I hope this beginning of the year finds you healthy. Last year was an unpredictable, tough and complicated one, from which we’ve learned and from which we will continue to learn.

However, we are happy to see that our customers are quickly adapting their strategies to the new reality and looking for new methods to optimize costs and modernize their application landscape to support their “work-from-home / work-from-everywhere” information workers with hyper-automation and an amazing user experience.

Now more than ever, an organization’s success will be shaped by its ability to do a better job of operationalizing digital transformation initiatives and optimizing costs through process digitization and automation.

Fortunately, we are here and we can help! And we would like to keep you informed about important developments in our products (SEAL, StarCapture, STATUS, StarMigrator Engine) and our solutions, made for the benefit of our customers and partners, in which we will invest a large part of our energy and creativity in 2021:

1.AI-driven Content and Process Automation

Organizations willing to embrace process digitization and automation in 2021 need to take full advantage of innovative technologies such as AI and ML as part of their digital transformation initiatives. By matching traditional process automation with AI (text intelligence and analysis, automatic image/ document tagging and categorization, content creation and translation, video and audio transcription, auto-tagging and metadata creation, etc.) organizations can realize significant productivity improvements whilst driving down costs.

2.Metadata-driven Content and Process Automation

One trap that many organizations fall into when planning for digital process automation is to diligently analyze the as-is processes and design the future-state without due focus on metadata. This creates significant challenges because in most organizations metadata is spread across disparate systems and unsynchronized data silos.

So, metadata is critical for successful process automation, so automation projects must have a primary focus on metadata quality, data modeling, master data management (MDM), business-related metadata-driven automation, and data integration.

3.Low-Code Digital Process Automation

Modern low-code platforms with a special focus on user experience – user-friendly and simple to use – will allow organizations to automate their business processes quickly and effectively. Their digital workflows and broad integration capabilities can connect users, applications and data across distributed entities, accelerating time-to-value through increased development velocity and decreased operational complexity.

However, low-code by itself is not enough, as functionality must complement speed. Without the right levels of functionality, low-code can even exacerbate problems, by creating even more disconnected applications. To avoid this, low-code application platforms needs to be mature, powerful and feature-rich, and built on a strong foundation of content, metadata, business rules, and process orchestration.

4.CSP / DPA / BPM / RPA – what’s the best?

Application leaders often struggle to choose appropriate process automation technology because of a lack of clear understanding of the different scope and functionality offered by different but similar tools: content services platforms (CSP), business process management suites (BPM), and robotic process automation (RPA) solutions.

Although RPA and DPA offer different value propositions, they are also highly complementary. Together they can comprehensively coordinate human and system-to-system activities in a business process. RPA has its own unique value, but, in the long run, cannot deliver a full outcome without DPA and AI/ML.

Also, having the Content Services and Business Process Management / Digital Process Automation capabilities as part of the same tooling (rather than integrating separate products) offers immediate advantages related to total cost (of ownership, but also total cost of business processes) and simplicity, productivity, and efficiency.

5.Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud

After years of trying to find the most suitable solution, many organizations have discovered that a hybrid cloud and multi-cloud approach offers the best mix of agility, scale, speed, control, and security.

Over the last few years, our cloud platform – StarVault – has enabled hundreds of customers to get started on their digital transformation journey, delivering real business benefits and saving millions.

We’re continuing to invest in our multi-choice cloud platform that brings together private cloud offerings based on VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, or KVM, public cloud offerings (Azure and Google Cloud Platform) and hybrid choices, so customers can use the most advantageous cloud offering for every workload.

In the end, I hope to have the opportunity to talk with you about all these exciting developments soon, as well as about the business opportunities we can approach together in 2021.

Best regards,

Catalin Paunescu

CEO Star Storage