DIGITAL DISRUPTION
We ’ re going to see IoT add real value this year .”
Armstrong sees immediate challenges for all industry sectors , positioning Progress to further enhance its reputation as a go-to for problem solving . “ Our customers in the EU have to face up to GDPR compliance by 25 May . We ’ ve been preparing for this for two years and are still engaging on this with education and technology to enable them to put in place a compliant strategy , whether that be areas like encrypting data or providing a more secure log in experience for users . By definition , being an indirect company , our customer ’ s challenges are challenges for us .” Progress aims to broaden its offering of next generation business apps through more acquisitions . “ These will complement our vision so we want to further take advantage of new tech and make it available in a frictionless way to our customers .”
The Progress veteran has been in the software industry since 1988 , always in the arena of business applications , either working for software vendors that build them or over the past nine years working for Progress to provide technology for those vendors . He ’ s experienced a multitude of paradigm shifts in the industry , and concludes : “ In the past it was about integration between apps , but today it ’ s about building micros services that can work with each other seamlessly via service environments that can be employed anywhere . The market dynamics are exciting today so people need to think differently about how they build business apps to embrace the future and truly deliver value from big data .”
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