What we are missing in modern PaaS

PaaS and low code platforms rule the business application development today. The platforms like ServiceNow, Salesforce and Appian score high against custom software development in terms of cost-efficiency and time-to-value.

However, there is a price to pay — we have to deal with UI and functional limits, platform-specific tools, custom API etc. That often leads to improper functional architecture and therefore hidden risks and future maintenance costs.

One of the most underestimated features that unfortunately lacks PaaS support is real-time interactivity — the ability for online users to get notified and be able to react to important events instantly, right in the app, without switching application context.

Hidden $ problem

Have you ever wondered what takes up the most of your team’s time throughout the day? What are their true productive hours and how many hours do they spend on unproductive tasks? Do you know how much it actually costs?

Whether you are a leader or a member of a service desk, sales, procurement, finance or IT group — we all work online throughout the day in various business applications where the primary way to be notified about any actions or task is via email notifications. How many of you remember the situation where you missed an important update or assigned task because it got lost in your inbox or just as you though you are done, you went back to your email and found few other critical things waiting on your action?

Studies showed that in the U.S. employees spend anywhere from 3 to 5 hours a day just by checking and responding to emails. By some estimates, the cost of inefficiency, when an email is a primary communication channel, is about $2.5K per user annually. It could be 10X more costly if some critical events are overlooked or not addressed on time.

Now let’s do some simple math. Let’s say you have 100 power users in a business app where email is the primary communication channel. Congrats! You have about $250K hidden under an expense blanket that you can tap into with a minimal initial investment. What would your team or organization gain with all that time and money back at your discretion? How much more initiative it can provide or what a better work-life balance it can achieve?

So, how can we get there?

The answer is simple, but may be technically challenging — by engaging users interactively in real-time, and allowing them to take action immediately, in-app, without switching the business application context.

Solution

Imagine what it would look like if you would be instantly informed on all the important events and tasks that are relevant to you in a real-time without ever switching to another app or email client?

The solution sounds obvious, but most PaaS and modern web applications do not provide those kinds of capabilities. Interactive real-time in-app notifications and requests for action simply not supported or hard to implement:

That is the reality of business application development.

And that is the exact reason we created buzzpost.io — high-performance messaging service that allows PaaS and web applications to engage online users in real-time interactively.

In the next post, I’ll explain how buzzpost.io helps to engage online users, overall technical architecture and how to integrate it with a business app in 2 minutes.