Managing enterprise applications is like wrestling an 8-foot rubber alligator — all-consuming, exhausting and futile. This is especially true for communications service providers (CSPs), fiber operators and tower companies because they struggle with intelligent and innovative data use.
These businesses keep the global economy humming, and their data challenge is astronomical due to keeping track of equipment, workforce, services and more, according to John Patton, president and CEO of OneVizion, a software company focused on helping businesses manage and transform their data.
Businesses must be able to count the resources they need to control and derive value from, or they cannot execute, Patton said. That’s true regardless of the industry sector. The better the data, the more the business is worth.
For example, a tower company needs to count, manage and maintain the number of towers it owns.
Businesses track these resources and more using fields in relational database tables and spreadsheets. But those tools aren’t up to the job — they buckle under the load and can’t keep up with the constantly changing data they need to manage.
Indeed, businesses need original thinking to cure the “data misery” caused by inadequate tools.
Or, to quote Albert Einstein, “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Evolution of applications
Einstein turned to thought experiments for innovative problem-solving, so let’s do one now. Think about how land transportation evolved. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans were muscle-propelled, traveling on their own feet and, later, harnessing animals. Top speed was a sedate 3-6 mph.
Later, humans harnessed steam engines and fossil fuels and learned to travel at 30-60 mph in trains and automobiles.
“This is a 10X increase – great, but not revolutionary,” said Patton.
Air travel, however, was revolutionary, bringing top speeds of 300-600 mph or more, another 10x increase above powered land travel. This advance enabled today’s global economy.
To start a software and data revolution, businesses need a 100X improvement, said Patton. “We can expect this revolution in three stages of advancement.”
Advance 1: Waterfall
The shift from mainframes to virtual machines and containers resulted in enormous improvement. Using APIs, businesses could set up a database in 10 minutes, compared with three years on a mainframe.
But this advance didn’t bring meaningful business improvement, because traditional development uses waterfall methodology, requiring years to implement change. Seventy percent, or more, of enterprise applications developed this way fail to deliver against their original goals, according to research from Standish Group.
Advance 2: Low-code
Using low-code development, businesses can create applications in a few weeks or months rather than the years required for waterfall development, using tools from companies such as force.com, QuickBase and Appian. These companies routinely claim their tools to be 10X faster than traditional development.
Advance 3: No-code + AI
The third evolutionary step – the equivalent of air travel in our thought experiment – is no-code, coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) to yield the next 10X improvement over low-code platforms.
What comes after Agile? Gragile.
OneVizion’s unique and powerful innovation is enabled by a proprietary Linked Record Architecture* system, which organizes data in a consistently structured parent-child hierarchy. This leads to an architecture that is both scalable and flexible. “Usually, you get to pick one but not both,” according to Patton.
Linked Record Architecture affords customers significant lifecycle solution cost savings and risk reduction. Because each customer’s database tables are identical, upgrades are seamless, timely and safe. Patton said, “This abstraction is the ultimate advantage between OneVizion and every other backend technology.”
Linked Record Architecture’s data encapsulation and management also supports a new type of development methodology that OneVizion calls “Gragile”*.
“Gragile” is a play on “gradual” and combines guard rails and agile. Gragile methodology allows businesses to start data transformation very small and build on success at their own pace.
“You can think of it like eating a data elephant — a business can take it one bite at a time,” he said.
Gragile methodology allows CSPs, tower companies and fiber operators to start their data transformation journey anywhere they like, based on their operational and business goals.
“They aren’t shoehorned into a vendor’s rigid sequencing or roadmap. They can configure their data to match their needs and update and add to it any time so that their data supports both granularity of information and scalability without limits,” noted Patton.
These characteristics are critical in the era of AI because AI feeds off short, highly organized segments of data— which is how the OneVizion platform operates.
“This architecture positions OneVizion to be a leader in helping our customers leverage AI,” Patton concluded.
*Gragile is registered by OneVizion. Linked Record Architecture is a pending trademark of OneVizion.