Musato Technologies Blog

Modern software development

Published January 25, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

Modern software development explained

Enterprises need software competency to deliver good digital experiences. Agile development is how enterprises get there. Every software development organization today seems to practice the agile software development methodology or a version of it. Or at least they believe they do. – Modern software development

Whether you are new to application development or learned about software development decades ago using the waterfall software development methodology, today your work is at least influenced by the agile methodology.

But what exactly is agile methodology, and how should it be practiced in software development?

Agile was formally launched in 2001 when 17 technologists drafted the Agile Manifesto. They wrote four major principles for developing better software:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Before agile: The era of waterfall methodology

Old hands like me remember the days when the waterfall methodology was the gold standard for software development. The software development process required a ton of documentation up front before any coding was done. Someone first wrote a business requirements document that captured everything the business needed for the application. These documents were long, detailing everything: strategy comprehensive functional specifications, and visual user interface designs. Continue reading →

Enterprise Applications

Published January 23, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

Successful Move to the Cloud for Core Enterprise Applications

The cloud architecture makes a difference in application strengths and migration success.

Where Do Core Applications Belong? IT leaders are caught in a dilemma when it comes to deployment of core enterprise applications. One side is continuing the expensive and time-intensive effort to maintain and adapt legacy applications, even though it seems they increasingly hinder business activity rather than help it. – Enterprise Applications

The other side is adopting new applications that run in the cloud—an environment that offers promising potential, but is also unfamiliar and may be perceived as risky. Until recently, enterprises used the cloud only for new applications or for those specific to an individual department or business unit. Now, with the growing strength of cloud application offerings, enterprises are starting to consider replacing the core applications traditionally hosted in on-premises systems and put those in the cloud, too.

The success of any move to the cloud depends in part on the architecture that underlies the cloud service or application. When looking at potential cloud solutions for core systems, it is important to understand the different cloud architectures and how they impact application capabilities and performance—and the difference that makes for migration from current systems. Continue reading →

Posted in Application Development, Applications, Apps, Enterprise Computing, Enterprise Software, Information Technologies, Musato Technologies | Tagged Applications, Enterprise Applications, Musato Technologies, Software

Software developers 10 questions to ask

Published January 20, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

Software developers 10 questions to ask a client

Software development is a tedious process and can often be challenging. The process consists of various successive phases which have to be performed in an organized manner. – Software developers

Custom software development includes heavy consideration to requirements, a focus on overall objectives, the creative design process, and the actual process of writing the code necessary to ensure optimal software functionality. Unfortunately, many software development projects ultimately fail due to poor execution.

Before embarking on the development process, it’s essential to have your custom software project completely outlined and organized. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll introduce you to 10 questions to ask when developing software. Not only will these questions aid in outlining the purpose and intent of the software, but also in the successful execution and completion of your software development project.

#1. What are the Most Common Mistakes?- Software developers

Before beginning your custom software development project, it’s imperative that you know and understands the most common mistakes made in the development process. By becoming familiar with these mistakes before the initiation of the project, you will be better able to avoid making the same ones. Continue reading →

Posted in Software Design, Software Designing Tools, Software Development, Software Development Tools, Software Lifecycles | Tagged Application Development, Application development in South Africa, Apps Development, Software developers, Software Developers in Durban, Software Development

Website Effectiveness

Published January 18, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

5 steps for tracking the effectiveness of your website

Your website is one of your most important sales tools. But could you say for sure how effective it is at generating leads and converting them to sales?-Website Effectiveness

If you answered no, you’re not alone. Many businesses set up a website without thinking about tracking its results. Second, it’s never too late to start tracking visitors, and doing so will have concrete benefits for the future growth of your business.

Any interaction with your site that moves a customer one step closer to making a purchase is called a conversion. Chagpar proposes five steps you can take to start tracking your online conversions.

1. Know what you want your site to achieve

There are two kinds of conversions:

Micro conversions are small events like somebody clicking on a video, downloading a brochure or engaging with a specific piece of content.
Macro conversions mark the completion of bigger goals, like someone submitting a quote-request form or completing an e-commerce transaction. Continue reading →

Posted in Analytics application platforms, Web Hosting, Web Hosting Services, Website, Website Design in Durban | Tagged Web Developers, Web development, Website, Website design, Website Effectiveness

Modernizing legacy IT systems

Published January 17, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

The keys to modernizing legacy IT systems

Legacy technology can hinder your ability to meet changing market dynamics. Here’s how to prioritize and execute IT modernization efforts that drive business value.- legacy IT systems legacy IT systems:

The IT stack at Live Nation Entertainment resembled the setup typically found at most companies of any substantial size and age: a mix of new systems with some older hardware and software.

Similarly, Live Nation found itself in another typical situation: trying to move at the speed of business while dealing with legacy systems not up to the task.

Those situations drove the company’s decision to ramp up modernization, says Jake Burns, the vice president of cloud services at the Beverly Hills-based global entertainment company.

“For a couple of years, I and my peers were starting to feel that way. But then, at the end of 2015, the senior leadership made a decision to modernize IT. It became my project in 2016,” he says.

