natural language processing are all used by AlohaDXP.
Ongoing Integrated DX Strategies for Modern Business Requirements
“For end users, differentiated value and day-to-day operational excellence start with a satisfying digital experience. Resulting demand will drive end-user spending for digital experience platforms (DXPs) at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14% to reach a size of $18.5 billion in 2021.
The market opportunity for DXPs is fueled by modern business requirements. A DXP offering can serve as an enabling and iunifying system to deliver multi-channel and personalized experiences for a variety of applications serving everything from digital workplace initiatives to customer experience programs.”
~Gartner Forecast Snapshot: Digital Experience Platforms , Worldwide, 2017
The AppFusions’ team have focused on far-reaching cloud and hybrid integrated web, portal and digital experience strategies for years now. AppFusions’ no-code/low-code AlohaDXP platform takes the concept to the cutting edge of the industry, quickly, by embedding a large and growing AppSpokes integration app portfolio. In addition, AlohaDXP includes content curation, business intelligence, integrated app SSO, enterprise directory management, messaging, AI analysis and machine learning and much more.
With AlohaDXP, in days or weeks, an enterprise can spawn dozens of new polished, working and secure deeply integrated spaces or portals. Further, via AlohaDXP’s built-in enterprise architecture framework, enterprises can skip building the complex “technical underbelly”, and instead focus on the cross-functional business requirements from constituents who will use the quick-to-develop Web experiences.
AppSpokes and AlohaDXP are evolutions already of continual real-world feedback, with active roadmaps that are steadily appended by customer inputs and demand. The model allows customers to be deeply engaged in the ongoing product development with continual iteration and innovation, together.
Keeping Their Heads Over Shoulders
Over time, like IBM, the most key differentiator for AppFusions has become experience, breadth, and hard-knocks.
As the adage goes, “nothing truly great is easy” – and the AppFusions path has certainly had its share of challenges along the way. But with time, the journey has become easier, and peristence and perseverence to “make integrated digital experiences across systems easier” is what got them here today, and will carry them forward. And they are grateful for that.
