Why Enterprise Software Must Evolve In the Age of Apps
When it comes to anything to do with the digital economy, most business executives are looking for ways to keep their options open. They want to be able to experiment with new business models and services without having to make a major commitment.
With that need for flexibility in mind, Avangate today unfurled a fall upgrade to its namesake digital commerce platform, available as a service in the cloud. It now includes the ability to more easily set up sales channels and customize the application environments using RESTful application programming interfaces.
Michael Ni, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of marketing and products for Avangate, says that as a cloud application that can be deployed in a matter of days, Avangate is designed to allow business users to develop new business models without relying on IT to hard code a payment system into every process. Instead, the Avangate digital commerce platform has an embedded transaction processing system that is optimized to support business models based on recurring subscription revenues that are typical of a digital service.
By adding support for portals through which an organization’s business partners can process those transactions, Ni says Avangate is now significantly extending the reach of its digital commerce platform into the indirect sales channel that most business-to-business (B2B) organizations employ.
Very few businesses today have a firm grasp of what it truly means to operate a digital business. To gain that experience, Ni says businesses need to be able to mix and match products and services in a way that allows them to dynamically create new offerings without continuously reconfiguring the way their ERP applications keep track of products and services. Once integrated with those ERP systems, Ni says the Avangate platform essentially masks the complexities of making those changes and routing the associated payments from the underlying ERP system.
Most senior IT executives today are uncomfortable with the rise of digital business models because they know that the IT systems in place are not flexible enough to support them. Yet, the business wants to be able to experiment with new business models. And the executives in charge of those systems have no patience for IT organizations that take months to make the necessary changes to underlying systems. So, it’s clear that an overlay on top of those legacy systems is the only way that IT organizations are ever going to be able to support the kind of dynamic business model experimentation that companies now crave.