Since then Burns has led Live Nation’s multiphase modernization efforts. The first phase involved ditching much of the corporate on-premises data center and migrating its applications to AWS, a move that increased efficiency and speed while decreasing costs. Continue reading →

Posted in IT, IT Services, legacy IT systems | Tagged ICT services, IT company, IT modernization, IT systems, legacy IT systems, Musato Technologies

SaaS

Published January 16, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to optimise business operations

Digital business adoption is growing rapidly, as are the revenues associated with it and CIOs stand at the forefront of these changes. Leading a well-thought-out digital transformation requires CIOs to fully appreciate the potential of SaaS Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and to optimise its benefits for internal business operations, customer services and collaboration with partners.

While CIOs understand that cloud computing offers obvious and immediate benefits for most enterprises, they also need to know that—done right—SaaS implementations pay off in both good times and bad. What’s more, they are vital for ensuring a company’s data systems and digital infrastructure are built for innovation and competitiveness, both now and well into the future. Among the top challenges facing today’s CIOs: Continue reading →

Posted in Musato Technologies, Software As A Service, Software Design, Software Designing Tools, Software Development, Software Development Tools, Software-as-a-Service | Tagged Clouds, Digital Transformation, IT systems, SaaS, Software As A Service

App development teams

Published January 15, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

App development teams brace for big change in 2018

Multi-cloud, blockchain and more sophisticated PaaS tools are three trends expected to reshape app development practices in 2018. Is your team ready for the change? – App development

Experts expect 2018 to be a year of change for cloud app development, as trends like DevOps, hybrid cloud and blockchain continue to take off.

Here’s a closer look at these and other emerging trends, what they’ll mean for enterprise app development teams and the potential challenges and risks they pose.

PaaS platforms evolve

In 2018, vendors will attempt to improve their platform as a service (PaaS) offerings to speed up application development and support DevOps workflows. Leading cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, will continue to roll out tooling to automatically provision PaaS-like capabilities via containers and Kubernetes. In addition, CIOs and app development teams will start to take advantage of higher-level service mesh tools, such as Istio and Linkerd, to recreate the benefits of monolithic apps within a collection of microservices.

However, these more sophisticated cloud tools come with potential vendor lock-in risks, said David Bartoletti, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. For example, AWS provides a set of tools to automatically provision containers with its Elastic Container Service, but those tools won’t necessarily help developers who need to move apps to private infrastructure or manage apps that span cloud platforms. Continue reading →

Posted in Application Development, Applications, Apps, Mobile Apps, Musato Technologies, Software As A Service, Software Designing Tools, Software Development | Tagged App Development, Application Development, Apps, Musato Technologies, Software Development

Analytics applications

Published January 11, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

Five steps to build better predictive analytics applications

An outline approach to planning and manage predictive analytics applications initiatives to help ensure that they don’t miss the mark on meeting business needs.

Citizen data science is on the rise as modern analytics tools empower an increasingly diverse community of data analysts to implement predictive models. Yet a byproduct of the democratization of predictive analytics is confusion about which algorithms to use for what, and whether a particular type of predictive model will perform better than others.

While the available tools provide a rich palette of analytics methods to work with, the plethora of choices can stun inexperienced users into a near-catatonic state as they ponder where, to begin with, predictive analytics applications. As a result, it’s helpful to devise a set of processes and best practices that can guide analysts to match the right methods, algorithms, and models to the business challenges with which they’re presented.

Here are some guidelines on what that might look like at a high level:

Specify the business opportunity and objectives, describe the desired analytics outcomes, and set measurable goals for success. This will also help to define performance metrics that can be used later to evaluate how well different analytics methods work. Continue reading →

Posted in Analytics application platforms, Analytics applications, Data, Data Analytics, Database

Application Architectures

Published January 10, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

Modernize Application Architectures

Business Challenge

Application Architectures: for many organizations, the existing architecture, and systems that support customer- or employee-facing apps are outdated and cannot be scaled or built upon as quickly as required by today’s realities—especially when it comes to
supporting the demands of mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Companies may want to develop new apps, create new customer experiences or expose data to partners or third-party developers, but tremendous improvements to infrastructure, process, management, connectivity, and security are needed to support that plan. This problem is exacerbated when working with partners that use different protocols and databases, making it difficult to connect efficiently.

Solution Overview-Application Architectures

A new digital transformation layer is needed to help benefit from investments in mobile and IoT, integrate new acquisitions or optimize the partner supply chain. Continue reading →

Posted in Application Development, Applications, Apps, Mobile app development, Mobile application, Musato Technologies, Software Designing Tools, Software Development, Software Lifecycles | Tagged Application Architectures, Application Development, Applications, Modernize Application Architectures, Musato Technologies, Software Development

Enterprise Resource Planning

Published January 8, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

5 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Trends to Know in 2018

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) requires many components and many different tools. In this piece, we examine five ways ERP is evolving to make your implementation easier.

Most businesses that have moved beyond the startup phase are likely looking into acquiring enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Whether you’re trying to get a handle on how your customer relationship management (CRM) efforts are impacting your bottom line, or if you’re tracking revenue from point-of-sale (POS) to research & development (R&D), ERP can be an asset to your company.

Although ERP is one of the older segments of the business software landscape, ERP vendors are consistently evolving to become more powerful, more affordable, and less complex. Mega-vendors such as Oracle and SAP have a major share of the ERP market, but newer companies are nudging their way into the space with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options that are changing the game. In this piece, we’ll examine the most important trends to expect from the ERP industry in 2017. Continue reading →

Posted in Enterprise Computing, Enterprise resource planning, Enterprise Software, ERP packages | Tagged Enterprise resource planning, Enterprise Software, ERP, M Tech, Musato Technologies