Digital Bulletin - Issue 35 - December 21

DIGITAL BULLETIN Issue 35 | Dec ’21

THE LOYALTY PIONEERS Stephen Scott has spearheaded a digital transformation at IAG Loyalty, extending the company’s innovation trail and helping airlines to better reward their customers. We get the full story

JAMES HENDERSON Content Director

I

t feels like no sooner were we welcoming in a new year - mostly in the hope that it would mark the beginning of the end of the global pandemic - that we are now looking towards 2022.

If it feels tiring to still be reading about COVID-19, then believe me I feel just as fatigued writing about it. But the impact it has had on the enterprise tech space is simply undeniable.

Its most obvious impact on the business world saw cities, enterprise centres and office blocks empty almost overnight as working from home orders were implemented.

Behind the scenes, business leaders and tech teams were forced to scramble to upgrade their systems and infrastructure so that employees could continue their roles effectively.

The joke that the pandemic was the single most important driver of digital transformation didn’t go down well with some CIOs I spoke to, but there is an element of truth about it.

A report from IBM last month showed that the pandemic has played a huge role in the evolution of cloud computing, with the percentage of decision makers utilising a single private or public cloud falling from 29% in 2019 to 3% in 2021.

Some 59% said the health crisis accelerated their company’s transformation.

What is clear is that companies are unlikely to tolerate vendor lock-in again, meaning the public cloud hyperscalers will need to work harder than ever in 2022 to ensure interoperability and thrash out common standards.

For businesses, that should mean it becomes far easier to run workloads and connect systems across multiple clouds and ultimately achieve their transformation goals.

We’ve seen a number of the big players make pledges to do just that in recent months, but the proof will be in the pudding.

I hope you enjoy the issue!

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TALK TO US editorial@digitalbulletin.com business@digitalbulletin.com

Digital Bulletin spoke with a number of IAG’s leadership team and its aviation partners last month to find out how technology is being used to transform customer loyalty initiatives

INSIDE VIEW

Contents 12

Regulations

16

Funding

22

News analysis

28

Case Study

42

Looking at technology and COP26

Digital Bulletin looks a newly-minted unicorn Yugabyte

Has the single cloud had its day?

28

IAG

Transforming aviation’s passenger loyalty initiatives

Connectivity Arm is ready for the IoT economy

16

42

+

52

2 72

78 52

62 62

+

People Building a culture of accessibility and inclusivity

Debate Bringing low and no-code tools to the fore

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A Life in Tech

78

Closing Bulletin

Lifelong techie Mat Rule shares his pearls of wisdom

Rackspace Technology’s Andy Brierley on the digital transformation journey

MONTH IN REVIEW

NEWS UPDATE Digital Bulletin rounds up the news that shaped the enterprise technology space over the last month

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NEWS UPDATE

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS infrastructure by creating API-driven revenues,” said Ericsson’s CEO. The deal is one of the biggest in Ericsson’s history.

Headline: The UK government has ordered an in-depth investigation into the proposed $40bn takeover of Arm

by Nvidia.

Info: It said a report by the CMA watchdog found that the transaction may result in a substantial lessening of competition across four key markets: data centres, Internet of Things, automotive and gaming. The next phase will look at both competition and national security concerns.

Headline: Ericsson is to acquire cloud communications firm Vonage for $6.4bn.

Info: Vanage’s API-led approach to software connectivity will allow Ericsson to broaden its services for customers as 5G becomes more widespread.

“Customers will be able to better monetise investments in network

Headline: Meta deal to buy Giphy in doubt, could be blocked in a matter of days.

Info: The UK competition regulator is expected to block Meta Platforms’ (formerly known as Facebook) acquisition of GIF platform Giphy. If the decision is confirmed, it would be the first time the regulator has reversed a Big Tech acquisition. Meta acquired Giphy last May to integrate GIFs on Facebook in a deal then pegged at $400m by Axios.

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FUNDING Headline: Cloud security startup Lacework has raised $1.3bn from a Series D funding round.

Info: The company’s solutions are built for cloud, containers and DevOps teams. Security companies have attracted significant funding in recent months. Lacework’s latest round welcomed new investors, including Snowflake Ventures and Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Snowflake is one of its highest-profile customers.

Headline: Security firm Armis has raised $300m in funding led by One Equity Partners (OEP).

Info: The company specialises in IoT security but has ambitions to provide security to every asset in an organisation’s environment. It will use the cash to 10

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improve its products and fund acquisitions. The round values Armis at $3.4bn.

“Armis is the industry leader when it comes to asset visibility and security,” said OEP.

Headline: AI chip startup Cerebras Systems has raised $250m in funding, taking the company’s value to $4bn.

Info: The Series F round was led by Alpha Wave Ventures and takes the company’s value to $720m. The funding round enables Cerebras to further expand its business globally and deploy its CS-2 system to new customers, while continuing to strengthen its position in the AI compute space.

NEWS UPDATE

PEOPLE Headline: ​​Jack Dorsey has stepped down as chief executive of Twitter, the social media site he co-founded in 2006.

Info: He will be immediately replaced by the current chief technical officer, Parag Agrawal.

“It’s finally time for me to leave” Dorsey wrote in a statement, saying the company was “ready to move on.”

Dorsey will remain a member of the board until his term expires at the 2022 meeting of stockholders.

Headline: Data analytics leader Splunk has announced that its CEO Doug Merritt is stepping down after six years at the helm.

Info: The markets reacted unfavourably to the news, with Splunk’s share price falling by 18%. Graham Smith, Chair of

Splunk’s Board of Directors, has been appointed interim Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. Merritt will remain in an “advisory role”.

Headline: Nat Friedman is stepping down as CEO of GitHub. Info: He will be replaced by the company’s chief product officer Thomas Dohmke. Friedman led GitHub through its acquisition by Microsoft.

He will now take on the role of Chairman Emeritus. Dohmke has been at Microsoft since his company HockeyApp was acquired in 2015. He will ultimately report to Julia Liuson, head of Microsoft’s developer division.

Stay right up to date with the latest news shaping the enterprise technology sector with The Bulletin, available at digitalbulletin.com

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HOW TO SAVE THE EARTH Each month, Digital Bulletin analyses one of the digital policies that countries are enforcing with the goal of regulating the online world. In this issue, we look at the outcomes of COP26

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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DIGITAL POLICY

S

ix years after the Paris Conference, the leaders of 197 nations of the world met in Glasgow to search for a way of addressing the climate crisis.

During the conference, the path towards net-zero and the importance of privatesector commitments was made apparent.

Under the new ‘Glasgow Climate Pact’, countries committed to accelerating the pace of current decarbonisation plans by pledging to start strengthening their emission-reduction plans targets for 2030 by next year. Moreover, the parties agreed to create a legal framework for a global carbon market and recognised the need to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions by 45% by 2030. Some considered this pledge as promising, while others saw it as being insufficient to address the climate crisis.

“The final last-minute agreement made between countries at COP 26 fell short of those actions recognised by scientists as necessary to limit rising temperatures to 1.5C,” says Simon Robinson, author of Deep Tech and the Amplified Organisation and CEO of Holonomics. “The result is that we are still collectively facing a potential planetary catastrophe, with poorer nations being hit the hardest.”

Often, the law follows technology.

However, when it comes to addressing climate change, the conferences’ pledges

are a call on innovators to develop new technologies that can realise those goals.

In cases such as the UK, this call can soon turn into a legal requirement.

Currently, relatively few businesses have yet to make clear, detailed plans for how they will achieve the net-zero commitments of the countries where they operate. However, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak reiterated at COP26 that the Treasury would require UK-listed companies to release net-zero plans by 2023. It is only a matter of time before regulators worldwide follow that example.

“COP26 marked a turning point in how the private sector regards the climate crisis,” says Simon Daniel, Founder of Moixa. “As we enter into the implementation phase where decisive action needs to be taken by governments and the private sector, it is clear that we are ISSUE 35

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Simon Robinson CEO of Holonomics

Nick Mills General Manager, EMEA, CircleCI

Simon Daniel Founder of Moixa

Sam Gooder Head of Operations, EP&T Global

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galvanised around a firm goal. If we’re to stand a chance of keeping the increase in global temperature at 1.5C, we need everyone at the table.”

There are many technological solutions that can contribute to reducing carbon emissions, for example by replacing personal computers with low-energy data centres. Moreover, other areas that technological innovation will contribute to include smart cities, mobility and vehicles, energy-efficient architecture and reduced waste in food production and consumption.

