Altron: Improving customer experiences with more effective applications

The role of applications in driving an improved customer experience (CX) in today’s digital world should not be underestimated

When companies’ business applications fail to work as advertised, it could have a negative impact on the organisation’s reputation.

Furthermore, the desire for an instantaneous response is so great today that from a user experience point of view, in all likelihood, an application that takes too long to load can lead many customers to move on to a competitor.

This is a huge risk and something companies need to consider when developing applications, suggests Charl Venter, Practice Lead for IaaS at Altron Systems Integration (ASI). What they should be asking themselves is, what is the cost to the business if customers cannot transact on the application? What sort of monetary loss might we be facing, and what sort of damage will it do to our reputation?

“The real issue is that if there is a problem with the application, the traditional siloed war room approach, means that there will be little collaboration between the teams to solve the problem, increasing the length of meantime to innocence” he says.

“What is needed is a way of bringing everyone from the relevant operations teams - namely infrastructure, network, development and security - together in a way that allows them to collaborate in order to quickly determine where the problem lies and how it can be eliminated.” Venter notes that this is where the Full Stack Observability (FSO) solution comes in, as this provides insights into each touchpoint that connects an application to its user. From the internet, network, and cloud to the application and infrastructure, there are many dependencies along an application’s journey, he adds, which is why eliminating silos and increasing collaboration between the various teams is so vital.

End-to-end view

Because the different teams are connected, it is easy to track exactly where the outage occurred as well as the cause, he says. More- over, by providing an end-to-end full stack observability, it enables repairs to be affected rapidly. Ultimately, it reduces the potential downtime from days to hours, a critical difference in a world where uptime is more valuable than gold.

“ASI is the first systems integrator in the country to offer FSO as part of a new ap-pro- ach to IT management, where we are able to provide a zerotouch, AI-assistedmulticloud system. This can be provided to clients as a stand-alone solution that we implement, or it can form part of our managed services offering, Digital Operations Centre (DOC). “Our DOC team is highly certified and has many years of experience in dealing with these types of environments. You could say we have learned from past experiences and are able to leverage our vast professional experience and technical knowledge to deliver a world-class managed services offering.”

In fact, continues Venter, ASI is confident enough in its offering that it is prepared to offer customers a proof of concept (PoC) at no cost, to allow them a clearer under- standing of how this solution can really benefit them.

“Once we show the customer the type of insights, we can gather from their applications and how quickly challenges can be overcome and prevented, they are able to understand the true value of the solution.

“In the end, our goal is to move IT operations from reactive response to pre-emptive action, while enabling predictive remediation. FSO is the enabler for this, allowing companies to optimise their costs, reduce downtime, and improve productivity and capacity,” he concludes.