Looking ahead at the next horizon

Many of you know that I love New Zealand's mountains. In fact, I took the photo above not far from where I live.

Sometimes, to in order see the next horizon, you must first finish climbing the mountain you're on.

It's certainly felt like that lately. We've been extremely focused on several client projects as well as some very complex internal initiatives.

Getting perspective and vision can be difficult when we're in the grind. Once we're through it, though, and before we get knee-deep into the next initiative, there is a fleeting moment where we can take a step back and look around at what we've achieved and how far we've come and then gaze into the distance at where we want to be.

I love talking to people in the tech sector, particularly those I meet for the first time. When discussing the capabilities we've created over the last few years, more often than not, their reactions remind me of just how far we've come, and that fuels me.

Most companies are blessed with great engineers, and when a Product Manager presents a feature request or problem to a team of great engineers, they will generally respond with a solution. The question of viability, however, hinges entirely on time. How long will it take to produce the solution? If it takes too long, it's not worth pursuing, and the opportunity is lost.

For the sake of clarity: It's not that the opportunity didn't exist - it's that it was lost.

Lose too many opportunities, and your company starts to decelerate - worse still - if your competitors are able to capitalize on their opportunities, they start to accelerate, and a gap develops. If this cycle is repeated too often, market perception shifts, and customers start churning.

This is a huge engineering problem, and in terms of API development, we had completely solved it by the end of 2023.

Looking back, I can honestly say that we have achieved so much and are exceptionally well-equipped to take on our next major horizon.

I don't anticipate any radical changes to our API Framework Technologies. However, there are a few nice-to-haves that are on the backlog, which we'll prioritize as use cases with those requirements present themselves.

That said, we are seeing distinct patterns in the problems being solved by our clients. Time and time again, organizations continue to solve the same problems. For this reason, we see an opportunity to deliver additional acceleration through a suite of enterprise-grade multi-tenanted Platform Services that address these common problems.

As this suite of Platform Services evolves and develops, it will offer clients the capability to accelerate the design and development of solutions by composing capabilities from an expertly crafted and proven suite of services rather than repeatedly reinventing the wheel.

In addition to creating these Platform Services, I foresee that we will also look to leverage our technologies to create a number of standalone products designed to solve isolated problems within the market. A number of product ideas are currently being bounced around and we'll probably have more to say about this towards the end of the year.

We are excited and optimistic about the future. Granted, the next year or so might be challenging in the tech sector, but we're well-positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that we see ahead of us and look forward to the next horizon.