The technology sector also has to make itself sustainable. Currently, the modern technology stack is made up of a set of different, complex, and physically distinct components and services provided by a digital and physical supply chain, whose carbon footprint is difficult to measure. Nonetheless, if the net-zero target is to be met, companies will need a specific and detailed plan to achieve it.

“Pledges must be backed up by concrete solutions,” says Nick Mills, General Manager, EMEA at software development platform CircleCI. “If companies want to make changes for global impact, they need to start reviewing every aspect of their business, all the way down to their software development choices.

“Taking action to optimise software delivery is a concrete, actionable, and urgent step all technology firms need

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to adopt for two reasons: more efficient technology has a huge part to play in reducing resource consumption and depletion, and impacts on climate change. Additionally, it’s just good practice to make better and more efficient services fitted for the modern technology stack. The answers are straightforward, but the execution requires skilled and focused developers collaborating across teams and companies.”

The private sector is under growing scrutiny from both customers and institutional investors when it comes to sustainability efforts. During COP26, UN Secretary-General, António Guterres announced that the UN will establish a “group of experts” to propose clear standards for measuring and analysing net-zero commitments from companies.

This will expose the practice known as ‘greenwashing’, create international

standards on net-zero and reward those companies who have adopted strong net-zero strategies.

Until now, most of the sustainability commitments have been voluntary.

However, the time when they become the law might not be too far ahead and when that happens, companies need to have prepared.

“It all starts with measurement – what gets measured gets managed – once it becomes known where energy is being used, then data can be analysed and steps can be taken to optimise and reduce wastage,” says Sam Gooder, Head of Operations at EP&T Global.

“In essence, net-zero boils down to good measurement of current metrics, improving the performance of assets, improving the renewable mix of the energy used and then offsetting any remainder. As it stands it remains too easy for companies to commit to net-zero and complete this by focussing on the latter two areas; Greenwashing fundamentally won’t solve the climate crisis.”

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A BASE FOR GROWTH Yugabyte has made great strides in 2021, topped off by a bumper funding round. As a newly-minted unicorn, it is targeting rapid growth for its cloud-native database

INTERVIEW: James Henderson

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FUNDING

C

ongratulations on the Series C funding round, what are your initial thoughts on the raise?

Having successfully closed $188 million in an oversubscribed Series C funding round, we are thrilled to have more resources at our disposal to help us better serve our customers, and continue to grow the market.

As organisations globally embrace digital transformation and strive to become more data-driven, the need for a cloud-native database that can scale with them also grows.

YugabyteDB was built to address this expanding market and to meet the current and future needs of any business, regardless of their cloud infrastructure. We are now even better placed to support our customers and realise our ambitious growth strategy.

Could you tell us a bit about Yugabyte and its ambitions?

Yugabyte is the company behind YugabyteDB, the open source, high-performance distributed SQL database for building global, cloud-native applications.

YugabyteDB serves business-critical applications with SQL query flexibility, high performance and cloud-native agility. This allows enterprises to focus on business growth instead of complex data infrastructure management. YugabyteDB

has global customers across all verticals, including retail, financial services, IoT, ecommerce and telecommunications.

The business was founded in 2016 by former Facebook and Oracle engineers, who recognised the demand for the database’s geographic data distribution, horizontal scalability and transactional capabilities.

The open source SQL database industry is in the early years of transformation to cloud native applications and databases, and technology transitions usually play out over a decade or two. With this in mind, we are building Yugabyte with a long term perspective, whether it is architectural decisions like full PostgreSQL compatibility through code reuse, or best-in-class developer experience.

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How does Yugabyte plan on using the funds from the raise?

The influx of capital will be used to further grow Yugabyte’s field and engineering teams and fuel the company’s expansion into new markets. EMEA continues to be an important strategic focus.

The funds will enable faster enterprise adoption of the Yugabyte Cloud product offerings, which deliver a streamlined operational experience for running YugabyteDB in any public, private, or hybrid cloud, or Kubernetes infrastructure. Growing customer adoption and international demand drove this additional round of funding to accelerate product velocity and go-to-market efforts.

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How important was it to have new and existing investors participate in this round?

It was a very important and a welcome endorsement of our strategy from both our existing and new investors. The latest round, led by Sapphire Ventures, includes participation from Alkeon Capital, Meritech Capital, and Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, as well as existing investors Lightspeed Ventures Partners, 8VC, Dell Technologies Capital, Wipro Ventures, and others.

This round brings the company’s total funding to over $290 million and values Yugabyte at more than $1.3 billion.

We are particularly honoured to have

FUNDING

YugabyteDB was built to address this expanding market and to meet the current and future needs of any business, regardless of their cloud infrastructure”

Sapphire Ventures President, Jai Das, join the Yugabyte Board of Directors. We are thrilled to have more resources at our disposal to help us better serve our customers, and are excited to draw on Jai’s wealth of knowledge in this space going forward.

It takes the company’s funding to-date to almost $290 million, are we likely to see any further rounds in the near future?

We have no plans for further rounds in the near future. We are focused on delivering value to our customers globally, further improving YugabyteDB, and delivering on our business strategy.

Could you speak to us about some of the highlights of 2021?

2021 was our landing year in Europe.

We have built the core team, and for a ground-breaking technical product like YugabyteDB, that means attracting very strong technical people. They’re not easy to find, you can’t rush this part of the process, but we are more than happy with the great people we have in place. Our team has many years of database experience with some of the most prestigious and innovative data companies in the world.

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We expect 2022 to be the year that more enterprises realise the database underpinning their applications must be cloud-native”

able to transfer skills and give them the best possible technical assistance. We’re simultaneously building our customer base in Europe, which includes a mix of forward-thinking corporates and high-growth start-ups.

What are your ambitions over the next 12 months?

Soon we’ll be telling the success stories of our early adopters. When that happens, we expect momentum to build rapidly, and we’ll be ready to meet demand with offices and staff across multiple territories in EMEA. 20

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The industry is already seeing wide acceptance of cloud-native applications: microservices, virtualisation, and containerisation. We expect 2022 to be the year that more enterprises realise the database underpinning their applications must be cloud-native, or their digital transformation initiatives will stumble.

What are some of the longer-term goals for Yugabyte?

Yugabyte aims to be the default distributed SQL database for cloud-native systems of record. Resilient, global, and scalable. Resilient, because modern

FUNDING

cloud applications must be constantly available. Global, because they must be available everywhere. Scalable, because they need to grow with business needs.

Cloud-native architectures are still aspirational for some organisations, but they represent a significant wave, and Yugabyte is well poised to ride it. However, we already know that’s not the end of the story. More and more data and processing is going to move to the edge in the coming years. Gartner has predicted as much as 75% by 2025. For Yugabyte, distributed deployment is the default, which positions us perfectly to ride future waves.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Anyone who knows me knows that a big focus of my long career in technology has been helping US data innovators bring their technology to Europe. I’ve had some exciting adventures over the years – Netezza, Sequent, Thoughtspot, Tivoli and others. But Yugabyte has possibly the most potential of them all.

Operational databases are the core of business operations, but as the world moves to the cloud, old monolithic databases just aren’t fit for purpose.

Yugabyte is and we can’t wait to create and build that future together.

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The next era of cloud computing A single cloud approach is on the way out, according to an IBM report. Digital Bulletin looks at the key findings and asks three experts what is driving the trend and how technologists should be planning for the future of cloud computing

AUTHOR: James Henderson

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NEWS ANALYSIS

T

he age of the single cloud approach is over, according to a new study from IBM. It is the headline takeaway from a global study on cloud transformation carried out by Big Blue.

It shows an extraordinary shift in behaviour from enterprises when it comes to cloud computing, with only 3% of respondents reported using a single private or public cloud in 2021, down from 29% in 2019. IBM says the figures show that hybrid or multicloud cloud is now the dominant IT architecture, and it is hard to disagree.

“In the beginning of their cloud journey, many companies dabbled with several different clouds that created complexity and disconnected piece parts, potentially opening them up to major security

threats,” said Howard Boville, Head of IBM Cloud Platform. “[The] findings reiterate that security, governance and compliance tools must run across multiple clouds and be embedded throughout hybrid cloud architectures from the onset for digital transformations to be successful.”

Indeed, four in five of respondents said workloads being completely portable with no vendor lock-in is important or extremely important to the success of their digital initiatives.

