App Innovation | A Partner’s Perspective

Microsoft has long been one of Lixar Fuelled by BDO’s key partners in the cloud-computing space. We seek to create and innovate using the best-in-class technology, offering our clients more flexibility, scalability, and security. Microsoft provides tools to support this, whether we are migrating clients to the cloud, building a data pipeline, or optimising through AI. They also provide excellent support when it comes to application development. As technology moves forward, App Dev has also progressed in such a way that it’s no longer enough to simply build an app. For businesses and organisations to disrupt, lead, or catch up, they need modern apps that empower both their employees and the people they serve.

As a leader in innovative technology, Microsoft enables its partners to deliver cloud application solutions that go beyond the basic benefits of Azure cloud, which include scalability, security, and cost optimisation. While these cloud app perks are critical to any app modernisation story, app innovation is more about unlocking additional benefits of Azure that will give you a real competitive edge: 

• Faster shipping through application containerisation
• Enterprise-grade, fully managed database services
• Ability to leverage cloud, data, and AI to offer intelligent app experiences

Now is the Time to Innovate

Organisations are currently investing in digital innovation at a rapidly increasing rate. In April of 2021, Gartner Inc. reported that it was forecasting worldwide public cloud end-user spending to grow 23.1% in 2021. That brings the total to $332.3 billion, up from $270 billion in 2020. Rising interest in building better apps is certainly one of the drivers behind this growth. 

But why now? It’s simple:

• CIOs understand that technology plays a vital role in business survival and success during this period of challenging economics
• As the workplace landscape continues to change, employers recognise the value in offering powerful, mobile business apps that can be used, pain-free, from anywhere
• Executives continue to be under operational pressure to decrease infrastructure and maintenance costs

We’re all currently on a digital innovation journey. Some of us may be at the start, others are farther ahead and looking to maintain momentum. But wherever we are, and wherever we’re going, it’s clear that app innovation is a key component of the journey.  When we look at the digital innovation loop, a cycle that encourages continued improvement, we can see that building modern apps provides access to so many benefits and positive outcomes.

App innovation, like Data and AI, is now an economic imperative. It’s no longer a question of if, or even when; but rather, how. And the answer is Azure.

Innovate to Unlock the Power of Azure

App innovation allows you to modernise existing apps, or build next-generation, cloud-native apps that enable you to unlock the full power of Azure. Innovating with Azure services solves countless challenges, whether you’re looking to:

• Deliver intelligent app experiences that empower employees and the public, alike
• Support rapid development and scalability through fully-managed services
• Ship faster with application containerisation
• Put an end to IT worries about DB and server versions, with continuous upgrades instead
• Lower your costs; or even
• Go to market faster, with a higher profile

Azure Services for App Innovation

With our Azure expertise, Lixar understands the value of leveraging Azure cloud to help you solve specific business challenges and meet business outcomes for your specific use cases. The Azure cloud platform offers more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you realise the full potential of your solutions — including building, running, and managing innovative apps.

Azure App Service is an HTTP-based service for hosting web apps, REST APIs, and mobile backends. It supports multiple languages and frameworks, a managed production environment, better security and compliance, a wide variety of application templates, and DevOps optimisation for continuous integration and deployment. Moreover, with App Service, you only pay for the Azure compute resources you use. This means you can always stay on-budget, and scale as required.

Azure API Management is a reliable, secure and scalable way to publish, consume and manage the APIs you run on the Azure platform. Providing all essential tools for end-to-end management, it ensures optimal API performance, and tracks and governs usage, authentication, and more.

Azure Logic Apps is a cloud-based platform designed to create and run automated workflows that integrate your apps, data, services, and systems. It enables you to quickly and efficiently  develop highly scalable integration solutions for your enterprise and business-to-business (B2B) scenarios. Logic Apps is also highly flexible, simplifying the way that you connect legacy, modern, and cutting-edge systems across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.

Azure DevOps is a set of developer services for support teams to plan work, collaborate on code development, and build and deploy applications. Azure DevOps supports a cooperative culture within which developers, project managers, and contributors work together to complete software development. It also allows organisations to create and improve products quicker than with traditional software development approaches.

Azure SQL Database is a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) database engine that automatically handles most of the database management functions such as upgrading, patching, backups, and monitoring. Azure SQL Database is always running on the latest stable version of the SQL Server database engine and patched OS with 99.99% availability. PaaS capabilities that are built into Azure SQL Database enable you to focus on the domain-specific database administration and optimisation activities that are critical for the success of any operation.

Azure Spring Cloud is a fully managed Spring Cloud service, jointly built and operated with VMware. It enables you to bring modern microservice patterns to Spring Boot and Steeltoe .NET Core apps, eliminating boilerplate code to quickly develop robust apps in the cloud. In addition to accelerated development, Azure Spring Cloud helps you monitor and extend your apps, as well as simplify infrastructure management.

Lixar Fuelled by BDO’s Approach to App Innovation

Lixar is dedicated to providing our clients with the technology services that best suit their needs. We deliver solutions that are powered by the cloud, and driven by data. Wherever you are on your journey, we will meet you there, and help get you where you need to be. 

When it comes to App Innovation, Lixar will help you understand what is possible and determine your best path forward. We take the time to truly dive into your objectives and key requirements, and to assess your capabilities and current environment. This allows us to build you a roadmap with a prioritized list of improvements and innovations, just for your organisation.

Whether you are pre-cloud, mature cloud, or anywhere in-between, we can help you:

• Migrate to PaaS infrastructure
• Re-architect for a more scalable solution
• Redevelop to take advantage of containerization or serverless computing
• Move from monolith to microservices
• Improve load balancing and resilience
• Instantiate or mature Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines

Ready to start your app innovation journey? Reach out today. We’d love to help you future-proof your organisation.

And to learn more about how to better leverage your data, join us for our upcoming events, Analytics in a Day and .NET Application Modernization. We hope to see you all there!