Today’s customers are an impatient lot. They want the information they need when they need it, at the click of a mouse or a swipe of a tablet or smartphone. You have only milliseconds to grab their attention and complete the transaction.
Traditional approaches to speeding application performance, such as CDNs (content delivery networks) or ADNs (application delivery networks), just don't cut it anymore. These technologies cannot deliver the application experiences users have come to expect.
In this webinar, Dan Rayburn, Principal Analyst at Frost & Sullivan, and Ari Weil, Vice President of Product Marketing for Yottaa, will discuss the next generation of CDNs and describe the elements required to automatically, intelligently and in real time speed the flow of the data each user needs at any time to their specific device.
Digital delivery trends have expanded
What are the components that make up the evolving digital delivery landscape?
Where have we seen innovation in that area?
What are some of the specialty solutions/implementations we’re seeing?
How is that changing the way that businesses look at the landscape?
Google and others have proven that Mobile is an important part of every eCommerce transaction, and analysts across the industry have called out the need for companies to respond with strategy updates.
One is a call for a Customer Experience strategy that brings business leaders and technology leaders together to focus on the entire customer lifecycle.
Historically CIOs were responsible for the technology to power the customer experience, but the buck stopped at the firewall. Whatever was sent was the extent of the SLA.
It should be a natural extension for CIOs to consider the entire customer journey, which would include front-end technologies to maximize engagement.
Dan, what are some of the challenges for a CIO to make that transition?
How are some companies creating specialized offerings to ensure, for example, accelerated, more consistent, or more secure mobile delivery?
This then leads to the other call: for a Business Technology strategy
There is clearly a correlation between speed and a company’s top and bottom lines. The idea behind a Business Technology strategy is to eliminate the silos that correspond to business and IT core competencies and instead collaborate on the entire customer experience lifecycle – of which digital delivery is a major factor.
Dan, how do you see managing a complete customer lifecycle challenging the established infrastructure and delivery considerations and best practices?
For example streaming media
For example security
How common would you say CDN federation – where a company would use multiple CDNs – is today?
What are some factors that would cause a company to contract with multiple CDN vendors?
This is important when you look at how components of a business technology strategy would come together.
If you consider the green box has historically been the domain of the IT/CIO organization, and the blue is the domain of the CMO/eCommerce executives:
Many of the solutions the business executives are aware of will include “pre-integrations” with infrastructure solutions for monitoring, acceleration and security
Taking a specific example, in eCommerce, web applications are instrumented with a LOT of different components.
These include some of what we’ve been discussing. For example:
Content from multiple domains
Rich, streaming media
Rigid security for encrypted traffic and industry certifications like PCI
Business users will have been told that, for example their Demandware eCommerce portal is pre-integrated with a CDN, but that CDN may not be purpose-built to mitigate the challenges an eCommerce site presents.
Dan, I think this is in line with what we’ve seen – where some “mega-vendors” offer a very broad set of solutions, but those may not extend to 100% of the solution they’re charged with providing. Right?
Taking a specific example, in eCommerce, web applications are instrumented with a LOT of different components.
These include some of what we’ve been discussing. For example:
Content from multiple domains
Rich, streaming media
Rigid security for encrypted traffic and industry certifications like PCI
Business users will have been told that, for example their Demandware eCommerce portal is pre-integrated with a CDN, but that CDN may not be purpose-built to mitigate the challenges an eCommerce site presents.
Dan, I think this is in line with what we’ve seen – where some “mega-vendors” offer a very broad set of solutions, but those may not extend to 100% of the solution they’re charged with providing. Right?