It chimes with one of Microsoft’s key announcements from its Ignite event.

The tech giant revealed a number of new technologies that will enable its customers to run software services such as database tools both inside its own data centres, but also in data centres owned by the likes of AWS, Oracle and Google.

Speaking to Reuters, Microsoft’s cloud and AI chief Scott Guthri said the decision has been key in persuading some of its customers to run its services in situations where they cannot use Microsoft data centres.

“The challenge with higher-level services historically has been the concern of ‘lock in’ - what happens if I can only use them in your data centre?” he said. “That freedom of movement causes customers to feel much more comfortable using those services.”

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As with just about every enterprise technology trend, the global pandemic has played a central role when it comes to the acceleration of changing infrastructure preferences.

“IBM’s report does suggest that hybrid cloud is the dominant IT architecture as a direct result of the speed in which organisations moved at the beginning of the pandemic. Rather than being strategically orchestrated, the shift was caused by companies having to adapt quickly and completely transform their IT infrastructure,” says Marc Lueck, CISO EMEA at Zscaler.

“Beforehand, many took a monolithic approach to cloud provision, but this has now changed completely. When enterprises were faced with this situation, they quickly realised the benefits of choosing the best platform for particular applica24

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tions. This meant they needed to relinquish that monolithic strategy and have services running within a matter of weeks, rather than a number of years, which was often the case prior to the pandemic.”

Andrew Oliver, Senior Director of Product Marketing at MariaDB, says there are a number of factors at play that are attracting businesses away from single source cloud and towards more complex infrastructure arrangements.

“There are a few reasons that businesses are pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy,” he says. “There are some industries like manufacturing where purely public cloud deployment is neither desirable nor practical - for example, manufacturing shop floor systems where latency is of the essence.

“These businesses use the public cloud as a disaster recovery site to stay

NEWS ANALYSIS

up if there are problems with the local system. The latency of going to the public internet is not desirable for their day-to-day operations.

“Some companies are also hybrid as part of an ‘edge’ strategy. They keep local systems for high-frequency data - even if the final data lives on a DBaaS [Database-as-a-Service]. Others are hybrid because of security policies or regulations, and some are hybrid because they have legacy systems and migrate over time as they refresh applications. There is not one single reason - and reasons also vary by industry.”

The figures strongly suggest that a tipping point has been reached in terms of companies relying on a single public or private cloud, but there are still scenarios where that approach might be most suitable, according to Lueck.

“A single cloud approach allows organisations to know their IT environment, meaning they will have more visibility from a security perspective.

One of the most difficult elements of a CISOs role is understanding what has to be protected, so visibility is paramount. Multicloud footprints make that difficult without specific tooling.

“There are scenarios where multicloud might be preferred, but it’s essentially about finding a balance. If an organisation is able to understand the difficulties with management, access, and visibility, then

they can assess how resilient the environment needs to be for faster success.”

Other key findings from the IBM report include 64% of respondents saying they viewed industry-related regulatory compliance as an obstacle to the business performance of their cloud environments. The study also revealed that enterprises need to assess how they use the cloud in terms of adoption, velocity, migration, speed, and cost savings opportunity.

Part of the desire for speed and velocity is being fulfilled by running apps and services at the edge by bringing computing closer to original sources of data. It is a trend that is expected to surge in the next few years and an area public cloud service providers are already integrating into their offerings.

Marc Lueck

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“The public cloud vendors have a large number of locations so they provide an instant edge strategy for their customers,” says David Friend, Co-founder, President & CEO of cloud storage startup Wasabi.

“Using a cloud vendor is a much more efficient way to get a large number of points of presence in the field. In addition to the hyperscalers, however, there are CDN [content delivery network] vendors who have large numbers of edge locations that are now offering distributed compute at the edge of the network, in addition to their traditional CDN business.”

Unsurprisingly, Friend says that the preference to migrate infrastructure to clouds will only increase, with organisations still showing a degree of restraint by keeping some workloads on-prem.

“What I think will change, however, is that rather than Microsoft, Amazon, 26

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and Google owning nearly the entire pie, there will be more vendors offering a wide range of best-of-breed services that channel partners can assemble into solutions that are superior from a performance or cost perspective than what you can get by running 100% in one of the hyperscalers.

“In this sense the market will evolve more like how the hardware world did.

It started with a very few dominant vertically integrated vendors like IBM and evolved to a rich environment of vendors specialising in various pieces of the computing pie.”

Friend concludes that while some technologists seem reluctant to give up on the on-prem environment, they are swimming against an increasingly strong tide.

“CIO should be looking five years ahead to envision what his infrastructure will look like in the future. They should be making

NEWS ANALYSIS

plans for how he gets from an all-on-prem infrastructure to a hybrid model, and then ultimately to an all-in-the-cloud model that’s where the world is headed.”

Oliver says there are actually only a select few businesses that require private infrastructure and that businesses should think about simplifying their systems.

“If you do not have a good reason to run it locally, run it on the public cloud.

It’s simpler, more cost effective and there simply is no reason for anyone outside of the technology business to own or lease servers without a regulation or hard latency requirement [i.e. manufacturing],” he says.

David Friend

“Additionally, preserve your right to leave and negotiate for a better deal - for most companies that means multicloud and avoiding Cloud Service Provider proprietary services. Most importantly, take the opportunity to simplify. If you have a multitude of different databases, try to find one that can handle mixed workloads for all of your everyday applications. Ideally, go to one solution that is versatile rather than 100 point solutions.

“Focus on software that uses a new horizontally scalable architecture.

Predicting capacity is really hard.

Even if you do it well you have cost overruns and performance underruns, so focus on things that let you change to meet dynamic business needs and avoid complexity.”

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CASE STUDY

REWARDING LOYALTY Loyalty is big business for airlines, a fact never demonstrated more than during the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital Bulletin meets the digital team at IAG Loyalty - the organisation behind the frequent-flyer programmes of British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Vueling and LEVEL - to track its multi-year digital transformation, and to learn more about the future of product and customer-centric loyalty from this industry pioneer PROJECT DIRECTOR: Richard Durrant AUTHOR: Ben Mouncer VIDEOGRAPHER: Fraser Harrop PHOTOGRAPHER: Krystian Data

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IAG LOYALTY

STEPHEN SCOTT Chief Digital Officer, IAG Loyalty

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he travel sector, like most industries, has faced some turbulence over the last 18 months. The coronavirus pandemic temporarily shut down routes around the world and, for airlines especially, focus turned to other revenue streams.

IAG, or International Airlines Group, responded positively to this challenge. The group, which owns British Airways, along with other European airlines Iberia, Vueling, Aer Lingus and LEVEL, saw IAG Loyalty - its “centre of excellence” for the development of loyalty products and services for its airlines and other partners - buck trends.

Online customer transactions and volumes for its Avios currency were up compared to 2019, two billion Avios were redeemed, and new partnerships with the likes of Santander and Nectar were sealed.

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The resilience shown by IAG Loyalty is a neat justification for a digital transformation programme the company has been running since 2018. Recognising the value of IAG Loyalty and Avios to its core business, IAG set about optimising the technology and teams in this area.

Today, IAG Loyalty is in growth-mode, ready to capitalise on an industry welcoming back passengers.

In the airline loyalty space, IAG Loyalty has always been a pioneer. The company has its origins in Air Miles, a ground-breaking frequent-flyer programme formed in 1988 and soon adopted by British Airways.

When British Airways merged with Iberia in 2011 and formed IAG, it innovated Avios as a single currency to operate across both

IAG LOYALTY

loyalty programmes and offer more value to customers.

But as IAG added more airlines and its loyalty demands increased, it recognised the need to innovate again: this time it wanted to uproot its entire technology real estate, creating a single platform for multiple loyalty programmes and from where it could spin up new products and services for its growing range of partners much faster than before.

“For us, it’s a wholesale change to the business,” says Stephen Scott, Chief Digital Officer since 2017 and formerly IAG’s Head of Global Innovation. “It essentially moves the business from using corporate processes to one that is fast, agile, keeps up with the pace of the market, which is continually changing now, and uses modern processes and tools.”

This work has been undertaken because loyalty programmes are increasingly important revenue generators for airlines.

Frequent-flyer programmes have grown from add-ons targeted at a small number of customers to standalone businesses.

