What’s next for IR and Prognosis?

As we close off the books on the Australian financial year, July is a time for IR to step back and think about our focus for Prognosis for the next year and beyond.

HPE’s virtualization roadmap for NonStop, and how that might help evolve the market for NonStop capabilities, is near the top of the list. As are changes in the Payments ecosystem: real-time payments, APIs/PSD2, and blockchain. There is, of course, the ever present need for compliance, the most recent reminder being GDPR. Compliance is a 3-part challenge for us: ensuring internal compliance (including our hosted solutions), ensuring compliance within our on-premises product(s), and providing features that can help customers ensure compliance in their applications and systems. And we also need to consider the broader trends like moving services to the cloud and the application of machine learning to improve processes.

And while each of these areas has a solid base in reality, there can also be some hype that goes along with that. So we have to find the balance, somewhere between the current reality and the hype that reflects the likely future reality.

But maybe this is putting the cart before the horse? Are we on top of the core problems that we have traditionally helped our customers solve?

It used to be that outages, especially in 24×7 financial services, were a big deal. The cost of even a short outage could add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost transaction fees, damage to reputation, and even fines. Surely this problem is already resolved and we can move onto something else. When I search for Payments Outage in my favorite browser, though, I can’t get past the first results page without seeing major payment provider outages, as recent as a matter of weeks ago. So maybe some attention on this is still needed.

So, the focus for the next year?

Efforts will most likely center around our core capabilities, helping to optimize the performance of critical systems. We’ll take into account that the definition of “optimize” can vary depending where you sit in the ecosystem. If you’re in the operations team, it may refer to optimizing the infrastructure. If you’re in the merchant services team, it more likely refers to ensuring your top merchants’ transactions are flowing successfully, and that you know about any issues before they do. We’ll ensure these capabilities can support the evolving payments ecosystem moves to real-time payments and payment APIs. And we’ll leverage new technologies and deployment models where, and when, that makes sense.

I know that not everyone is on the same reporting cycle as us, but I suspect the issues that consume our thoughts are fairly common, no matter the time of year. If you are working through the same challenges as we are, and are looking for ways to minimize the risk of major issues as you roll out new technology and applications, contact us to hear how IR Prognosis might help.

Jamie Pearson | Product Manager | www.ir.com