How to Turn Your Website into a Mobile App

Every business has a website and every business needs a mobile app. The benefits of having a mobile app can increase customer engagement, loyalty, and visibility of your service or product. There are two ways you can turn your website into an app – through a converter platform, or by using a development company specializing in mobile apps.

Use a Converter Platform

Converter platforms are a DIY (Do It Yourself) option for somewhat tech-savvy individuals. Building your app is typically easy to use with templates and different drag and drop options to choose from. However, many converter platforms only allow you to create an app that opens your website within a mobile browser (and that is the app). This doesn’t offer any new functionality or experience for your customers, so it’s important to know what type of result you’ll get when using a converter platform.

Converter platforms can be a cost-effective option for smaller businesses hoping to see a return before hiring an app development company for more unique app options. For the most part, a converter will only be used to copy over website information with no extra functionality. However, depending on the converter platform you use, you will be able to add a blog and/or social media sharing options.

Use an App Developer company

Businesses using an app development company will see many more customized options and greater functionality within the app than if they were to use a converter platform. These types of apps can be integrated within already existing company systems, will load faster than converter platform apps, and can grow with a business.

Instead of being limited to one type of app, a development company can create an app for whichever operating system you need (whether it’s Apple, Android, Google, etc.). A mobile app development team will be able to create an easy to use app that engages your customers in a way that isn’t possible with converter platforms.

The Charter Global Process

Our app development process includes five steps:

1. Our team collaborates with you to see what type of solution you need.
2. We will create a rough draft of wireframes to your specifications.
3. We start rolling out the first round of your functional, user-centered design.
4. We work with you to test, evaluate, and optimize your new app.
5. Your app is launched on the Play Store and App store once you’re completely satisfied.

Let the Charter Global team create the perfect app for your business! Contact us today for a free quote.

Digital Transformation: Four ways to prepare for post COVID-19 pandemic

During this period of uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic, companies may find themselves at a crossroads. Many industry experts had predicted that 2020 will be a year of major digital transformation initiatives across industries. The question is do companies move forward with digital transformation initiatives or put them on hold?

Some experts suggest that companies continue with their digital transformation programs. Many explanations are offered, but one resonates as a strategy to not only survive the pandemic but thrive on the other side of it. If a company accelerates its business digital transformation projects now, the company will be in a better position after the pandemic ends.

Here are four ways companies and organizations can take now to prepare for the post-pandemic world.

1. Increase IT spending 

 

This suggestion may seem radical in light of current events, but it can translate to a positive outcome. According to KPBG research, 80 percent of revenue growth hinges on digital offerings and operations by 2022, IT leaders should continue transforming their operating models.

Experts believe that companies that continue to invest in their digital strategies will maintain business continuity and resiliency that will provide a platform to emerge from this pandemic more competitive. Research suggests that using solid models that incorporate the best people, processes, and technologies can help companies recover faster. Moving forward with digital transformation initiatives covers a broad spectrum in areas such as e-commerce, AI, machine learning, mobile, and public cloud adoption.

2. Strive to retain and hire IT staff

 

The skills gap was a challenge for enterprise IT departments before the pandemic. That gap will continue during and after the pandemic. Filling in those skills gaps should escalate as a high priority during the pandemic, and most likely will continue after the pandemic.

IT leaders understand the importance and value of having strong IT teams. Through years of experience, IT leaders also know that it is difficult and time-consuming to build highly-skilled and experienced IT teams. But to survive the pandemic, companies will need a knowledgeable, powerful, and resourceful IT team.

 

3. Create a plan to support work-from-home as the new normal 

 

There is no question that work-from-home has become the solution of choice so that companies can continue to operate. Shifting to work-from-home was relatively simple for companies who offered to telecommute and had already adopted a work-from-home model. For many companies, this was a new way to work and required adjustments to the IT communications infrastructure. It also required psychological adjustments for employees who never worked from home as well as remote workers.

Remote access and videoconferencing significantly increased overnight. Companies must determine if these systems are adequately provisioned or secured for long term work-from-home functionalities. Also, companies may need to plan for the distribution of mobile hotspots and other alternative ways to get home workers online.

