In the past several decades, the corporate, government, and business world has experienced several waves of IT architecture foundations, moving from mainframes, to minicomputers, to distributed PCs, to the Internet, to social media / mobile, and now to the Cloud / Internet of Things (IoT) stack. We call this the sixth wave of corporate IT, and like its predecessors, cloud and IoT technologies are causing significant disruption and displacement, even while they drive new levels of productivity. Each architecture focuses on key business processes and supports killer technology applications to drive new levels of value. Very soon we will be looking at an enormous networked interconnection of everyday machines to one another, as well as to humans.
Lets have a look at the fifth wave of corporate IT:
The machine-to-machine-to-human connectivity will have a profound impact on the consumer and corporate IT experience. As these machines become social and talk to us, we have an enormous opportunity to greatly enhance their value proposition through improved product quality, customer experience, and lowered cost of operations. A heightened consumer expectation for more personal and real-time interactions is driving business to holistically embrace the next wave of technology innovation such as cloud, IoT, and bots to boost business performance. In this age of billions of connected devices, there is a need for such a technology where our apps, such as bots, could talk back. Bots that have specific purposes and talk to any device or any app or to anyone, live in the cloud, we can talk to via any communication channel such as e-mail, text, voice, chat, and many others, can go where no apps have gone before when it comes to the machine-to-machine-to-human connectivity. In order to make this happen, we will need a whole new platform, a platform for conversations.
