GigaSpaces, a provider of a platform for processing analytics data in real-time, will be making available professional services for free during the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of a Go Live initiative to reduce the total cost of acquiring and implementing its platform.
Yoav Einav, vice president of product for GigaSpaces, said the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic shows it’s apparent organizations of all sizes will need to reduce their IT costs. At the same time, many organizations will need to keep IT projects moving forward as nascent digital business strategies now become business continuity strategies, he said. Most of those business continuity plans will be contingent on providing a better digital customer experience based on real-time analytics.
GigaSpaces has been building up its professional services capability for the past several months and plans to tap into the expertise of third-party IT services providers to make sure there is enough available expertise in the right place to meet anticipated Go Live demand.
It’s still unclear to what degree IT projects will be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Undoubtedly, many IT projects are being paused or outright canceled, especially in vertical industry segments that have been among the hardest hit. Organizations that are moving IT projects forward, however, should expect to IT vendors to help reduce the total cost of implementing those projects by providing free additional services, as in the case of GigaSpaces, or at the very least much more flexible payment terms.
There are, of course, some vertical industry segments where organizations are building new applications that are highly relevant. One GigaSpaces customer, for example, is racing to build an application that will make it easier to find critical healthcare supplies that are frequently out of stock when needed most, noted Einav. Other organizations are simply moving to reduce costs by offloading queries from traditional databases.
In many cases, organizations will be evaluating which platforms to employ to build these applications not just on the raw performance attributes of the platform but also how quickly those platforms can be implemented. As such, the robustness of the IT services ecosystem, including its overall DevOps acumen, will become a more critical evaluation criterion.
In the meantime, a major transition away from legacy batch-oriented applications toward applications that process data in near real-time that has been gaining momentum now for several years should continue. Most organizations are now going to require the sub-second performance of a financial services application. However, visibility into supply chains in near real-time is becoming a bigger requirement, especially when many of the organizations that make up the supply chain are potentially not as economically resilient as they once were.
Less clear is the rate at which the transition to near real-time applications will now occur. However, at a time when competition between organizations is about to become more fierce than at any time in recent memory, many organizations are about to discover how big a difference modern applications can really make.
