EXPERT SPEAK
THE REAL BENEFITS OF EVENT STREAMING FOR CHANNEL PARTNERS
Technology bets that foster process improvement that better align the product and technology organisations to respond to business realities yield far better outcomes than those that are better mousetraps that incrementally improve technology performance , says Andrew Sellers at Confluent .
We have all heard the adage change is the only constant and this holds particularly true in the fast-paced world of IT . But often , while innovation may be stated as the intent of a digital transformation undertaking , the underlying justifications are flimsy at best .
Sure , the team may offer some rationalisation around improving build times by 20 %, reducing cloud costs by 10 %, or halving the lines of code for new features , but I cannot help but wonder if many a time , it is just a fear of missing out .
Andrew Sellers , Staff Technologist , Office of CTO , Confluent
Paradigm changes do not offer a faster , better world of yesterday but a fundamentally new way of doing things .
Risk versus reward
Sometimes these investments pay off big , overcoming obstacles holding the company back . The right technology initiatives unlock scale and resiliency , which may be the difference between the business becoming viable or not . Far more frequently , the juice is not worth the squeeze .
One commonly cited estimate suggests that 70 % of technology projects fail . While these are not all related to software development , something like a two-thirds failure rate feels right to me .
These experiences make us incredulous about the marketing claims around new
technologies . How often have we taken significant risks to incorporate new technology only to find the integration was far more challenging than expected and the improvements far less than promised ?
Often , we regret these changes . We would have been better off just spending the lost quarter bolting on new features to the
old systems . At least then , the sales team would have been much happier .
Roi of event streaming
Given the risks and expense , how do technology leaders and architects reason about the return on investment , Roi of event streaming ? Product and technology organisations are notoriously bad at rationalising return on investment .
Future development acceleration is among the most common potential benefits of new technology , but it is hard to quantify and even harder to predict .
Even benefits the CFO assures us can be calculated in the abstract , such as TCO , become difficult to measure in real organisations . Sometimes , Roi is justified in terms of promoting agency within the teams .
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