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By George DeBono, General Manager, Middle East & Africa at Red Hat
With today's customers choosing to interact through multiple channels, businesses are wasting time and budget 'hand-carrying' information from application to application, frequently without adding value at best and introducing human error at worst.
Most organisations today don't lack data; they lack information. Take your average Middle East bank with a high-street presence. Any one of thousands of customers might choose to interact by phone, post or email, online or in branch at different times. They might have a query about interest rates, request a loan application or ask about remortgaging.
If there is someone manually transferring all the data related to this customer that is coming in through different channels, then the bank is wasting an enormous amount of resources. There's bound to be a time-lag, between data being captured in one part of the organisation and becoming available elsewhere. The result is a lack of joined-up corporate thinking that leads to slow, patchy decision-making and mounting customer frustration.
In contrast, enterprises that are both intelligent and integrated are eliminating unnecessary labour, removing bottlenecks and ensuring a high quality response to every business event. Business rules consistently applied across the organisation improve and automate decision-making, while manual effort is removed. Resources are freed to focus on handling the exceptions and high value transactions that genuinely require their skills.
Open source technology an affordable solution
In the past, reliance on proprietary software has meant that developing and maintaining the IT architecture that underlies the intelligent, integrated enterprise has been both complex and expensive. This has made it the preserve of corporations with substantial IT budgets and IT teams. Even these organisations have struggled to implement a genuinely holistic approach, and have often settled for picking the low-hanging fruit, thereby missing out on the opportunities that true integration generates.
A readily available open source enterprise data services platform can unify data from multiple sources into trusted, accurate, accountable information assets. The return on data assets is maximised by being able to easily reuse existing data in new applications and business processes.
An open source business rules management system will allow organisations to develop, automate, review, audit and modify business rules so that applications can invoke predefined decision logic. This ensures that every operation from a simple transaction to a complex business event is handled efficiently, consistently and correctly.
Open source business process management and automation means organisations never have to reinvent the wheel, as replicable business process can be identified, standardised and automated.
These and other solutions can be configured to create the intelligent, integrated enterprise, are affordable and come with open source licensing and a subscription purchase model. Some open source customers, for example, pay a yearly subscription for a certified platform with professional support with high levels of support available within an hour 24x7, rather than paying to use the software. Certification of elements such as Java Virtual Machine, platform and database configurations is included with the subscription, which reduces risk and saves time and money.
In the event of dissatisfaction with the product or support, customers have the freedom to 'walk' without incurring high exit costs.
