At MWC this year I saw a budding constellation of similar thinking around “micro-service” innovation. This is a very positive trend. Every service provider wants greater agility, easier innovation, lower innovation costs and reduced ongoing maintenance burdens. No surprise here. Yet in our industry, most innovation methods and supporting software are essentially one-offs, with significant development times & point to point integration. This leads directly to slow rollout, high costs, and the “gift that keeps on giving” – the need to continually maintain and re-integrate these complex processes. Its one reason that such a high proportion of IT budgets are expended on simply keeping the existing environment running – leaving far less money and manpower for innovation. Appledore Research is not alone in promoting the need to switch to more efficient methods: typically those of service-oriented (“micro-services” to use the latest buzzword) components, composed into complete services, and fostering a high degree of re-use. By re-using “services”, this allows orders-of-magnitude improvements in agility and cost (its already built). Moreover, if you re-use a service object, you maintain it and integrate it ONCE. So that ongoing expense comes down steadily over time. This gift continues giving in a much more positive […]