As the holiday season approaches, many of you must be gearing up to meet the anticipated demand spike and capture a piece of the online spend. While your marketing, sales, and fulfilment operations are ready to meet this increased demand, what about software and supporting technology infrastructure? In a hyper-competitive environment where growth is of paramount importance, it is an essential business need to have systems (including core software applications, supporting technology infrastructure, and processes) that are flexible, elastic, and truly scalable.
Steven ten Napel – CEO
Software scalability was traditionally viewed as a system’s ability to scale-up and manage varying loads dynamically and to deliver a consistent user/customer experience. This scale-up view is predominantly focused on system capacity, bandwidth, and resources. Thanks to increasing adoption of cloud, it has become relatively easier to tap into flexible, on-demand infrastructure and resources.
But, this scale-up view only addresses one dimension – scalability of performance, which has inherent limitations, as performance does not scale linearly. Until unless a system and its individual components are architected and designed to leverage resources independently, you will not achieve true scalability.
As my colleague Seshu explains in the next section, to design truly scalable systems, it is essential to understand the multiple dimensions of software scalability, namely scalable infrastructure, scalable architecture, and scalable process.
Happy Holidays and Seasons Greetings.
Scalable Infrastructure Scalable and high-performance applications must have critical capabilities to enable:These features will ensure that the system makes efficient & optimal use of computing, storage, and communications infrastructure and resources.
Scalable Architecture When you are building a structure, the best quality steel & cement are not going to make it strong enough to handle additional load and prevent structural failure, if its inherent architecture & design doesn’t support handling additional loads and stress. A flexible, robust, scalable architecture is essential to overcome limitations of linear performance scalability and make an application truly scalable. Scalable applications and systems must be designed by leveraging the following architectural principles and strategies:
Scalable Process
While a robust architecture along with elastic infrastructure and resources are key components, a scalable process is also a mission-critical need for application scalability. The following are essential practices that will enable businesses to build organizations and workflows to deliver process scalability:
When all these dimensions are addressed appropriately, businesses will benefit from truly scalable software systems, and will be capable of leveraging opportunities for growth and business expansion.
Microsoft’s holiday ad shows off translation technology
Microsoft unveiled a new holiday commercial to showcase its language translation software. The new holiday ad in which a little girl uses the software to talk to a reindeer promotes Microsoft Translator, a cloud service that can translate dozens of languages, highlighting an area where the software giant is competing directly with Amazon and Google. In the commercial, a six-year-old girl watches as her mother takes part in a conference call from home as her colleagues speak in Japanese and uses her Surface tablet to translate for her.
The influential Robb Report has put together a list of best technology gadgets as gift ideas for the holiday season. The list contains an eclectic selection of items ranging from zero-emission mobility solutions to stylish wearables and high-fidelity audio gear to robot security dogs, ensuring that there’s something for nearly every futurist on your holiday gift list.
Global cab services market drivers
In a recent report titled Global Cab Services Market Size, Price , Industry Outlook Report 2025, Adroit Market Research projects that the cab services market is poised for significant growth through 2025. The report identifies demand for easy transportation solutions and developments in technology such as cashless payments as key factors driving the growth of this industry. The report also identifies factors hindering the growth of this market such as changing government regulations and rules related to driver and road safety.
Google has an ambitious plan to make chips less hackable
Google plans to open source the Titan Security chip that is used in its servers and Google-branded smartphones. Alongside a handful of partners, including Swiss university ETH Zurich and Western Digital, Google is taking some of its tech and making it available to anyone through an initiative named: OpenTitan, an effort to make silicon chip design more consistent and less closed off. “Open-sourcing the silicon design makes it more transparent, trustworthy, and ultimately, secure,” says Royal Hansen​, Vice President of security at Google.
Future Apple iPhones will ditch all ports for wireless charging
Apple’s future iPhone would ditch all ports for wireless charging or audio, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has predicted. According to the analyst, the purported iPhone will be launched in the second half of 2021 and offers a completely wireless experience, without any USB-C port either. The wireless version is likely to be the highest-end model, MacRumours reports. Kuo also predicted that Apple will also launch a possible ‘iPhone SE 2 Plus’ with a full-screen design, no Face ID, small notch, and Touch ID enabled power button.