Some other factors to consider include providing ongoing online training for remote workers. Also, IT employees may need training related to new IT infrastructure, hardware, and software applications.

4. Provide a centralized source of communication

 

The need for central communication is greater than ever during this COVID-19 pandemic. Company leaders should provide information to employees clearly, transparently, and in as timely a manner as possible. Announce decisions, and detail how these decisions were arrived at and why.

Communication is the most important element of leadership. During and after the crisis, a return to successful operations will require leadership.

After the pandemic, a company’s success and growth will depend, in many ways, on what leaders do during the pandemic. Leaders should think long-term and guide their organizations through the pandemic and into a successful future.

When the pandemic ends, there will be a new digital normal. The digital strategies that are implemented during this pandemic will help companies navigate with digital transformation.

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What can machine learning do for your business right now?

Machine learning is a way for businesses to use artificial intelligence (AI) in their processes and systems to constantly improve and learn without any extra programming. As a business leader, you are always looking for the newest thing to take your business to the next level and right now, that is AI.

With that being said, a lot of people are afraid to make the jump to utilize machine learning because they believe that the cost isn’t worth the benefit. For some businesses that already know exactly what they need and utilize data analysts, that may be true. However, AI can help many businesses:

1. Draw more efficient conclusions

AI can analyze your data in large sets at a time to cut down on waste while predicting customer behavior and discovering hidden patterns. Machine learning can take an otherwise complex assignment and turn it into an easy task.

2. Gain more happy customers

Having great customer service is key to retaining customers. Machine learning services can be integrated into your website to help your customers get their questions answered faster and easier without your employees at their every beck and call.

3. Save employees’ time

You want your employees working on the things they need to be working on not wasting time passing customers back and forth on the phone. With AI, your phone system can have a system that predict what your customer needs based on their buying methods which means employees can focus their time and efforts on selling/supporting your service or product.

4. Make new hires transition smoothly in their new roles

Working a new job is not easy, especially when the training and resources are outdated. Machine learning can help organize and recommend the correct resources your new employee will need to succeed all based off of your past data. Because it’s continuously learning, the system can adapt to what your new hire uses the most to help them reach their goals in no time.

As more and more machine learning applications are being introduced into our everyday lives, it’s only natural that they become engrained in our businesses and workforces. AI can save us time and money while enhancing our customer service, data predictions, and overall efficiency.

Whether you need a small integrative system or a large, complex machine learning program, Charter Global can help you determine what AI is best for your business. To better predict future events or smartly monitor over business systems, machine learning just might be valuable solution you need.

COBOL Makes a Comeback

Imagine working on a technology that runs on an old mainframe computer. Imagine using a 60-year-old programming language, COBOL which stands for Common Business Oriented Language. This computer programming language was developed back in 1959, according to the National Museum of American History. Imagine in 2020 using a programming language that was used to create a very significant percentage of business systems during the1960s, the 1970s, and even into the 1980s.

This is not a movie scene flashing back to an era dominated by mainframes, printers with perforated computer paper, and vintage computer monitors with an occasional IBM electric typewriter. It is the reality facing programmers and state unemployment employees who are implementing The CARES Act which was signed into federal law on March 27, 2020, and will expand unemployment Insurance benefits. It is designed to provide financial relief for workers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Implementation of this unemployment program will be performed by individual states.

Challenges facing state unemployment offices

States are incorporating new changes based on The CARES Act into their resource guides. Detailed and instructional information about the pandemic unemployment benefit extensions is still in the process of being released. States must follow guidance from the U.S. Department of Labor to implement The CARES Act.

Most states are trying to implement CARES as quickly as possible, but they are struggling to process the large volume of unemployment claims. More than half of the states in the US, including California, New York, and Pennsylvania, continue to run the decades-old programming language on mainframe systems—including critical unemployment claims systems. Therefore, processing and unemployment claims may take as long as two weeks because of the difficulty of using COBOL. In addition, many developers in today’s technical environment have never used COBOL. This is slowing the government’s effort to get billions of dollars in stimulus checks to millions of newly unemployed citizens.

