As we approach the half way mark of 2014, how we manage new internet technologies in the business and consumer realms continues to crop up in tech commentary on a regular basis.
Driving much of the discussion this year has been the internet of things (IOT) and how this is about to change our home and working lives. With these impending changes in mind, we spoke to Paul Heywood, EMEA director of internet infrastructure specialist Dyn, about the challenges of IOT and much more.
TechRadar Pro: How can businesses leverage internet performance to overcome the complexity of latency issues?
Paul Heywood: The key to Internet performance is understanding your end-user demographics and moving the content closer to them.
By doing that, you shorten the distance between your end users and your content, vastly lowering the latency an end-user experiences reaching your brand. Internet performance is about understanding the interactions of the entire technology stack, rather than looking at components in isolation.
Spreading out your content so it is closer to your end users also allows you to more easily isolate issues, divert traffic to other sites as needed, or bring on extra capacity to meet high demand times. Studies have shown that for every one-second increase in latency, there is a 7% drop in online sales.
TRP: How can Internet enabled technology enable organisations to achieve rapid globalisation?
PH: A beautiful self-service user experience for a product or service is not only key to user delight (just look at Uber), it is also the most scalable and efficient way to service customers 24/7 around the globe.
Technologies such as cloud hosting, mobile devices, broadband, and content delivery networks have allowed organisations to be everywhere, for everyone, at all times.
What's more, the drive for greater efficiency in the delivery and support of technology has made this more cost effective than ever before.
TRP: What will enterprise IT of the future look like and how can IT teams best manage the opportunity to innovate?
PH: Agility and innovation is the name of the game; not only to move quickly, but to learn to quickly and effectively change direction as needed in response to customers.
Month long IT endeavours often become obsolete by the time they are ready for deployment. Shorter operational windows can leave everyone frustrated, both outside and inside IT.
IT won't be a separate functional silo of the organisation anymore; technology experts will be locked arm-in-arm with business experts and embedded throughout the functional groups, just like developers and operators have demonstrated in the cultural and professional movement that is "DevOps," which is credited for the massive scale and agility of the web giants.
Technology is now a revenue-generating asset not merely an operational cost. Our advice to IT professionals is simple: understand how your organisation makes money and work towards adding value.
TRP: How can transactional email be deployed to leverage the internet of things?
PH: We've mentioned in some articles before (like this one) that one of the main reasons that email has been so successful throughout the years is that it was built on a platform independent framework, unlike other messaging types like social platforms.
This means that an email is originated by a sender that usually belongs to a mailbox provider or business. But let's just say that today these senders belong to a domain.
The email travels from the originating server at that domain to the destination domain's receiving server, and is then made available for the end recipient as part of that domain. It's all about the domain and the mail server originating and receiving mail on behalf of all the recipients under that domain.
The evolution of the internet of things, and further evolution around things like the wireless registry (#8 here) and bitcoin / namecoin could lead to significant email delivery changes.
It could lead to a place where people are sending email from one recipient straight to another recipient, no longer needing to be organised under a domain's sending and receiving mail servers, therefore the message would travel from sender to recipient directly.
Encryption and security could be more easily implemented on a per message basis. This would have a lot of downstream effects around privacy, spam and marketing in general.
TRP: When IT decision makers look at Internet performance to evaluate their customer loyalty strategy, what should they be paying close attention to?
PH: A great experience is only great as long as it's always available and always fast. A sixty milisecond decrease in speed = 1% drop in sales, according to an Amazon study. Internet performance is about leveraging Internet enabled technologies to enhance end-user experience.
It is important to identify the interaction points within any technology stack whilst considering 4 main areas:
- Understand your customer demographics
- Achieve greater commercial leverage
- Generate operational efficiency
- Guarantee security
TRP: Outsource and gain time or outsource and lose control, there surely needs to be a balance?
PH: Every successful business needs to choose what they are going to focus on being better at than anyone else in the world, and that's where they need to focus their internal time and attention to build as a competency.
Trying to build a competency in everything will result in a competency in nothing. Every business will need to individually decide what it needs to focus on to compete effectively.
TRP: What are the four macro trends driving change on the internet?
PH: The internet of everything – a future that is not only about what and where people connect, but most importantly how.
The shift in expectations of the consumer (private or business), from control and access to automation, from people to 'everything', has experts focussing on how we'll be able to get the right data to the right device at the right time to the right person or machine to be able to make the right decision.
The 24/7 economy – how businesses can overcome the complexity of latency issues. A small delay in Internet performance, makes a huge difference – to businesses and consumers alike. From a business perspective, organisations leverage Internet performance to (1) effectively access and enter new markets and demographics and (2) manage brand protection and governance.
User experience and loyalty – for business, it is all about the customer's online experience, avoiding downtime and creating a faster, more targeted experience than ever before.
The importance of geolocation – there is nothing that ensures speed and reliability like geolocation, guaranteeing optimum performance no matter where in the world the users are currently located. This provides invaluable credibility to your reputation.
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