What trends are you seeing in business applications and their budgets?

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It’s tough times in terms of what we're facing in the world today as well as from a budget perspective. I think we're moving to a world where it's about doing more with less. I think that's where the decision making is for business applications. I think there are two main trends. One, of course, is digitalization. Everything is online. The second is how do operational organizations deliver efficiency to the businesses without the large IT budgets, without the gamut of applications...and how do you get closer to the customers? How do you self-serve sales teams? I feel like there's a big trend towards that entire digitalization as well as self-serve and that's where we're going to see the maximum growth.

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There’s a couple of things I’m seeing. There's a world of so many things moving fast and self-service is in the center of it; customers are in the center of it; the organization’s growth is in the center of it... Automation will take a center stage. How do you integrate your systems? How do you integrate your business resources through automation? How do you do that in a timely manner?  How can I use these AI engines which are coming in? Can I put it into my process so that I can repeat some of the manual tasks through automation? These things continue to come in my radar. I'm always curious to see what else is out there.  But cost is a very common factor. We want to mindful about what we spend. Cost can be remediated in many ways. I do tend to pay a little bit more for software but the people who manage it may not be here so it balances out. Sometimes it's the other way around.

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This is so industry specific right now, given the current times that we're living in. What I've noticed is that there is a willingness to invest, but you have to have a really strong ROI. I'm also seeing opportunities for consolidation, which means that we're looking to some of our more critical applications to see how we can stretch those to do the same functionality that we've had several other apps doing.  That's one of the areas that we've been really focusing on for the past three to four months. We’re looking at our entire landscape of applications and each of the functions, and asking is this a point solution or is this something that's broadly serving a number of different needs?  If not, how can we consolidate or look to do that same functionality in some of the other tools that we have, and connect department's together? Oftentimes, companies will have 5 different survey tools. Why do you need 5, right? It's because they were purchased point in time at different periods. How can we consolidate down and recognize some cost savings?

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Synthetics and Monitoring to make sure apps are up and running all the time with everything going online.

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Biggest single trend is the move to the cloud.