Loyalty today doesn’t just encompass air miles but the whole ecosystem of travel from hotels, car rentals, restaurants and more - as well as ecommerce. IAG Loyalty has partnerships with more than 3,000 retailers.

It’s not just about revenue opportunities and growth, either, but equally establishing an ongoing and personalised relationship with flyers in this customer-centric era. “A loyalty programme for us is a way to allow us to make our customers feel recognised and feel special,” says Dave O’Donovan, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Aer

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For us, it’s a wholesale change to the business.

It essentially moves the business from using corporate processes to one that is fast, agile, keeps up with the pace of the market, which is continually changing now, and uses modern processes and tools” Stephen Scott

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IAG LOYALTY

Lingus. “It’s actually a key differentiator for us, both in our short haul market, where we compete with low-cost carriers, but also long haul where we compete on price.

Loyalty is really important from a retention perspective.

“Aer Lingus and IAG together recognised in our respective businesses the need to change the way we think about projects, to start thinking about products, and particularly start thinking about regular release of value.”

Over the last three years IAG Loyalty has completely rebuilt its core products, moving them onto a cloud-hosted microservices platform with event-driven architecture.

This includes its currency product, which lets members collect and redeem Avios, its membership product for customers to enrol, manage their balance and share benefits with friends and family, and crucially its data products, which enable IAG Loyalty to deliver data in realtime to its partners.

All are offered as headless services and supported by the scalability, security and resilience of the cloud - a proposition that James Walker, Global Loyalty & Identity Platform Product Leader, sees as compelling.

“We have built a more cohesive set of products across our platform, which enables our partners to be able to integrate and access those in their own channels,”

he says. “We’re now able to offer our loyalty products and services to multiple different sectors too, and we can either power that through Avios or provide a different currency.”

A critical partner to IAG Loyalty on this journey has been Comarch. A software company founded in Poland, but today with multinational operations, Comarch has been delivering loyalty management solutions to the travel industry since 2010.

Comarch Loyalty Management for Travel (CLM) is an end-to-end platform for the administration of loyalty programmes, providing the digital experience to members and data analytics to users.

The two organisations first worked together in 2014 when Comarch relaunched the SME loyalty programme for British Airways and Iberia, a proposition that it went on to launch globally. This latest project has built upon the trust developed over the last six years, with IAG Loyalty migrating millions of members onto CLM. “We have around 100 million transactions per annum and we send API requests to their platform at a rate of 1,000 requests per second. We demand a lot from Comarch and it delivers,” says Walker.

“The key strength of the Comarch platform is ultimately the configurability.

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A loyalty programme for us is a way to allow us to make our customers feel recognised and feel special” Dave O’Donovan

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the fact that we’re able to host multiple programmes on a single platform.

“Comarch are a fantastic bunch of people to work with. They’re fully committed. Like us, they’re experts in their field and incredibly passionate.” *** For IAG Loyalty, this transformation project has gone far beyond just technology. Part of Scott’s role as Chief Digital Officer has been to align the whole business around his team’s work, ensuring that it went further than an IT programme to something that would fundamentally change IAG Loyalty for the better.

IAG LOYALTY

Comarch delivers its end-to-end loyalty management platform to IAG Loyalty. The company’s VP Consulting Piotr Kozlowski (left) chats with James Walker.

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Comarch provides an all-in-one suite of loyalty management & digital marketing tools powered by AI & Machine Learning.

Use it to connect with and engage your customers on all fronts.

More information at loyalty.comarch.com

CASE STUDY

We have built a more cohesive set of products across our platform, which enables our partners to be able to integrate and access those in their own channels” James Walker

Technology was just one of five key priority areas for Scott, with the same focus given to processes and ways of working, development methodologies, culture, and recruitment.

“The journey of digital transformation really does start with business process and business stakeholder buy-in,” he says. “If you don’t have that upfront, you can’t digitally transform as much as you want to.”

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Work began first on governance processes, funding models and business processes, with the aim of creating a structure where decisions could be made quickly and more autonomy was given to teams. Then came the teams themselves - eschewing a functional, linear structure, Scott aligned his people around the value streams of the business, and the KPIs

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(key performance indicators) of those value streams.

This was designed to slowly drop the boundaries between the business, commercial and technology.

“Our product teams consist of business people with commercial goals, and the technologists they need to deliver the products,” he adds. “And day-to-day, they report to those product owners to make

sure that they can deliver against the value.

This means we’re always looking for new ways of creating services and things that are important to customers.”

On the recruitment side, IAG Loyalty needed people who would fit in with a new culture around continuous delivery and improvement. Scott speaks about “curiosity” and individuals who wanted to continually learn as cycles of change became more regular. There have also been numerous success stories of existing employees - some who had never been involved in transformation projects reskilling and growing as valuable members of the team.

Agile methodologies have also been adopted not just in technology but across the whole business.

“We’ve always considered ourselves pioneers in loyalty. Air Miles was a pretty unique concept when it came out in 1988, so we’ve got a history of pioneering. And to continue that we have to remain curious.

We have to keep learning and digital transformation, and the elements of digital transformation, allow us to set that up both in mindset and in the tools and the methods we use to deliver.” *** The future is all about diversification for IAG Loyalty. With the groundwork of its digital transformation done, the organisation can ISSUE 35

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now turn its attention to offering loyalty products to more and more partners, both in the airline sector and beyond.

It wanted to create a set of loyalty products and services that could be provided to any company which wants to run or offer a loyalty programme, regardless of the industry.

“We have a highly talented, multi-skilled team within IAG Loyalty who are motivated to continuously innovate and develop solutions which adds value to our partners,” says Hayley Buckerfield, Head of Sales, Loyalty Products and Services. “This has taken us both out of our current geographies and also into different sectors where we can add value and where we can be a loyalty leader.”

For the airlines themselves, O’Donovan believes the personalisation and segmentation of loyalty offers will be the principal benefit of IAG Loyalty’s work.

“The idea of recognising who the customer is by their behaviour, and then personalising the offer, or the reward, to that customer based on what they will want, is going to be the thing that really resonates with our flyers,” he says. “No longer do you only get recognised because you fly a lot. Now you get recognised because you fly with us.”

Scott’s priority going forward is accelerating through IAG Loyalty’s growth phase. It is creating new products and services each week and driving expansion in both B2B and B2C markets.

We have a highly talented, multiskilled team within IAG Loyalty who are motivated to continuously innovate and develop solutions that will add value to our partners” Hayley Buckerfield 40

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IAG LOYALTY

It’s been a difficult time for the travel industry as a whole.

At IAG Loyalty we’re in growth mode, we’re really pushing forward, and we have a hunger to succeed” Stephen Scott “It’s been a difficult time for the travel industry as a whole. At IAG Loyalty we’re in growth mode, we’re really pushing forward, and we have a hunger to succeed,” he says. “From our vision as a company and the portfolio that we see around the leadership team, down to the teams that are working on the ground, we are joined up and have visibility and transparency in everything that’s going on in the business.

“The thing I’m most proud of is how the team has stepped up every day. They’ve continued to grow and evolve with the

business and that’s a really nice position to be in.”

Buckerfield adds: “I joined IAG Loyalty fairly recently and have been delighted to be part of a team that’s continuously innovating and disrupting the loyalty industry.

It’s an exciting time as we emerge from the pandemic and start to really anticipate what customers are looking for in the market and what our partners need to do to help address their needs.

“Being part of a highly motivated team for me is very important and you can see the passion here every day.”

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ARM

ARMING FOR THE FUTURE Arm’s Mohamed Awad and Panch Chandrasekaran discuss how the company is transforming IoT software design and paving the way for a new generation of IoT-ready semiconductors

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

W

ill the future of Silicon Valley be silicon-less?

The demand for chips for Internet of Things is expected to grow by 15% every year until 2026, according to Mordor Intelligence. In addition, the number of 5G connections is expected to reach 692 million globally by the end of this year. As IoT and 5G become ever-present in society, the need for solutions that integrate both technologies and enable faster software development solutions is more acute than ever.

UK-based processor designer and software platform provider Arm whose acquisition by Nvidia is still under regulatory consideration - has

recently unveiled what it claims will be a unique approach to IoT design that will lay the foundation for a new IoT economy, removing the need to develop on physical silicon, enabling software and hardware co-design and accelerating product design by up to two years. In addition, the company claims that the majority of 5G infrastructure deployments will be powered

by Arm-based chips.

