HYLAND ANZ COUNTRY MANAGER TALKS 5G AND THE DEATH OF HYBRID

The rollout of 5G across Australia and New Zealand will have a ‘massive’ impact on increasing the mobile workforce, according to Hyland Software ANZ country manager Jamie Atherton, who says it will also change the offerings we’ll see from software developers.

Telstra turned on its first 5G enabled Wi-Fi hotspots on the Gold Coast earlier this year with its 5G offerings for cities expected from mid-2019. Optus, meanwhile, expects its own network to be rolling out early next year.

Atherton told Telecom Times 5G is expected to be a further growth driver for Hyland in Australia. “If you’re out of the office in the city, even with 4G you are going to get a pretty decent resource. But as you move further out, the expectation become less and less,” he said.

“By improving the overall internet speed across the region it will enhance what solutions software developers such as Hyland can offer,” added Atherton. “The more access we can get, the more we can do with information that can be passed down to users.”

“It will have a massive impact on increasing the mobile workforce.”

Atherton said mobility was a key part of the information management vendor’s roadmap. He addd that ‘OnBase 18’, due for release later this year, will include “significant” enhancements on the mobility front, including reshaping of content to ensure best use of screen real estate no matter what device is used.

“That provides more functionality you can pump down to the device,” he said. “Mobile workers are no longer an obstacle to ongoing business processes.”

Atherton said increasingly, Hyland’s customers across Australia and New Zealand were seeking cloud, or software-as-a-service, options from the vendor.

“When we are working with clients and they’re analyzing [SaaS or on-prem options] in the last couple of years, the decision to go SaaS or cloud is on a par, if not slightly overtaking, going on premise,” he said.

“More and more customers have tested the water with SaaS or cloud and they may not have a cloud-only policy but they definitely have a cloud consideration policy where they would expect that vendor to have some sort of skin in the game, some sort of option available, and a roadmap,” Atherton said.

“There’s no doubt what customers are looking for is to have something hosted on their behalf, managed by the vendor and they just consume as a service as opposed to being responsible for looking after, supporting and upgrading and all the other things involved with traditional on-prem implementations,” he added.

“The shift is going one way and will continue to do so,” Atherton said.

With that move, he believes we’ll see the end of the hybrid model. “There’s an argument to say the hybrid model was there to ease people into making that full leap to the cloud.

“Most organisations have made that leap with an application or two and therefore the need to have this dip the tippy toe in but not quite fully, is not quite as strong as it was,” said Atherton.

He says equally important was the need for vendors to get themselves ready for SaaS, with in-region data centres and an investment in infrastructure to allow fully SaaS options.

“You could put it back to the vendors and say before the hybrid model might have been more of a software vendor’s positioning because not everything was in place to offer a fully fledged SaaS offering,” Atheton said.” But that has changed.”

 

 

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