Digital Transformation
I prefer to use electronic equipment instead of musicians.
They make fewer mistakes.
Frank Zappa
Old Frank was certainly a curious fellow: he hated pigeons so much that he criticized Venice and loved electronic equipment ... often more accurate than man (who could blame him?). He was an eccentric and, if he were here with us ... in our day, he would surely have given us some fine satisfactions by combining his flair with that geek heart that we here at Drop feel we have. Technology will not replace man, it will help him ... and the product, as was the Frank Zappa's music, will always be a human, creative product. So we like to imagine.
Digital Transformation according to Drop
We have come a piece ahead, everything is interconnected, everything is digital: Industry 4.0, IOT (Internet Of Things), Omnichannelality, smart devices from TV to watch, from the phone to the smart home. To take advantage of the possibilities of this new digital world requires a total overhaul total overhaul of logic and processes. In this we can help you: we stand by your side and reason about how your business can best participate in this ecosystem. technological, cultural, organizational, social, creative and managerial.
The Drop approach
Drop has been imagining and developing e-commerce, applications, websites, online mechanisms for 20 years. We started with cathode ray tube, books and heart in a slower world where we could work sequentially ... according to "waterfall" logic, where the project materialized task after task thanks to hard work & devotion & project management. We always did well, we often arrived a little late with eggs broken in the basket due to variants in progress, surprises, dependencies, stop&go. Slowly we changed, driven by curiosity and the desire to question question logics and technologies by always testing new ones. The result? Today we work in a variable set-up adapting to the pact with the client and the type of project, using all the latest technologies useful to achieve the result while ensuring maximum freedom for advisors, devops and developers. This allows us to keep the focus on the vision of each project, on the answer to the upstream question, the one that typically comes after several cascading whys. After all, Drop was born just as a group of enlightened developers were revolutionizing the way of making software. Below is the text of their 2001 manifesto:
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
We are discovering better ways of creating software,
developing it and helping others do the same.
Through this activity we have come to consider important:
- Individuals and interactions rather than processes and tools.
- The working software more than the comprehensive documentation.
- Customer collaboration rather than contract negotiation.
- Responding to change more than following a plan.
That is, without prejudice to the value of the items on the right, we consider the items on the left to be more important.
Magento Commerce
We manage global e-commerce with an omnichannel approach reaching every market thanks to a solid know-how and a structure with offices in Italy, US, UK, France, Switzerland and China. We can manage e-commerce in full outsourcing or hybrid mode with a setup that can vary over time by pandering to an eventual roadmap toward internalization.
Digital Experience Platform
Again we were early adopters. In 2009 we adopted Pimcore, natively a PIM to manage the front-end of some e-commerce. We were the first Italian Pimcore partner. Today Pimcore is a DXP: digital experience platform. Which means it can manage product sheets, assets, pages, e-commerce features, granular permissions on complex workflows and much more in a very robust architecture. Basically with Pimcore you can do ... everything.
Headless & API dates
We propose agile and easily integrated solutions that can change continuously and speed time to market, moving away from rigid systems that are slow and expensive. From the perspective of an Enterprise IT Architecture, a headless system is divided into three layers of APIs, which from the bottom up standardize calls to legacy systems and make the processes for creating new digital services faster and more flexible, ensuring a greater focus on creating fulfilling user experiences that keep pace with modern consumption habits.
Laravel
Laravel is a framework derived from Symfony and started in 2011. We like it because it allows us to quickly and reliably develop applications that are robust. Laravel-based is our Order Management System (OMS) currently running on several Magento-based e-commerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Google Cloud Platform
We have been working with both GCP and Amazon AWS for many years. We like both although there is an obvious preference for Google. For the record, we moved to cloud-based enterprise email (now gsuite) in 2008 taking the first step toward the Agile enterprise concept. Today we run an infrastructure on Google Cloud heavily optimized on reliability and performance for our e-commerce. To orchestrate the interaction between applications and cloud infrastructure we have a solid team of DevOps professionals.
PWA and VUE.js
Vue.js is an open-source JavaScript framework developed for creating user interfaces user and single-page applications. We really like Vue.js because we find it more linear and fast than other similar frameworks such as React or Angular, and it provides us with very high reusability of both CSS and HTML code. Vue is also an excellent framework for developing PWAs (progressive web applications); these are marking an incredible step forward on the UI/UX front by going so far as to guarantee an experience similar to that of native Android and IOS apps.