Mohamed Awad, Vice President of IoT and Embedded and Panch Chandrasekaran, Director, Carrier Infrastructure Segment Marketing, spoke to Digital Bulletin to explain how these new technologies will revolutionise IoT software design.

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The potential for IoT is massive, but as an industry, we are not making progress fast enough” Mohamed Awad

DB: Companies are more and more looking at IoT as the technology for the future. Can you tell me about its potential to change the world?

Awad: The IoT is a diverse market with incredible innovation already taking place across many applications, however, the IoT opportunity can be an order of magnitude greater. ROI and time to market can be drastically accelerated for the entire value chain. The IoT runs on Arm, with more than 70 billion Cortex-M based MCUs shipped to date, and millions of developers designing with Cortex-M today. Arm is therefore uniquely positioned to unite software and hardware developers to develop purpose-built compute for markets including general-purpose compute, industrial, home automation, smart cameras and storage. We can fuel a new IoT economy that rivals the shape and size of the smartphone industry’s app economy.

DB: What are the greatest challenges that come with developing chips for IoT? Awad: The potential for IoT is massive, but as an industry, we are not making progress fast enough. There is huge complexity and diversity of applications in the IoT. IoT developers are currently

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ARM

facing challenges such as slow product design, inefficient software development and lack of scale meaning software and services can’t be easily leveraged across multiple platforms.

We believe Arm Total Solutions for IoT will fundamentally transform the economics of IoT and accelerate product design cycles by up to two years.

DB: How will Arm Total Solutions for IoT simplify and modernise IoT software development?

Awad: Arm wants to accelerate the development of IoT, and at a moment where requirements for intelligence, security, connectivity, versatility, power and performance become exponentially hard to address for traditional

embedded developers, it is the right time to switch gears and change how IoT products are developed.

Arm Total Solutions for IoT combine robust foundations (Arm Corstone) with new technologies (Arm Virtual Hardware) that will accelerate product development and ROI for IoT. It is the first time such a complete set of elements to design IoT endpoints (both hardware and software) have been integrated and verified together, up to the application level. Through this combination of proven technologies and new elements specifically developed for Arm Total Solutions for IoT, we’re delivering a radical use-case led change to how IoT systems are designed that will enable partners to create best in class products based on these foundations.

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DB: What are the main benefits of a cloud-based virtual software model?

Awad: Arm Virtual Hardware provides a functionally accurate representation of a physical SoC, simulating its software-visible behaviour. It runs as a simple Linux application and it allows developers to run and test IoT software directly in the cloud. We believe this will accelerate design cycles by up to two years. With Arm Virtual Hardware, we’re putting technology in the hands of millions of software developers that before just wouldn’t have access to it. It’s an entirely new way for software developers to innovate and develop for diverse IoT devices – all in the cloud. Now, IoT product developers can start writing code months, or even years, before the final hardware is available.

DB: These new improvements in the technology also come with a transformation of the whole design process. Can you explain how?

Awad: Embedded design hasn’t changed much over the last 25 years since I was an engineer, but Arm Virtual Hardware is now enabling parallel hardware and software codesign, and bringing new cloud-native development benefits to IoT. The scalability of the cloud means embedded developers 46

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can adopt more modern and agile development methodologies like continuous integration / continuous deployment without having to build and maintain hardware farms. It also means machine learning developers don’t have to become embedded developers and worry about investing in a new hardware infrastructure to take advantage of diverse Arm-based IoT edge and endpoint devices. Through Arm Virtual Hardware we are simplifying embedded software development and enabling it to begin well ahead of silicon availability.

ARM

There is a reason why Arm is a leading architecture in both technology segments; a powerefficient compute system is critical to both IoT and 5G”

Panch Chandrasekaran DB: Arm is also providing chips that power most of the world’s 5G infrastructure. Why is it important to ensure that 5G and IoT technologies are integrated?

Chandrasekaran: 5G has evolved to more than an incremental update generation over generation, and it is now enabling various new use cases.

The data throughput is three orders of magnitude higher, but it also enables extremely low latencies and the ability to connect millions of devices to the ISSUE 35

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network. The next era of connectivity is extending beyond people to connecting billions of devices. This is where the IoT infrastructure and 5G infrastructure overlap and there is a reason why Arm is a leading architecture in both technology segments; a power-efficient compute system is critical to both IoT and 5G. 48

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DB: What is the Arm 5G Solutions Lab? Chandrasekaran: The Arm-based Open RAN ecosystem has been growing rapidly in areas such as small cells, macro cells, cloud cells, packet core, and RAN Intelligence Controller. To accelerate innovation, the industry needs to move from siloed one-to-one engagements

ARM

to a many-to-many collaboration. There are infrastructural bottlenecks – such as access to hardware, test equipment, lab space etc. – as well as operational bottlenecks like multi-party agreements, access control, and security. Through the Arm 5G Solutions Lab, we are aiming to remove these elements of friction and accelerate innovation for network infrastructure by providing a place for Arm’s hardware and software ecosystem partners to come together and demonstrate end-to-end solutions in a live test environment.

Through our partnership with leading telco system integrator, Tech Mahindra, the Lab will provide key building blocks such as secure remote access to state-of-the-art equipment, end-to-end components from UEs to radios, Arm ecosystem hardware and software – all of which are intended to lower the barrier to work together. Our partners can work on end-to-end solution integration, validation of proof of concepts and benchmarking activities for networking workloads. By working closely with operators, we can enable blueprints for use cases that would help get the solutions closer to deployment readiness.

DB: Tell me about Arm’s new ecosystem initiative, Project Centauri.

What are its goals and how does it plans to achieve them?

By streamlining and modernising IoT software development and accelerating product design cycles by as much as two years – we truly believe this will transform the economics of the IoT” Mohamed Awad Awad: Project Centauri, a new ecosystem initiative for Cortex-M, will drive the standards and frameworks needed to grow serviceable markets and scale IoT software innovation. Thanks to the easy portability of the whole software stack, Project Centauri enables the capitalisation of software investments, instead of reinventing the wheel when migrating from one chip to another, or when building a family of products relying on SoCs or ASICs from multiple sources. Project Centauri and Arm Virtual Hardware are both part of Arm Total Solutions for IoT. ISSUE 35

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DB: Where do you see Arm and the chip industry going in the next three to five years?

Awad: By streamlining and modernising IoT software development and accelerating product design cycles by as much as two years – we truly believe this will transform the economics of the IoT. In the next five years, I think we’ll be able to demonstrate how powerful being able to develop on Virtual 50

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Hardware can be in accelerating development on Arm silicon.

Chandrasekaran: The infrastructure market is going through an exciting phase right now. The world is not only becoming more connected through various devices, but where compute is happening is also expanding from the devices where the data is generated, to the edge where time-critical data processing happens, and all the way to

ARM

the cloud-powered by large data centres.

In the next five years, I think we’ll see fast and reliable connectivity to link the various compute elements together aided by wireless technologies like 5G and 6G, further “cloudification” of functions through the adoption of cloud-native software frameworks, and new approaches to growing computing needs through the heterogeneous implementation of the compute subsystem with hardware accelerators augmenting CPUs

for time-critical functions to maximise performance/watt.

Compute efficiency is part of Arm’s DNA. Spanning markets like 5G infrastructure, IoT, automotive and end-user devices, Arm reaches over 70% of the global population. With the vast ecosystem of Arm solution developers, we are in a unique position to bring the industry together to accelerate innovation around 5G infrastructure and the use cases that drive them.

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CELEBRATING DIFFERENCE What can neurodivergent people bring to the industry? Sarah Francis, Senior Product Manager at YouGov, shares her experience as a neurodivergent woman in tech and discusses how companies can build a culture based on accessibility and inclusivity

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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“

I

’ve got a really good, but often very frustrating, brain.” This is how Sarah Francis, Senior Product Manager at YouGov, opens her workshop at the Women in Silicon Roundabout Conference. Francis has recently joined YouGov after working for a decade in senior product roles across hospitality, housing, social care, leisure and fitness. She is responsible for the teams that build engaging and rewarding experiences for YouGov’s 15 million panellists in 55 different countries. And she’s also living proof that neurodiversity is a net positive for any organisation.

According to the CDC, in the US, one in seven people is neurodiverse, meaning that they have variations in 54

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their brain function. Despite this fact, neurodiverse people still face an unemployment rate of around 85%.

