Going tiny to go big.
Have you heard about microservices yet?
You probably have. If not, you will.
Gartner’s definition of a microservice: a service-oriented application component that is tightly scoped, strongly encapsulated, loosely coupled, independently deployable and independently scalable.
In our inaugural “Two Question Tuesday” series, we spoke with Digitech System’s VP of Marketing, Christina Robbins, about this growing and important trend.
The video is embedded below. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for immediate alerts when we publish something new (next week we’ll have an interview with Ralph Gammon, Infosource’s about the Capture Conference, AI and IDP, and more).
For those (like me!) who prefer to read rather than listen, the transcription is included below the video.
My name is Bryant Duhon. I’m editor in chief of the Document Imaging Report, published by Infosource. Welcome to the first of what I hope to be many Two Question Tuesdays.
I’m regretting not making this “13 Question Thursdays” immediately because two questions is a hard limitation, but it is what it is and we’re rolling with it! We have with us today Christina Robbins, who is Vice President of Marketing for Digitech Systems. We thank her very much for agreeing to do the very first one of these with us. So thank you, Christina, for being here with us today.
Robbins: That’s fun to be a Guinea pig, I guess, right?
Duhon: That’s right. And we appreciate your willingness to crawl into the cage with us.
So let’s just kick it off. These are intended to be short and sweet. So let’s be short and sweet.
First question is we’re going to be talking about containerization [note: the more appropriate phrase is microservices]. So the first question is can you give us a quick explanation of containerization slash microservices and then how it works in the context of the IDP/content services space.
Robbins: So the conversation around microservices/containerization, Gartner calls it composable technology, has kind of been brewing for a couple of years. And what’s really interesting about it is it’s actually two separate things that are going on that we’re all sort of talking about under one label or one group. So today I’m going to try to break those out and I think in doing so it’ll help clarify what they each are.
So internally at Digitech Systems, we tend to use the term microservices. Microservices is a software development architecture. It allows developers to build very small components of code that can then be repurposed and reused and recombined in a whole bunch of different ways in order to produce new products for customers. The value to a business like ours in software development is that it allows us to bring new product to market that is of higher quality more quickly.
So obvious benefits there for customers as well.
I do think customers get excited about the second aspect of this, however, which is the idea of microtransactions-based billing. So what happens in a microtransactions based billing environment instead of paying for software in terms of licenses or even subscription fees which give customers access to a whole array of features and functionality of which they might use a very small fraction. They actually get billed based on what they ultimately access and how much they use it. So it allows companies to really right size their technology spending budget to exactly match what their company needs in terms of technology to support business processes and success.
Duhon: That’s a great answer. Thank you very much. In past conversations, we’ve talked about Digitech’s efforts in this area. So what does all of this mean for your company, both from a threat as well as an opportunity perspective?
Robbins: So Digitech Systems is super excited about this shift that’s taking place. From our earliest days – we were founded almost 26 years ago — we’ve had four guiding principles that underlie our software development efforts.
We want our products to be easy to use. We want them to be rich in features and functionality. We want them to be architecturally flexible so they work in a wide variety of customer environments using standard components and equipment. And we want them to have a sensible balance between price and performance.
So a microtransactions-based billing environment really allows us to see that price performance balance through for every customer, whether it’s a small mom and pop single-user environment or you know, the largest global conglomerate with hundreds of thousands of users. Every business now has the ability to pay for only the technology they actually need and use, as opposed to this traditional environment we’ve been in where you have to pay for everything in order to get the tiny 20% subset of features that your business actually needs.
Have two questions you’d like to see answered? Want to have two questions asked of you?
Contact me at [email protected]. I welcome all thoughts and suggestions.
