We are in the era of smart everything - where devices are getting smarter and everything is interconnected.
You have probably seen the ‘smart’ label attached to every gadget in recent years - mobile phones, lights, television, watches, thermostats, home monitors and more. This rapid convergence of digital and physical systems has presented a wealth of opportunities for organizations across diverse industry verticals to revolutionize their business operations.
However, smartwatches and other smart devices represent just the tip of the iceberg as ‘Internet of Things (IoT) and smart technology has more potential than we can fathom.
This is where smart applications make an entrance. Smart applications possess a significant potential to reshape entire industries for the better.
Wondering how they differ from traditional applications? How would it prove beneficial to your business? Keep reading to gain a better understanding of smart applications and how they will lead to smarter business outcomes.
What is a Smart App?
A smart application is an innovative type of software that gathers tremendous amounts of data from IoT devices and utilizes it in a dynamic way to gather actionable insights and to deliver rich customer experiences.
These insights are delivered as features in applications that would enable the user to complete a task efficiently. Do keep in mind that the ‘user’ is not necessarily human, it can be a machine as well. In such cases, the smart app infused with cognitive intelligence automates business and operational processes.
What truly makes an app smarter is its data-driven abilities. That is why processors and sensors are integral parts of smart device architecture which helps in collecting and processing data and retrieving information actionable for users.
At the same time, a smart application has other ways to collect data as well. They are designed in such a way to collect and process data about the user’s surrounding environment and their behavioural activities such as sensory, location-based or personal.
Every smart app is supercharged with complex data science rituals and emerging technologies such as machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence(AI), intelligent automation, mixed reality, cloud-native computing and the internet of things (IoT).
What are Traditional Applications?
Traditional applications, now termed as ‘legacy applications’ refer to the applications that were created in the earlier days of computer networks. They have a monolithic architecture and run on a mainframe environment or in a client-server environment.
In simple terms, they are outdated applications with manual scalability, oversized capability, non-immutable and hard to predict properties. Moreover, traditional applications don’t allow growth as they are generally difficult and expensive to change or re-factor to interact with newer systems.