AWS announces new enterprise search tool powered by machine learning
At the AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced a new search tool called Kendra, which provides natural language search across a variety of content repositories using machine learning. Matt Wood, AWS VP of artificial intelligence, said the new search tool uses machine learning, but doesn’t actually require machine learning expertise of any kind. Amazon is taking care of that for customers under the hood.
Gartner Reveals Five Major Trends Shaping the Evolution of Analytics and Business Intelligence
Announcing the release of its Hype cycle for Analytics and Business Intelligence, Gartner stated: “as intelligence is at the core of all digital businesses, IT and business leaders continue to make analytics and BI their top innovation investment priority”. As per Gartner key trends include the ongoing transition to augmented analytics, focus on building a digital culture, and the scaling and operationalization of analytics initiatives.
Forrester predicts that 2020 will be the year that moves leaders’ attention to adaptability: the ability to understand and anticipate market dynamics — and rapidly exploit opportunities, both big and small. Factors including heightened values-based consumer activism; the lack of clarity around Brexit; automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics moving deeper into the organization; and recessionary fears due to socio-political uncertainty will make 2020 a raucous year, forcing leaders to embrace adaptability.
As part of its FutureScape: Worldwide Digital Transformation 2020 Predictions report, IDC highlighted the critical business drivers accelerating DX initiatives and investments as companies seek to effectively navigate business challenges, compete at hyperscale, and meet rising customer expectations. In this report IDC talked about ten industry trends that will impact digital transformation efforts over the next one to five years and offered guidance for managing the implications and implementation strategies.
Handling the challenges of upgrading from Dynamics NAV to D365 Business Central
This blog post provides a broad overview of the challenges and options for ISVs to upgrade their legacy applications from Dynamics NAV to D365 Business Central, which is Microsoft’s comprehensive business management solution designed for small to medium-sized businesses.
Embedded Analytics using Power BI
Analytics is the field of applying quantitative techniques to analyze and interpret data sets and discover broad patterns to guide decision making. Embedded Analytics helps businesses to seamlessly integrate powerful BI (Business Intelligence) capabilities directly into their applications, mobile apps, products, and web portals. With embedded analytics, you can make reports, dashboards, meaningful data visualizations, available at the fingertips of your customers, employees, partners or end-users – within their natural workflows.
Push Notifications in mobile Apps
Push notifications are messages that are typically used to update customers and users about any important changes, updates, or status through their mobile / desktop devices. These messages can be of a generic nature or personalized for a specific user. This blog presents an overview of push notifications, and describes its different components and features.
Biometric Authentication in mobile Apps
Majority of the current generation of mobile devices have some sort of access control features built-in, which can be leveraged by applications to provide an additional layer of security. This instructional blog describes how to implement biometric authentication (face & fingerprint) in mobile applications using Ionic framework.
How to build a Progressive Web Application (PWA) using Angular
This blog describes how to build a Progressive Web App (PWA) that uses modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like experience to users. These apps are deployable to servers, accessible through URLs, and indexed by search engines. Progressive websites act like native mobile apps, which can be pinned to the home screen of the mobile without having to “install”.
Razorpay integration Ionic Applications
Most ecommerce applications utilize a payment gateway to process their online payments. Payment gateways are intermediaries which help you connect and process a variety of payment mechanisms including credit cards, banks, wallets etc. This blog outlines step-by-step instructions to integrate Razorpay, which is one of the most popular payment gateways in the market.
New Customer Wins: We are delighted to welcome 
UK to the coMakeIT family. Cimteq offers innovative solutions to the cable manufacturing industry.
Celebrating Navratri and Dusshera: The Indian festival of Dusshera was celebrated by the entire coMakeIT family with lots of fun activities. Employees were encouraged to dress up in different colors for each day of Navratri (9 days). The office looked colorful and literally was like a mini-India, with people from different states of India, donning their respective regional attire.
Rejuvenate with a rustic escape to Pochampally: We took a collective day off and went on an outing to recharge and rejuvenate. Instead of treading the beaten path and heading to a resort, we chose to visit Pochampally, a village famous for its handwoven ethnic ware. It turned out to be an epic outing – we had loads of fun indulging in uniquely local games and activities, which are fast disappearing from the rapidly urbanizing landscape. We were also entertained by some amazing folk artists. Many of us literally took a trip back to our childhood!! We also visited some of the local weavers to learn about their craft and finished the day by shopping in the local markets.
