Accelerate Time to Market With Cloud Services: Automate and Innovate

If you want to remain competitive, you need to offer your customers a smooth, engaging experience – and ideally, beat the competition in doing so. This means that time to market, i.e., the period between developing and launching a product, is a decisive factor for creating scalable business models and defending your market position share long term.

Achieving a rapid time to market requires ongoing and comprehensive efforts to optimize and improve business processes. This includes a willingness to adapt new technologies and modernize work processes.

The importance of time-to-market is not only evident in specific industries such as e-commerce. It is important in any industry where innovation and speed are critical success factors – from the technology industry to the pharmaceutical industry. Customers are clamouring for new products at an ever faster rate, and because globalization means they can source what they want from anywhere in the world, it’s best to have everything immediately available so that they don’t leave you for a competitor.

In this blog, we will be taking a closer look at strategies and technologies that can help companies reduce their time-to-market and strengthen their position in the market.

What are the benefits of reducing time to market?

Managing time to market is not a side issue in business strategy but a core component. Companies that shorten their time to market can better deploy their resources, prevent delays, and benefit from reliable IT solutions that not only manage business processes, but let you adapt them to new demands.

A faster time to market is therefore not just a competitive advantage, but is also often of strategic importance. Companies that can adapt their business processes more quickly to market changes are able to stay one step ahead of their competitors. This means that instead of following the crowd, they actually help shape trends and innovations, while benefitting from first-mover advantages that give them a stronger position in the market. These advantages include the following:

• Lower costs through more efficient processes: A shorter time to market can actually significantly reduce development costs as you need fewer resources for the correspondingly shorter development phases or end up reusing resources.
• Greater time savings: As the phrase time to market suggests, time savings are very much in focus. These can be achieved by employing agile development practices such as simultaneous engineering, also known as concurrent engineering. This is a development approach that aims to accelerate product development by coordinating and running simultaneous project phases.
• Greater customer retention: By being able to respond faster – ideally first – to changing customer wants and needs, you build long-term customer relationships based on trust gained from a customer-centric approach characterized by innovation and higher product quality. Conversely, long waits for new features or products create frustration on the part of the customer.

On the whole, this results in a win-win-win situation of cost and time savings as well as increased customer satisfaction. However, now that we’ve looked at why we need to aim for a speedy time to market, how can we actually achieve this in practice? Enter cloud services, with some real opportunities and possibilities for reducing time to market.

Why should you make it part of your business strategy to accelerate your time to market with cloud services?

The strategic use of cloud services is a key success factor for companies that want to achieve sustainable success in a dynamic business environment. Cloud services offer numerous advantages that help companies significantly reduce their time to market and strengthen their competitiveness.

• Automation
  Cloud services can automate processes by providing a variety of tools and services that automate the management, deployment and execution of processes and workflows. These may include the use of infrastructure as code (IaC), automation scripts and code, container orchestration and serverless computing, as well as by configuring CI/CD pipelines. The key to deploying the SEEBURGER BIS Platform from a cloud is that you then have easy access to a wealth of pre-built connectors to integrate your cloud-based applications with other cloud-based software, data storage e-commerce tools and more, making integrated automation super efficient as your needs change and evolve.

How does this affect time to market? Well, when you automate you accelerate. Automated processes are known to

• • be less prone to error,
  • work faster than people
  • work around the clock and
  • can react and adapt to events, new circumstances and errors in real time.

• Scalability
  Cloud services give you the ability to quickly scale resources up or down quickly. Known as elasticity, this gives you flexibility with instant availability of resources. Companies can adapt their IT infrastructure as needed and no longer have to invest in licenses for additional capabilities (horizontal scalability) or in expensive hardware (vertical scalability), which may end up being underutilized or redundant once the need has passed. This “flexi-elastic” approach enables companies to react quickly to the needs of their customers, adapting their resources and really benefitting from the cloud services they’ve invested in. Another key argument for deploying from the cloud is the 24/7 availability of your IT resources, as the increased needs don’t disappear at the end of the working day.

• Save on IT equipment
  If you use cloud services, you don’t only save money through reducing your average time to market. You are also saving on your IT costs. By using cloud services, companies reduce their expenditure on hardware, maintenance and support. Instead of needing to run expensive servers and data centers on premises, companies only pay for the resources they actually use, a concept known as pay per use. This makes it easier to budget for and track IT spending, making it easier for companies to plan ahead. In turn, early, accurate planning is a key factor in reducing IT costs.

Cloud services enable companies to optimize their time to market, which is key to succeeding in a dynamic business environment. Companies that have recognized the benefits of cloud services are able to employ them as a strategic success factor. If you have decided to take a cloud-first approach, let’s now move on to selecting the right provider.

Public cloud or vendor cloud? That is the question!

We’ve already looked at how cloud services can shorten time-to-market by leveraging certain advantages, features and tools. However, what type of cloud should you deploy these services from? But which cloud is best for this? This much is certain: The right combination will accelerate your time to market.

In principle, both public clouds and vendor clouds can help you shorten time to market. The option you take depends on the specific requirements and goals of your company.

Public clouds score with their scalability and resource access, global presence, excellent automation capabilities and DevOps. Vendor clouds, on the other hand, usually offer industry-specific solutions, multiple integration options, inbuilt security and compliance as well as personal customer support. Combine the benefits of both and you are likely to get an optimal tailored mix for the needs of your business.

Combining the two can generate a real synergy effect. Let’s take a cloud-based deployment of our SEEBURGER BIS Platform as an example. Customers who deploy the SEEBURGER BIS Platform from a public cloud benefit from low latency and low costs for data transfer. At the same time, they gain added value by leveraging the expertise and innovations of the vendor.

Prepare for the future today and use SEEBURGER Cloud Services to reduce your time to market

The SEEBURGER BIS Platform enables any user to independently configure simple to complex integrations to seamlessly connect applications, people and processes. Our low-code platform provides users with a wide range of integration functions, connectors and industry-specific solutions. The extremely high-performance BIS Platform meets the highest demands for scalability, stability and security.

SEEBURGER Cloud Services on the SEEBURGER BIS Platform let you implement both classic EDI and API-based processes from a flexible and scalable infrastructure. This architecture is designed to let you react agilely to market changes while still enjoying high performance and availability. APIs enable data exchange in real time, which helps companies make faster, more informed decisions; respond more quickly to customer needs, and offer customized, innovative solutions, such as an integrated, personalized web store.

The SEEBURGER BIS Platform comes with a series of ready-to-use adapters for quick, seamless integration between legacy systems, other cloud platforms and even hybrid deployment for various environments. This extensive range of connectors lets companies optimize their processes, efficiently leverage existing infrastructure investment and maximize the overall value of their SEEBURGER Cloud Services.

Reduce time to market, increase profitability

We have looked in some detail at the importance of time to market for companies needing to adapt to market changes at an ever faster pace, while at the same time driving innovation. However, once you have laid the groundwork to an effective time to market approach, you can benefit from this far into the future as a basis for profitable business operations without compromising business performance or security. We’ll examine this topic in more detail in the next blog in this series where we’ll be looking at the positive effect of cloud services on your bottom line – your profitability.