Only 7% of the companies surveyed by Universum EB Now in 2020 said they had a neurodiversity plan in place and the National Autism Indicators Report

by Drexel University reported that currently, only one in six autistic adults is in full-time employment, with less than 16% of survey participants having full-time paid work.

Neurodiversity is not a lack. The more diverse a team is, the better the final product it will produce. About 35% of the neurodivergent population have extremely high creativity, complex problem-solving skills, data and technology acumen, aptitude, and interest,

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according to an EY report. However, for many neurodivergent people, finding roles where they can be their authentic selves, and thrive can be challenging, and Francis was no exception.

“We’re in a global competition for talent,” she tells Digital Bulletin. “We are desperate to recruit people, we want the best and the brightest minds.

Neurodivergent people could be the talent that you want and need in your business. But it isn’t all sunshine and roses. It’s really hard sometimes. I’ve previously described my brain in a neurotypical world as being like a square peg in a round hole. My boss at the time described the business as 56

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having a ‘Sarah-shaped-hole’ in it that I was filling. About six months later, I had to leave that role because I didn’t gel with the team” “The world is built by and for the norm.

It’s a bell curve, and we are on the edges. That’s okay. Of course, the world can’t be recreated around a minority.

But that doesn’t mean that small changes can’t make a big difference.”

Francis has ADHD, and although that has not stopped her from having a very successful career in the tech industry, it does come with challenges. She gets bored easily when the work is routine and becomes frustrated when change and pace is slow. On the flip side, if the

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work is compelling, she can become hyperfocused – with a “forensic” eye for detail and a relentless commitment to delivery - which results in her working many late nights and frequently forgetting to eat. Her brain’s way of working also allows her to understand the world in a different way.

“In my case, I join the dots really fast, which is great if you want your lots joined; if you don’t want that,, or you’re happy with the status quo, it can be annoying,” she explains. “And by that I mean I understand quickly how a company operates or how a strategy, a meeting, a project is likely to play out, because I’ve been through them over and over in my mind.”

“I’ve been described as passionate and articulate, which is great. But the flip side of that in the past has been unpredictable emotional outbursts that leave everyone feeling uncomfortable, especially me. I’m getting better at managing that now, but emotional regulation is still a huge challenge that I’m working on every day.”

When she talks about her struggles, Francis is incredibly honest and selfaware, as she narrates how difficult it was for her to get a diagnosis and how her anxiety masked for years her ADHD, when it was just a symptom of it.

However, Francis has come a long way since then, and she has learned what to

We’re in a global competition for talent. These guys could be the people that you want and need in your business” Sarah Francis

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look for in a workplace. For example, she resigned within weeks from a previous role when she realised the culture and management style of the business wasn’t a good fit.

“I have learned to ask the right questions in interviews, which in that case, I didn’t,” she says. “And I can tell within a week or so of joining a company, whether it’s for me.”

In YouGov, Francis has found an inclusive culture and a manager with a leadership style that works well for her and where she is comfortable sharing how the business can get the best out of her.

In her case, she explains that she needs structure - clear tasks and deadlines but also a flexible schedule, where she is judged by the work done and outcomes

The world is built by and for the norm.

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achieved, and not the times or hours that she spends at her desk. In fact, since a lot of people on her team are in the US, she has moved her working schedule to be more in line with their work hours which also helps her personally.

“I’m senior enough now to have carved out a way of working that works for me,” Francis says. “I can advocate for myself well. But not everyone can. And that’s why it’s so important that I use my voice to help create an environment where people with these challenges can speak before they hit burnout. Inclusion helps everyone. A culture of flexibility about working hours and focus on results also helps mums who need to go and drop the kids off at school or dads who need to pick them up ” Simple changes can go a long way in ensuring that a workplace is inclusive to both neurodivergent and neurotypical people. Moreover, by implementing company-wide policies such as flexible working, companies can support all their employees.

From parents to introverts, the COVID-19 pandemic and remote work have transformed people’s relationships with their workplace. But Francis is adamant about making sure that things don’t go back to the way they were before, where working from nine to five is the expectation and “anything outside that a privilege.”

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Another thing that Francis stresses as essential is openness. Her company, YouGov, recently marked Mental Health Week, where members of the organisation shared their stories of struggling with different aspects of mental health, from postnatal depression to anxiety and childhood trauma, that she found extremely valuable.

“It demonstrated that we are a bunch of slightly broken people that come together and work together, building relationships with each other. Everyone is facing challenges you can’t always see.” Francis says. “I find that being open about this stuff helps. But it’s hard

to start these conversations and knowing that you’ve got a supportive boss or a colleague that cares and wants to listen to you makes a massive difference.

“If we can be a little bit more understanding, and a little bit kinder, it makes everybody’s life better. We’re not talking about sweeping giant changes here.

There are small cultural things that can make a difference.”

Rather than waiting for someone to request a change, she advocates for company leaders to start introducing these policies and changing their culture to attract and retain more diverse people.

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when they feel empowered,” she says.

“But if your culture isn’t inclusive you’re not going to attract the people that you want. There’s a lot of emphasis right now on racial and gender diversity, and that’s so important. The way people think, behave and learn isn’t quite so visible, but it still leads to an important diversity in the conversation.”

Prejudice can often hide great talent.

Francis talks about a former colleague, James, who is on the autism spectrum.

“He had huge nervous energy; he was constantly pacing up and down during his interview.” However, she describes 60

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him as “one of the best research minds I’ve ever worked with”.

Another former colleague, Peter, who has ADHD, was perceived as uncooperative and difficult to manage. However, once he was freed to lead and empower his team using his unique combination of strengths, he was brilliant at it and his team became the highest performing engineering team. A third, Joanne, who also had ADHD, was often late and had a chaotic organisational style that more structured types found challenging.

However, she had a talent for understanding other people and was able to

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take her department through a huge transformation and cost-optimisation project without losing a single person.

Small changes, such as recognising one’s own biases during interviews or offering small accommodations, can go a long way in helping people feel welcomed in their workplace and reach their full potential. However, Francis stresses that these must be real policies and not just words that companies use to promote themselves.

“It’s not a bunch of values on your website. It’s who you promote, why you promote them, how you reward them, and how much you publicly recognise them,” she says.

In a field where both being a woman and being neurodiverse are far from the norm, Francis feels lucky to be able to advocate for her colleagues and help create environments that are both diverse and inclusive. However, she admits that the diversity agenda is something that can be often surfacelevel, or an add-on to someone’s job, typically a woman’s. Although there has been a trend in recent years towards promoting diversity, she is aware that there is still a lot of work to be done in the path towards recognising the true value of these individuals.

“I’d like to see more companies promote and support leaders who embrace inclusion, and not just do it to

I’d like to see companies promote and support leaders who embrace inclusion, and not just to tick a box” tick a box,” she says. “When you truly recognise diversity, you not only get happier employees but you see the improved commercial performance that comes from having divergent thinkers and a diverse range of voices on your teams. And when leaders create that kind of culture and environment, they should be rewarded. We can’t make it yet another unpaid piece of work that (usually) women do; something that’s valuable to the business but isn’t rewarded.

“It should be part of every manager’s job to be inclusive. There should be a recognition that it’s not just soft and fluffy.. There are some cold, hard commercial reasons why this is a good idea. Let’s celebrate those as well.”

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DATA INTELLIGENCE

CRACKING THE CODE In this month’s debate, we ask five experts: “How can CIOs best implement and execute a low-code/no-code strategy within their organisations?”

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DEBATE

Fusion teams are critical

Victor Kuppers,

Vice President of strategy, Betty Blocks

By radically changing their approach to software development to include no-code/low-code (LCNC) development platforms, more and more organisations are becoming agile, improving competitive value and increasing employee engagement. Their newest secret is fusion development teams; teams that empower digitally-skilled and solutions-oriented employees to work sideby-side with the IT department to build apps using LCNC platforms.

A fusion team brings together people with diverse professional backgrounds who use data and technology to achieve shared business outcomes. Ideally,

a fusion team combines professional developers with citizen developers.

A citizen developer is a business person without coding experience who builds apps using a LCNC platform.

The citizen developers in these fusion teams are genuine problem solvers and easily recognised in the organisation.

They are often found managing and analysing datasets, automating tasks, developing websites and much more.

Trouble is, if you do not provide these innovative colleagues with the right tools, guidance and governance, you risk them creating shadow IT projects, ungoverned by the professional eyes of IT.

