Capgemini report finds that firms have no strategy to deal with the IoT ecosystem
Two of out three firms have no strategy in place for managing IoT workloads, according to a report published by Capgemini.
The consultancy firm’s latest World Quality Report, found that 68 percent of respondents are ill-equipped to deal with IoT workloads, despite 85 per cent of organisations claiming that IoT products are a part of their business operations.
It said that organisations are under pressure to deploy new digital products and services are finding it tough to strike a balance between quality and speed of development, particularly when it comes to deploying IoT technology. This year’s share of the IT budget devoted to quality assurance (QA) and testing has dropped to 31 percent after a significant and worrying increase from 18 percent to 35 per cent during the preceding four years. Despite this year’s reduction, there is an overall prediction that spending will increase to 40 percent in 2019.
The survey of 1,600 respondents from 32 countries, found that many companies are turning to machine-based intelligence to help cut costs and drive efficiency across the organisation. The growing adoption of digital technologies is consuming large amounts of budget and businesses are finding it challenging to balance innovation with cost, with 48 per cent failing to meet the contrasting demands of handling multiple test environments. To combat this, the report calls for greater investment in intelligence-driven QA to identify and predict quality issues before they occur.
Business operations
Capgemini said that as the internet of things takes an increasingly important role in business operations, every enterprise must adopt a risk-based test strategy that creates a secure test ecosystem. To do this the report recommends that, businesses invest in as-a-service solutions for testing environment management, data management and test execution, as well as higher overall levels of engineering in their testing teams in order to maintain their system integrity and help boost innovation.
Mark Scott, head of testing at Capgemini, said that what’s interesting in the UK, is we’re starting to see the business driving the change when it comes to adopting new technologies, instead of the IT team, as companies focus on improving their customer’s experience.
“UK business leaders are leading the way in pushing ahead with adopting initiatives like agile, automation and digital transformation. With quality assurance and testing, we’re actually seeing a strong shift in the UK back to small and specialised testing,” he said.
Modern pressures of IoT
Joy Gardham, head of Western Europe at Brocade, told Internet of Business that organisations in general are not currently equipped to deal with the modern pressures that the Internet of Things (IoT) brings.
“Businesses have been tasked with adapting to the growing pressures – specifically around the network – to deliver the products and services required, without compromise. The benefits of IoT will not be realised, however, unless businesses have a strong foundation in place to support its growth,” she said.
“Organisations can be better prepared for IoT workloads by ensuring they have the best visibility of the network to monitor and address issues efficiently, providing a solid base to build an IoT world on – plus a network infrastructure that is focused on automation which will be able to take on the growing pressures and demands of the modern day IoT.”
Peter Duffy, CTO of Sumerian, told Internet of Business that many organisations are ill-equipped to deal with IoT due to a lack of visibility and insight into current and future capacity requirements.
“With a rising number of new devices joining the IoT club, obtaining a clear and accurate view of an IT estate while ensuring 24/7 service availability, is becoming increasingly complex,” he said.
According to Johan den Haan, CTO at app development platform vendor Mendix, firms can struggle to move on from IoT as a technology to getting their heads around defining the new digital experiences and services they will provide and to develop the new software applications that will present them.
“Developing applications that deliver new experiences requires a high degree of step-by-step innovation from the idea for a service towards the real-world realisation of that new service,” said den Haan. “This isn’t always easy since technical developers who write code need to be able to collaborate with those folks who have the ideas, but do not usually read code, work as a team inspiring one another and communicate well to make iterative progress together.”
Related: This study suggests some enterprises are flying blind with the Internet of Things