Don’t PaaS up a great BT opportunity

Here’s some food for thought: Forrester is claiming that “business technology” will grow three to four times faster than classic “information technology.” Sounds like the role of IT is continuing to change at a rapid pace. With that kind of growth, there must be something to this BT idea. But what does “business technology” even mean?

BT vs. IT

As Forrester defines it, “Information technology or IT represents the spending on technology goods and services that businesses and governments have been making over the past six decades to run their operations more efficiently and lower business costs.” That is to say, IT represents your network architecture, security systems, and communication platforms. It’s the infrastructure your organization uses to run its day-to-day. It’s the ground floor—the essential backend to your business. Most importantly, IT is focused on cutting costs. IT spending is worth it when it lets you spend less money elsewhere in the organization. It should represent a net-negative in business expenditures.

On the other hand, business technology or BT is focused on creating revenue. As Forrester explains it, BT does this by “winning, serving, and retaining customers.” Unlike IT which is mostly internal, BT is out in front of your company. It represents your order-fulfillment systems, customer service, and tools used by your sales and marketing departments to drive sales and leads. It also represents the apps your company produces and the tools your development teams use to create those apps. While IT infrastructure is an old problem that most organizations are comfortable dealing with, we are living in an increasingly mobile and social world where customer engagement is key. It’s easy to see the forces driving this increased focus on BT.

PaaS is BT

When you are looking to invest in more BT, where should you put your money? A good place to start is a solid PaaS. A platform-as-a-service like Progress® Pacific™ bolsters your BT on multiple fronts. Most obviously, it is an application development platform. Utilizing a low-code visual programming environment, Progress® Rollbase®, Pacific lets you get apps to market faster than ever without the need to learn any new programming languages. This means apps cost less to develop and you can focus on using them to solve business problems without getting bogged down in code.

Multiple deployment options let you leverage your existing IT architecture while providing a path to the cloud through a hybrid cloud option. During that journey, you can implement a management and monitoring platform like Modulus™ to get valuable data on usage so that you may better serve your customers. A multi-faceted BT solution like PaaS could be just what you need to stay competitive in the changing market.