Xebia Articles

Tokens and Smart Contracts Redesign Existing Supply Chains

The rise of the internet and big data unleashed public access to a torrent of information. Blockchain is the next wave of this technological revolution. It took some time for the market to embrace the possibilities of the internet and big data, during which, they evolved and matured. The same phenomenon is happening with blockchain.

This article interprets and compares blockchain to the rise of the internet and big data and explains the core elements of its application. It also looks at its potential impact on society.

Today, most companies still rely on either traditional databases or data warehouses to generate the reports their management needs to make informed decisions. Those solutions have gotten us pretty far, but they also have some serious drawbacks. For one, loading all that data into the same place and then generating reports can take hours - and that’s only if everything works right the first time around! If something goes wrong during the process (and something often does) it can take even longer.

Imagine a world without WhatsApp. It probably wouldn’t change much, because WhatsApp has been slow to implement new features that would enable its platform for e-commerce, banking or marketing purposes. In September 2017, the first reports of WhatsApp’s new business-to-consumer (B2C) features arose, with customer support as one of the central axes on which it could swing into the enterprise jungle. This seems to be it for now, as no new reports of other B2C functionality have come out. And, with local and European privacy laws lurking just around the corner, it might take some time before WhatsApp can fly in a B2C context. Until then, WhatsApp will remain just a messaging application.

Co-authored by Thijs de Vries and Walter van der Scheer

We’re moving towards a serverless future, one where applications are developed in the cloud. The serverless approach promises to solve many of the issues of traditional (cloud) hosting while providing the latest technological functions against infinite scale and unprecedented low cost. In this article, we explain the concept of serverless, what it is, and how it works.

The business of any IT-enabled organization desperately depends on its ability to deliver functionality, timely and frequently. That means their utmost priority should be ensuring that software is available and works as promised. But with the myriad of modern development methods, techniques, and frameworks (not to mention reorganizations), this goal often falls by the wayside. Putting the software delivery process front and center is the only way to improve it. This article describes exactly how to achieve that and identifies the key, next steps to take.

As an agile coach, helping people, teams, and organizations reach their change goals makes me happy. I succeed when they succeed. However, despite my best efforts, sometimes they don’t achieve the desired growth and change goal. Change is hard, especially for complex organizations where multiple teams must work together.  In fact, studies show that 70% of all organizational transformations fail.

Although container technology has been around for more than a decade, it was Docker that made it easy to use. The impact on the software industry has been tremendous. It improved the speed of software delivery. It did away with manual handovers between dev and ops. It made the deployment process 100% reproducible. And last but least: Once you put your application in a container, you can run it anywhere. On-premise or in the cloud. In this article we give you 8 reasons, why container technology is a fundamental building block for a multi-cloud strategy.

Xebia IT Architects share improvements on Gartner’s TIME model for application portfolio management

Application Portfolio Management is about visualizing and managing applications within in an IT landscape on a regular and correct basis. It also makes it possible to analyse certain KPI’s to improve the quality of your IT portfolio. The more practical and easy-to-understand a model is, the more supportive it can be for IT managers in this respect. Read here some enhancements to the Gartner TIME model.

The surprising truth about success (and why some people never learn from their mistakes), is that it has everything to do with failure. Failure is not the opposite of success, it’s an essential part of it. It’s through failure, in a controlled and tested environment, that we learn and improve; a core principle of continuous delivery. Cloud-native technology speeds up the development cycle so that we can fail earlier and faster. But companies must also maintain quality, increase velocity and change the way they design and deliver their software to achieve a full cloud impact. This article explains how to do each of these three.

To win in today's marketplace, you need to build high-quality web software faster and smarter than your competitors. Cloud-native startups achieve a pace and agility that traditional companies can't match by buying what they don’t want to manage or build.