Application management processes are constantly evolving as companies migrate to new technologies, application management platforms change, packaging formats mature, and automation becomes more commonplace with products like Access IT Automation’s Access Capture.
What does the future hold for application management? Which packaging formats will dominate, what are the main drivers for change, and what impact will AI have on the application management space?
Access IT Automation’s Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer, David Butler-McAllister, gave his thoughts on the future of application management in a recent Liquidware podcast on The Art of Applications.
The Ongoing Relevance of AI
David said: “I would love to see more adoption of cloud-delivered applications or web applications but then, obviously, that is counterproductive in the world I am in because I’m a big fan of desktop applications and different styles of package formats.
“However, end users, they’re going to adopt the cloud more and more.”
While David predicts organisations will migrate more and more users to the cloud, he said there won’t be a dramatic shift away from traditional approaches.
“Legacy is not going away any time soon,” David said, “but people are going to need a quicker response when getting the same app delivered on multiple different platforms.
“As for packaging formats, honestly, I don’t see MSI disappearing overnight. I thought it would a long time ago but it’s standing the test of time.”
Strategies to Reduce the Burden on Application Management Teams
David added that more organisations would develop and implement application management strategies that would help ease the resource burden on application management teams, as well as the associated costs.
David said: “I see companies are really going to need a strategy to help their operations and engineering teams so they don’t have to repackage, redeploy, and create multiple objects.
“It’s happening everywhere. When I speak to different people, there’s just too much overhead on the engineering and ops teams. The strategy to move to one or possibly two technologies is the ideal way forward in my opinion.”
What About AI?
AI technologies have received a lot of attention over the past number of years, both positive and negative. AI-powered solutions are being developed across the EUC (end-user computing) space – how will those technologies impact application management?
For David, current mainstream AI technologies have limited scope on the engineering side of application management because of the vast range of products, platforms, devices, and scenarios that exist not just globally or even on a company level, but oftentimes within a single department.
David said: “It’s a difficult one, really, to adopt AI into packaging, whether it’s automation or other manual processes, because app packaging is one of those kinds of engineering processes that can sometimes be a bit grey.”
“That’s more the technology engineering side. I think maybe on the UAT (user acceptance testing) side of things, it could become quite interesting to be able to ask an AI-powered tool if there is anything else I should be functionally testing on this application.
“For example, I might need to UAT Adobe Creative Cloud, but I might not have enough knowledge of the application to know the processes and features that should be part of the test. We could see AI technologies assisting with these processes in the future.”
Continuous Improvement
While no one can be certain what the future holds, especially in the fast-changing worlds of technology and EUC, what we can be sure of at Access IT Automation is our commitment to continuous improvement. From testing AI technologies to developing our Access Capture APIs to be as agile and flexible as possible, we have the products, know-how, and hands-on standard of service to transform application management in your organisation. Get in touch to arrange a consultation with us today!