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A fusion team is about empowering problem-owners to become problem-solvers without relying on IT, but having access to IT’s guidance and support.

A citizen development mindset will result in a new way of working. This change can ultimately benefit everyone in the organisation, as well as clients and external stakeholders.

However, before that happens, your fusion team should learn key principles for good governance. Besides, you want to provide them with a platform in which they can safely develop applications, without the IT manager lying awake at night.

And that’s where LCNC platforms can really help. If you choose the right platform, with governance features and support, you have the perfect tool to help a fusion team achieve maximum returns. Solutions can be developed under the guidance of the IT department in a way that’s also compliant with the security standards of the business and which easily integrates into the company’s IT environment.

With fusion teams, what started as an innovative idea has become a pivotal moment for business-led tech. The use of LCNC combined with governance is an opportunity to make your workforce more productive, resilient, happier and better equipped for digital transformation.

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CIOs must understand teams and goals Florian Douetteau,

Co-founder and CEO of data science platform provider Dataiku

The rise of low- and no-code AI platforms isn’t just the proliferation of a new set of tools or solutions: it’s a new business model that will see business users find their own ways to add even more value with AI than data scientists have been able to add on their own. While data scientists will always be critical, a low- or no-code strategy represents a fundamental shift in mindset around data tooling — one where we’ll continue to see a bigger breadth of people access data and work with it on a day-to-day basis.

In order to see the immediate benefits out of a low- or no-code strategy, CIOs need to do their operational due diligence.

There are any number of low- or no-code options available, but it’s essential to vet and evaluate them to determine whether they meet organisational, cost, compliance, and functionality requirements.

In implementing low- and no-code tools, CIOs also need to understand their users and resources upfront. They will need to dissect each part of the

DEBATE

data journey to translate it into concrete organisational resources and needs, mapping those needs to the different data roles and profiles available.

A successful low- and no-code strategy is also about selecting the right internal business use cases. This means looking at the existing pain points that affect IT, tech, and business users to see how low- and no-code can best benefit each group. To start, businesses need to get data out of silos into a unified, analytics-ready environment. This is an essential step in using low- and no-code to scale AI deployment in a traceable, transparent, and collaborative manner.

Part of your strategy should also be identifying the tasks that are data science resource-heavy, and where a low- and

no-code approach can help. Smart data ingestion, processing dates and times, clearing complex text fields, combining datasets — even creating new machine learning models — these are all examples of tasks that can be done code-free on many platforms. Users may also be able to venture into code-free data pipelining, data preparation, and model training in order to scale out models in production with complete transparency.

Empowering business and other non-data science roles with low- and no-code visual tools is one part of the opportunity: however, your data scientists may also be able to leverage lowand no-code solutions to operationalise more models quickly versus a code-only approach.

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Focus on time saved Ian Funnell,

Head of Developer Relations, Matillion

It’s amazing how quickly new methodologies can gain traction in the technology industry. The use of low-code/ no-code is a perfect example. For developers no longer content with the thankless tasks of data management, these tools have transformed their role and helped them drive innovation in a short space of time.

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It’s easy to see why, too. Low-code and no-code solutions free up developers’ time in two crucial ways. First, they lessen the technical barriers to entry for non-IT workers across an organisation wanting to work with data, allowing data teams to spend more time on strategic data and technical initiatives that create impact and a competitive edge. Second,

DEBATE

they turbocharge IT productivity by automating tedious development tasks.

But it’s too simplistic for CIOs to simply see the adoption of low-code and no-code tools as a binary decision to automate a portion of developers’ workloads. Yes, they will democratise software development, enable the rapid development of applications, automate some aspects of data integration and better support data visualizations.

Those things are, of course, on every CIO’s wish list.

The key to transformation, though, is how CIOs direct developers to invest the time savings accrued by the introduction of automation. There’s a massive disconnect in organisations about how to approach analytics, with many stuck in a process-focused mentality. CIOs must push developers to dedicate greater resources to making analytics more useful, and focus on the collaborative aspects of data processing.

Low-code/no-code tools clear the path for developers to put meaningful ideas into production in a more agile

way. Developers become empowered to pursue projects that will further the goals of the organisation. By doing so, they become more fulfilled in their careers and want to stay; a worthwhile goal given the crazy demand for talent right now.

Of course, some tasks are easy enough for a machine to do: if they are, a machine should do them. In turn, we can give developers back the bandwidth for tasks that do require expertise, thought, and a human touch. Then we will be leveraging a data team’s full worth and value.

Low-code and no-code tools are undoubtedly here to stay, but are not a replacement for innovation: They are a catalyst. The skills and output of developers are incredibly precious. Without them, businesses can’t reap the truly valuable insights from their data, the key to ultimately differentiate and compete.

So above all, when implementing a low-code/no-code strategy, the first priority on your list, as always in business, should be people.

There’s a massive disconnect in organisations about how to approach analytics, with many stuck in a process-focused mentality”

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DATA INTELLIGENCE

Data pipelines must be addressed Nathaniel Spohn, VP EMEA, Fivetran

As companies grow, they constantly integrate new platforms and tools to uncover fresh operational insights, fuel growth and act on their customers’ wants and needs. But investing in new technologies without the right data governance and infrastructure in place often creates complexities at the expense of decision-making. Most data engineers are playing a losing game against time as they build and rebuild underlying data pipelines when they inevitably break.

This is where the combination of no-code tools and data pipeline automation can be a game-changer for CIOs. Tools like Airtable, SendGrid and Stripe all offer no-code options to help businesses collaborate faster on spreadsheet data, create email marketing campaigns and monetise products and services without the overhead. But the advantages these tools bring in terms of speed and insight can be quickly diminished if the valuable data generated is then not made accessible to the wider business.

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Decision-makers need comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date information from all areas of the business to understand where to prioritise investment and where customer experiences break down. What’s more, this data can help them get a real sense of their maturity and potential for implementing differentiating technologies such as machine learning. This is the next hurdle for data engineers.

Our research shows nearly all data engineers face challenges when building data pipelines. Every time a business integrates a new tool, it can take in-house data engineers over a week to write a bespoke code for the new data

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Shockingly, half of data engineers waste their time on manual data pipeline repairs on a monthly basis” source (known as a connector), and when the flow of data is interrupted – for example due to changes in the source application – it takes a full day’s work to patch up the code. Shockingly, half of data engineers waste their time on manual data pipeline repairs on a monthly basis.

Data pipeline automation takes the coding and delay out of this process.

Data engineers can deploy secure, pre-built connectors that automatically adapt when changes are made at the

source and make it easy to plug clean and fresh data into Business Intelligence systems. For example, using these connectors for Stripe, data from one-off campaigns can be seen in the context of all other purchases and subscriptions as well as wider customer data.

Ultimately, this not only alleviates the burden on data engineers – freeing them up to do more value-added work – but also empowers non-engineers across the business to drive growth and make better decisions based on data.

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The role of IT has to change Paul Crerand,

Field CTO EMEA at MuleSoft

To keep pace in an always-on digital economy, many CIOs are looking to implement low-code/no-code strategies to accelerate innovation. By enabling teams to drag and drop reusable application components to create new digital services, organisations remove the need for developers to write every line of code from scratch.

This greatly reduces the pressure on highly skilled developers, as they are able to build new services faster by re-using existing capabilities. It also

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empowers business technologists – employees outside of IT – to drive their own innovation projects, by reducing the need for them to know how to write code to build new services. Our research found that 86% of organisations said if business users could securely create their own connected experiences, using low or no-code, it would improve business outcomes.

For this to become reality, the whole organisation must instigate a cultural change. This requires everyone to

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buy into the idea that IT’s role is that of an enabler, rather than the department solely responsible for instigating and delivering digital projects. In this model, the responsibility of IT shifts to governing and curating a network of reusable ‘building blocks’ – existing digital capabilities that can be used to quickly compose new products and services, without needing to start from scratch every time.

This ‘composable enterprise’ model is best supported by a combination of integration, API management, and automation capabilities. This will enable developers and business technologists alike to use low/no code solutions to access

and consume existing digital capabilities to compose their own digital services, and automate processes to drive innovation everywhere, at the speed and scale that the business needs.

Use of these approaches will gain increased momentum in the next 12 months. 80% of organisations say they either already have a mature approach to enabling non-IT users to easily integrate apps and data sources through APIs, or that they are in the process of doing so. As digitalisation efforts, and demand for online services, continue to gather pace, the level of agility this unlocks will be crucial to organisations’ ability to thrive.

