Why technical agility is important?

We live in the “digitally connected world” where everything is changing rapidly, and which is characterized by the following trends:

• Rapidly evolving environment. The demand and behavior of customers, partners, and other stakeholders change quickly, requiring businesses to adapt.
• Technological disruption. The constant introduction of new technology, which disrupts industries, brings new offerings and enables new experiences for customers. Examples include artificial intelligence and M2M/IoT.
• Accelerating information velocity. Organizations face increasing availability, speed, and volume of information and need to have the ability to leverage it to fuel business growth.

To address those challenges, organizations need to move away from static, siloed, structural hierarchy in which goals and decisions rights flow down the hierarchy to a more agile format. This format is characterized by a people-centered culture that operates in rapid learning and fast decision cycles, which are enabled by technology.

This approach allows businesses to adapt to new market requirements quickly by allocating resources where they are needed the most and embracing cross-functional teams to find a solution for a problem. These teams have all the necessary tools, processes to quickly find a solution to a business problem, validate it, and scale.

According to McKinsey & Company, agile organizations demonstrate up to a 20-30% improvement in financial performance compared to their peers.

What is the role of commerce in all this?

Commerce service is a business-critical, revenue-generating asset and needs to support the needs of an agile organization by delivering superior technical agility:

• Reduce the learning curve. In a diverse IT environment, technical teams will have to deal with new solutions continuously. It is critical to make it is easy for technical teams to familiarize themselves with the commerce service and start developing right away.
• Provide freedom and flexibility. Different business problems will require different approaches, technologies, and frameworks. Developers should not be restrained in their choices and should have the freedom to select the most convenient and appropriate solution for the specific problem.
• Enable rapid iterations. Provide all necessary tools and capabilities for agile teams to rapidly iterate to bring new experiences and offerings to the market quickly and fail fast.
• Minimize disruptions. Ensure that while the teams are focused on innovation, nothing is disrupting business operations, and they don’t have to worry about new releases, patches, or new functionality.

How Elastic Path Enables Technical Agility

Elastic Path Commerce Cloud delivers superior technical agility, which allows you to provide new unique commerce experiences within weeks instead of months. We do this by providing a unique combination of tools, processes, and capabilities which ensure excellent developer experience:

• A modern microservices architecture allows developers to select the best technologies and services to create a best-of-breed solution for your business needs. Elastic scalability of a multi-tenant SaaS microservices-based solution will enable it to handle any number of transactions economically and support the existing and future demand of your business.
• Extensions Hub provides developers with all the necessary tools to enhance platform capabilities, adapt front-end experiences, configure commerce functionality. It includes very flexible and cleanly designed capabilities to extend the data model and configure business events. Explore how Elastic Path Commerce Cloud enables superior technical agility through extensibility.
• Ecommerce APIs. Elastic Path Commerce Cloud has developed its API according to industry best practices with the developer experience in mind. Elastic Path provides a postman collection to make it easy for developers to get on board.
  Explore how Elastic Path Commerce Cloud enables superior technical agility through APIs.
• Documentation. Elastic Path provides a comprehensive set of documentation to accelerate the learning curve of the developers. It includes concepts, getting started guides, useful blog posts, API reference, and release notes.
• Application Library provides you with ready-to-go out-of-the-box assets and best-practices to quickly deploy new touchpoints. It also makes it easier for developers to get onboarded with the Elastic Path Commerce Cloud.
• Education Enablement plays a crucial role in the solution adoption by customers and partners. That’s why at Elastic Path we have designed our education programs leveraging all the best practices to ensure contextual, personalized, learner-centric experience.

Superior technical agility provided by Elastic Path Commerce Cloud allows you to deliver business outcomes and adapt to the pace of business change without doing a large-scale rip and replace projects. Instead, you can quickly assemble commerce business capabilities to introduce experiences and revenue streams rapidly.

Explore how some of our customers, including Pella, and reMarkable were able to leverage Elastic Path Commerce Cloud to achieve superior technical agility and bring new experiences to the market faster than ever before.