4 Key Topics: Digital Business, Enterprise Modernization, the Metaverse, & EQengineered

Fireside Chat with EQengineered’s Senior Technical Consultant, Will Ramirez.

1. As enterprise organizations continue to transform and become digital businesses, what are the key front-end development areas on which to focus to enable growth and the ability of the enterprise to compete and thrive?

The goal of front-end development at its core is to make the user experience as pleasant as possible. Software that simplifies complex workflows, can scale to large teams, and provide a great user experience is highly valued. It is no mystery that, as consumers, a crucial determining factor of whether or not we use a software product is our experience with it.

The next question becomes, how do we optimize for a great user experience and deliver more value to our users than our competitors?

It boils down to a team's ability to iterate through the cycle of rapidly deploying, getting user feedback, and pivoting as needed to optimize the user experience in an uncostly way.

This process might sound unique to early-stage start-ups, but long-standing businesses should also iterate to improve user experience if they want to stay competitive. The Blockbuster-Netflix example is just one of many cautionary tales that come to mind when a long-standing business becomes complacent and stops optimizing for customer experience, and doom follows.

2. There is a lot of enterprise discussion about modernization. What are the key front-end technology challenges being faced in today's environment, and how can organizations overcome these obstacles?

The biggest current modern technology challenge is how to have large teams efficiently and effectively contribute to a product. There have been great strides in the advancement of the tooling we use to do so. We have continuous integration pipelines that are great for testing pull requests before merging. Libraries like Cypress provide reliable, easy-to-use, end-to-end testing tools. This is enhanced with new modern libraries like applitools that sit on top of Cypress that incorporate AI to visually inspect changes, further strengthening a large team's ability to contribute to a codebase effectively.  

Another great tool to help contributors operate more effectively is good documentation. It is sorely missed when it is not there and is one of the most effective yet underestimated tools we have to keep a team performant. Documentation prevents team members from repeatedly investing their time in getting others up to speed with their expert knowledge. It also allows new team members to make meaningful contributions faster.

3. What are your thoughts on the metaverse? What is your advice to enterprises trying to understand its relevance to their business? How do you suggest organizations get started and engage in the virtual world?

The metaverse is very much in its infancy. It is so new that there does not seem to be a consensus on what the metaverse is. I define it as a digitally connected immersive experience in which users can maintain and form a new digital identity.

For those who want to get a taste of what the metaverse is, there are already companies incorporating the metaverse into their businesses. As of now, you can take a virtual home tour, get employee training, and play multiplayer games on an Oculus Quest.  Oculus has an in-device app store that should provide a good measure of what is currently available.

Currently, many companies are sitting on the sidelines, waiting to see if this is something worth investing resources into. Once there are established winners, removing the incumbents from their domains will be difficult. The social aspect of the metaverse may lead to the power of network effects to create competitive moats for the winners of their category making it difficult for newcomers to get a piece of the pie. Although there is not a land grab yet, it very likely will be a winner take all type of scenario as we have seen play out in the dot com boom. 

4. Who is EQengineered, what are EQengineered's core competencies, and what makes EQengineered unique in the marketplace? 

EQengineered is a tech consultancy firm based out of Boston that specializes in helping businesses modernize legacy enterprise systems.

We take the time to understand what is important to our clients, and what their obstacles/opportunities are. When we partner with an organization, we take pride in not only providing solutions to the immediate challenges, but also in looking ahead to ensure the client is best positioned to make the most of the opportunities to come.

What makes EQengineered stand out in the marketplace is its people. Not only are they subject matter experts in their field with years of experience, but they are people who care about others and are a pleasure to work with.