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Seems almost crazy, but the era of ‘serverless architecture’ is upon us. It’s a continuation of the availability of utility cloud computing and it matters to most businesses because it means you can develop and operate your services without ever worrying about operating systems or underlying hardware. All you need to do is produce the code and run it.

On what, you rightly ask? The short answer is ‘containers’.

Serverless computing is an execution model in which your cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources (those machines would be the actual ‘servers’ – but they have nothing to do with you, certainly not in a physical sense: they are completely abstracted away from the end user). Pricing is based on the amount of resources consumed by your application, rather than on pre-purchased capacity. In other words, serverless consumption models are ‘on demand’ utility computing.

Seriously, rooms full of black boxes with little blinking lights is just so nineties.

While that might sound a lot like a fashion statement, the problem isn’t with appearances. Instead, it is costs. Flexibility. Security and resilience. Management overhead. Hassle. And that’s why the time has never been better for emptying out the server room and putting all those boxes into the cloud. A bonus: how much space will this (relatively simple) action free up…and what will you do with it?

The cloud, these days, is setting the standard for the infrastructure every company needs to run its business. The old way of buying hardware, along with the attendant hassles of configuring and then managing it, belong in the past because it’s expensive. It’s also clunky and times change fast, while ‘bought’ hardware might as well have a use-by date on it (tired of constant refreshes which make three years go by in the blink of an eye?).

Service Levels Agreements are everywhere, from Energy Companies to Pizza Delivery.  For consumers it’s things like “delivered in 30 minutes”, or “the best nights’ sleep you’ve ever had”.  For businesses it’s measured in response times, uptime or resolutions times – and setting these expectations is important! They allow both you and your customers to know when you are performing, and when there is work to be done to meet expectation.  

At Lancom we have set strong SLA’s that we are proud of, so we want to give you a behind the scenes peak at what they are!  

Before we dive in, we want to bring up an important 'extra', which is crucial in the success of implementing SLA's – the Communication Level Agreement.  What's often missing is the discussion around the discussion!  When and how will you communicate with your customer, especially in their times of need.  The SLA is a great document, but it lives in the past.  You only go to it after the fact.  SLA’s always talk about mean time between failure, business hours response times and defect rates.  And why do they always have a little star? 

By now, there’s no need to point out how much data is generated daily by just about every business there is. But despite this obvious reality, most businesses don’t really use that data beyond its immediate initial purpose. By that, I mean your email is only useful ‘in the instant’. Once you’ve completed the task, it’s forgotten. Today’s sales figures might be rolled into a weekly or monthly report, but after that, it’s history (except maybe again at year-end). The logs and reports generated by monitoring equipment often do nothing unless they throw up an anomaly. 

Isn’t it about time you did …something… with all that data? After all, ‘data is the new oil’, and contained in it could be the seeds of innovation or, dare I say it, revolution. 

But how? 

If you have been following us for a while (or even 5 minutes), you will know getting the upper hand with leverage is our thing. 

We have all heard the well-versed notion, “technology increasing productivity”, however, what most don’t realise is that this is only half the opportunity.

Businesses (and individuals) are increasingly realising the potential technology has to enable creativity.

When you think about it, it makes sense. The accumulation of all the technological advances over the last century has lead us to a place where we have documentation of human knowledge, creations and discoveries just a few mouse clicks away, at any time.  

Distances have been reduced (despite barriers of time and space). Sharing knowledge is easier. Making connections is at the tip of our fingers. All of these factors combined facilitate creativity. 

When you imagine our business 10 years from now, what do you see?

Do you have holographic, virtual meetings? Do you even have a physical office? 

What makes business exciting, is that there's always a way to evolve, perform better and create more. Whether it's conceptualising a better process, or discovering a new technology.  

We are living in the age of constant digital transformation. Evolving is crucial to remain current and competitive - stagnation is effectively a modern death sentence. 

But implementing a technology change is hard.

Many businesses inadvertently get their technology change process wrong, calling the project unsuccessful.
We want to stop that! 

Being an evolving business ourselves, we have worked out the 4 steps we typically go through when rolling an internal change: Assess, Design, Implement & Manage.

We elaborate further on our proven process below.

If you are one of the 37,000 franchise units operating in NZ reading this article, you most likely can relate to the fact that your growth opportunities could be limited by lack of systems for your front-line workers to interact your customers, as well as collaborate and communicate internally.  

Whether your people are behind the counter, onsite, in clinics, or on the phone, they are the first to engage with your customers, the first to represent your brand and the first to see your products and services in action. First line workers are the backbone to some of the world’s largest industries, and that is no different in our country. In New Zealand, recent surveys indicate that more than 124,000 people form part of our franchising industry first line.  

As a franchisor or franchisee, you need technology that enables your business and your people: technology that’s affordable on a small-business budget and doesn’t restrict your future growth.  

We have officially launched into 2018! With a fresh chapter comes fresh motivation and opportunity to pursue goals. 

To start the year off, our first article unpacks key areas for focus in the next 11 months. Rather than quoting books (with the exception of one!) or big industry names, the areas we mention in this article are the ones we believe in, those that we are focusing on to be able to innovate, create new products, and stay ahead of the the competition.

For this post, I have broken the combination of tactics we are adopting into 4 key themes. 

This is by no means the end of the list. Growing in 2018 will demand a combination of strengths. It is never going to be one thing, it has to be the integration of many things that, together will make you stand against the crowd. At Lancom, we summarise these key themes to: the talent you hire, the investment you make to manage the business behind your business, how well you are servicing your customers, and the attention you are paying to your brand.

We see (and write!) a lot of articles about why you should create custom software applications, how to come up with app ideas, and the cost of developing software. But then when we think about how we interact with clients, the first thing we do is check if they should not be creating the app. 

Yes, we are aware of the contradiction! However, as you know we are all about creating leverage, and despite acknowledging custom software is the ultimate way to gain competitive advantage, if results are not generated as expected it can quickly turn into a pit of wasted resources. 

To make sure you've thought through your idea, here are instances where we suggest NOT to pursue custom software development: 

You may have noticed that the traditional methods of gaining your customers attention (and business!) are failing to pull in the results they used to. To combat this, HubSpot developed the Inbound Methodology, focused on delivering value to your customers to attract them, and pull them through the buyers journey. This pairs nicely with our own belief in providing value up-front, so naturally we have whole-heartedly adopted this ideology into our online presence!