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A LIFE IN TECH

A life in tech

Sharing his technology pearls of wisdom this month is Mat Rule, CEO and founder of low code and automation fabric outfit Toca. Rule founded Toca in 2018, after 20 years holding numerous technical and consulting roles for companies such as Vodafone, Nortel, Atos and PA Consulting

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MAT RULE

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he five words I would use to describe myself are: tenacious, persistent, passionate, humble, curious.

I’ve always loved building things and creating solutions, which has extended into my career in business and technology. It’s probably in my genes to find a fix for any problems I come up against. Really, technology has always just felt like a hobby for me and a way to express my creativity.

I’ve always been inspired by British physicist, Alf Adams. Alf invented the strained-layer quantum-well laser, which contributed massively to modern communications and hence the advent of the internet. I like the fact that he had one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of all time, but still flies under the radar. His mission was to solve a problem and he got satisfaction in doing that. I like that it was enough for him.

I also read Richard Branson’s book at a really pivotal time in my life. I was stuck on the corporate ladder and struggling to express myself through technology in the way I really wanted to. The book ‘Screw It, Let’s Do It’, helped inspire me to make the change and start developing my own business.

Technology has always just felt like a hobby for me and a way to express my creativity” I enjoyed my time in both telecoms and consulting, but I needed more of a technical challenge. Many of the problems our customers were facing weren’t being solved in the most effective way. Their issues weren’t complex, but their tech landscape was, making it harder to overcome problems and digitally transform.

I wanted to go out on my own because I thought I had a better way of doing things. With Toca, I knew I had a solution that could simplify systems integration, speed up app development and streamline business processes, all while closing the high code skills gap through a no-code approach.

What I’d say to aspiring technologists is that it’s extremely important to learn your discipline. You can’t create good solutions without understanding the problem, so it’s critical to get stuck into as many projects as you can.

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Unless you see the necessity for change and understand where things aren’t working, you’ll be a technologist without context. Basically, just learn as much as you can, and your niche area of interest will come to you organically.

COVID-19 forced businesses to be more digitally-savvy, but as digital transformation continues to rapidly accelerate, organisations must keep up or risk extinction. Consumers have much higher expectations in the wake of COVID-19, requiring companies to respond quicker. Digital transformation is now inevitable, and digital stagnation is no longer an option.

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This puts huge pressure on those with old systems, data silos and unoptimised business processes. For these organisations to keep up with digital transformation, a piecemeal approach is likely most effective. Making small but frequent changes that enhance business processes will be more beneficial than trying to embark on a disruptive, business-wide digital transformation project.

Without a doubt, there’s been a strong swing towards remote working, especially as it’s been proven to work for businesses. However, I do think that as the dust settles and we go back into

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offices more regularly, employees will rediscover the value of socialising and collaborating in-person.

The pandemic has definitely helped create more work/life balance and I expect hybrid working to continue, but I believe the office will always be a key social network where people meet friends, partners and grow their careers.

Machines are incredibly useful at taking away mundane tasks from workers, but I think there’s always going to be some part of a process that a human will need to do. However, we do need to be more responsible with technology to strike this balance. Companies should work on building machines that support people in doing a better, more efficient job.

For example, Toca’s apps and automation fabric helps businesses digitally transform, but the technology is built around people and processes. The key is to create solutions that augment human capabilities, as opposed to replacing people with machines.

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Low/no-code is going to allow businesses to quickly and costeffectively address pent up demand in their organisation for new technologies”

Revolution. I’d say that automation is definitely going to be key in helping businesses achieve the agility they need to pivot and respond to whatever comes their way.

While the internet and mobile phones existed in 1991, nobody could’ve predicted their impact a decade later, let alone the effect of these technologies on our current day to day lives. The solutions for tomorrow’s problems may have already been created; organisations just have to be prepared to use technology in new and different ways.

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I think it’s becoming harder for us all to switch off, but it is very important to me. I have a motorbike which I like to take out for rides, I enjoy building random stuff in my garage and have two brilliant boys to take care of which keeps me grounded.

Low/no-code is going to allow businesses to quickly and cost-effectively address pent up demand in their organisation for new technologies. From internal portals and processes, through to customer engagement platforms, no code

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enables the creation of digital platforms with fewer resources.

survive, but thrive in the decades to come.

Eighty-six percent of IT decision-makers cite a lack of developers as their biggest digital transformation challenge. It’s becoming all too common – developers and IT departments facing huge backlogs, a lack of skilled staff to deliver on projects, and a pressure to do more with less. No code allows businesses to be more agile, as citizen developers can help build the solutions organisations need to not only

I feel like I already have my dream job, so for me it’s to just keep going.

I have big growth plans for Toca and want to keep helping more and more organisations transform their business processes.

Lastly, I’d say, if you have a product or concept you’re considering taking to market, don’t overthink it. It’s all a journey and nobody is an expert at the beginning.

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Andy Brierley, General Manager, UK, Rackspace Technology, on why the best next step on your digital transformation journeys might not be forward

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he value of digital transformation to organisations and their reliance on cloud services have been especially pronounced over the past two years. The resistance to, or scepticism of, technology that held back some organisations from improving and optimising their working processes was overcome by the necessity of finding ways to stay in operation during lockdowns.

This led many to accelerate their adoption of technology to support remote working and, in a majority of cases, to great success. What consequently developed was a new appetite 78

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for transformation and reinvention within organisations which are now looking further down this path about what could come next. But what many leaders are not considering is that the best next step might not necessarily be moving forward.

The legacy hangover In many cases, digital transformation has recently been embarked on more from the perception of ‘needs must’. However, the pace at which this adoption had to happen has meant that in some cases the appropriate foundations have not always been put in place.

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This means that organisations might mistakenly be thinking they are already in a position to push ahead with further digital transformation projects, when in fact there are issues in their existing infrastructure that could act as a barrier to the success and optimisation of current and future projects.

The longer that legacy hangover remains unaddressed, the greater an issue it becomes. So, instead of launching straight into the next stage of an organisation’s digital transformation, such as pursuing a multicloud strategy, now is the time to pause and reassess how current infrastructure meets ongoing needs.

Speed has also been misleading.

These sorts of projects typically take years to plot out and enact – and usually for good reason. The pandemic saw this timeline collapse down to a matter of weeks. While this should only be celebrated (and the teams that achieved this), it has set false expectations in other areas of the business.

In many cases, the projects needed to be turned around so quickly that IT teams were having to prioritise the processes that could be modernised and assess which corners could be cut.

And this cannot become the norm – no matter how ambitious a business’s plans for transformation.

In many cases, digital transformation has recently been embarked on more from the perception of ‘needs must’. However, the pace at which this adoption had to happen has meant that in some cases the appropriate foundations have not always been put in place” Putting foundations in place For a lot of businesses, what is now required is a turning back of the clock on their digital transformation journeys in order to fix the underlying problems.

Or to pause, reassess and reinforce their digital foundations. It may sound counter-intuitive that organisations with aggressive transformation plans should first look back. But the longer issues go unaddressed and the more advanced their infrastructure becomes, the more difficult resolving the legacy hangover will get.

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Organisations that were not even walking two years ago suddenly found themselves sprinting in their digital transformation projects” 80

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with business requirements, ensuring that any digital or cloud solution is suitable for a company’s operations and ambitions. There is no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to these kinds of projects, making it increasingly important to draw on the expertise available from trusted partners, who can help ensure that taking a small step back will set a company up for a prosperous long-term future. For instance, through the adoption of private cloud, which supports many legacy offerings. This can act as a first step “back” that will in turn empower organisations to become more forward-looking and futureproof

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their cloud architecture with a multicloud approach.

Marathon not a sprint No one wants to hold organisations back from achieving their digital ambitions. And the fact that business decision makers now feel more confident in adopting progressive solutions can only be a positive. But the rate of transformation over the past 18 months has been deceptive and any overconfidence must be tempered.

What we want to see now is companies feeling emboldened enough to make the right decisions for their IT

infrastructure today, by assessing their current status as much as envisaging their future requirements. If it is not quite the tortoise and the hare analogy, but there is definitely something to be said for taking the time to ensure new, modernised processes are being built on top of the right foundations.

Organisations that were not even walking two years ago suddenly found themselves sprinting in their digital transformation projects. Now they want to continue running, but they might benefit most from getting their technique right before they race any further ahead.

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