Towards an edge-enabled future

New-age technology has been synonymous with growth, and its rising adoption has opened new opportunities to deploy the right business strategy. In this scenario, enterprises that focus on customer experience (CX) and Internet of Things (IoT) will reap the benefit of an edge-enabled future.

To give us a clearer perspective on this, Subramanian (Mani) Gopalaratnam, CEO/CTO at Resulticks, a global cloud provider, shares his expertise on the emergence of new-age channels such as IoT will bring many enhancements and opportunities—for engagement, analysis, and business growth. To help brands capitalize on the shift, Resulticks is taking the lead on creating the pipeline for a future of truly interconnected, immersive CX.

To achieve this objective, Resulticks has incorporated next-gen edge and serverless infrastructure into its technology backbone. This move enables communications beyond conventional touchpoints like mobile and web. It extends the platform’s capabilities to help orchestrate rich, impactful customer journeys through, and derive intelligence from, a much larger ecosystem encompassing AdTech, B2B, B2C, and B2B2B/C communications.

Small reduction for processing. Giant leap for customer experience.

Customers today demand instant, contextually meaningful responses from brands that wish to remain relevant.

However, catering to this demand is limited by the capabilities and scale of the current infrastructure powering these interactions. Today, when a customer interacts with a brand through a digital touchpoint, it sometimes takes about one to four seconds before a contextual response can be determined and delivered. While a 2-second latency might not seem like a major issue, this lag leaves room for improvement in terms of mass engagement.

Thanks to the edge architecture supported by the WebAssembly framework (WASM) at digital endpoints, native latency can be achieved, reducing the delay to less than a second, a 2000-time increase in speed in an ideal scenario.

A faster framework

How is this done?

To start, key functions are processed directly at the customers’ devices, or endpoints, using WASM. Multiple edge points of presence (POPs)—where the remaining functions are deployed—are established at markets around the globe to minimize distance to the customer endpoints and reduce potential lag.

Given recent device advancements, it is now possible to cache critical customer information and applicable omnichannel business rules at endpoints, with no compromise on security or performance. This makes it easier for the Resulticks one-line SDK, which is embedded in the brand’s touchpoints, to trigger contextual interactions that facilitate engagement, conversion, and retention.

Not all requests can be serviced at the endpoints, however. These are directed to the nearest POP that handle requests to execute work services and send responses back to the customers. Since the edge framework also supports CDN and work services caching, the request completion delay is 30 to 50 times less than those arriving at the cloud after passing through multiple API gateways and databases servers.

Uncompromised security

By changing a solution’s technology architecture and moving workloads to the endpoints, this evolution would invite questions about data security and governance.

To address them, Resulticks has implemented the same rigorous encryption and encoding with salting processes at the backend data stores into the endpoints and POPs. This means additional defenses against potential breaches—on top of Resulticks’ multilayered protections and compliance measures.

In addition, shifting functions to the endpoint limits the risk of database leaks, because the devices typically contain only data related to their users. This gives the brand a lightweight yet secure framework with faster processing and greater scalability.

A step forward in foundational technology

The advantages of edge serverless technology aren’t to obscure the benefits of cloud. Thanks to auto-scale mechanisms, the cloud offers the flexibility to scale up and down based on the brand’s communication and processing needs. It has afforded brands increased scale and freed up resources for more critical activities.

However, the typical cloud often still requires manual maintenance and serious resource investments on an ongoing basis. The serverless counterpart, however, is more effective and self-healing, entailing virtually no maintenance. It automatically switches between POPs nearest to the customer within each region should one fail, instead of resorting to one centralized network.

Resulticks also established edge databases for even more efficiency. These edge databases store customer data that the brand cannot directly leave at the endpoint devices, bringing data crucial to individualized engagement as close to the customer as possible by storing it at regional POPs. The auto-heal mechanism built into such databases further minimizes frictions during CX delivery and optimization.

Empowering the future of digital customer engagement

Committed to its philosophy of not leveraging technology just for technology’s sake, Resulticks’ motivation to adopt WASM and edge serverless technology goes beyond greater speed and resource optimization. The goal is really to give brands the means to create, maintain, and continuously improve experiences that truly delight today’s omnichannel customers.

Individualized journeys based on the customer’s evolving demands are no longer mere promises. They are real deliverables with concrete business impact. With a 30-50% reduction in processing time for each interaction, the brand can be confident to offer its audience seamless experiences and expect greater satisfaction in return.

An example of Resulticks CX in action: Personalizing landing page experience for the visitor to boost engagement.