COBOL programmer’s s are hard to find

Five decades ago, programmer’s s who knew how to use COBOL were in high demand. Fast forward to today’s laptop, tablet, cloud computing, and servers’ technologies and it is a drastically different technical environment. In fact, COBOL programs are generally much older than the average age of current programmers. Another factor that has contributed to the scarcity of COBOL programmers is that many American universities have not included COBOL in their computer science programs since the 1980s.

As a result, businesses have moved away from using the difficult-to-learn aging language, and have incorporated other current and technically relevant software programs.

Less popular, but COBOL is used in certain environments

The number of COBOL programmers has dwindled, but the technology is still in use. According to a 2017 report by Reuters found that there are still 220 billion lines of COBOL in use today. Forty-three percent of banking systems are built on COBOL and 95 percent of ATM swipes rely on COBOL code. COBOL is still used by the federal government, including the federal government, and agencies such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Justice and Social Security Administration, according to a 2016 report by the Government Accountability Office.  The CARES Act was created to help Americans affected by the coronavirus. The economic impact has been drastic. Leaders realize the importance of moving the CARES Act, thus requiring the skills of COBOL programmers. This talent shortage has led to the need for COBOL programmers.

If you’re an expert in COBOL, you are suddenly in high demand because the 60-year-old computer language still powers some government office technology.

Charter Global’s Capabilities in Legacy Technologies

Charter Global is known for its expertise in providing top talent for legacy technologies. We have successfully developed and provided thousands of IT talent to our clients. Among the many services we render at Charter Global, we develop applications and tools using mainframe systems.

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How to use Karate while Microservices Testing

Choosing the best microservices testing framework for dealing with complex HTTP requests can be challenging at times. But with an open source tool such as Karate, you can get this done fast without breaking a sweat. Developed in 2017, Karate produces faster results and also enables teams to get feedback from the API in a matter of minutes. This ensures improved scalability because quicker feedback lets teams deploy faster.

A Gherkin-based API testing tool is ideal for quick prototyping and simpler testing to any depth of testing you want. Karate features a simple quick start mode, integrated dashboards, and other user-friendly designs that are gaining attention from the testing and developers community.

Why Use Karate for Microservices Testing?

1. Karate has a simple and intuitive DSL (Domain-Specific Language) format that allows developers to write tests with a minimum amount of effort. Karate also allows reusing test scenarios.

2. Karate enables parallelizable testing when you have to run multiple tests and as a result you can save time and reduce the CI/CD duration cycles. Hence, Karate relieves you from redundancy activities since test scenarios are independent of one another and thus running tests in parallel can readily be done with a lot of uniqueness and creativity.

3. Nowadays, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is the most used format for parsing data across rest APIs, and in most cases, tests are written in most programming languages. For instance, JAVA requires a POJO (Plain Old Java Object) to convert such a test to JSON-based APIs using a serializer. Karate on the other hand offers diverse ways to create and declare JSON as-is and in the same way as it was sent from the calling side. This practice minimizes error and ensures optimal readability.

How Can PostgreSQL, The Most Advanced Open Source Relational Database, Benefit Your Company?

PostgreSQL is free so companies can save money on database license fees

PostgreSQL— a powerful, open source object-relational database system — uses and extends the SQL language combined with many features that safely store and scale the most complicated data workloads. PostgreSQL runs on all major operating systems, and has powerful add-on’s such as the popular PostGIS geospatial database extender.

PostgreSQL is considered by industry experts and developers as the best database in the world—a bold statement backed by thirty years of use and a history of success by companies worldwide. This open source relational database offers business benefits, such as cost savings, scalability, enterprise security, and automation.

Free and open source relational database

PostgreSQL, also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance.PostgreSQL has its own license that is largely based on the BSD license. This allows for even greater freedom of use and distribution.

The license applies to the main project code, major contribution extensions, client libraries, connection managers, and most of the associated tools.

Considering the speed that new technologies emerge, maintaining dynamic data systems is crucial in today’s digital environment. PostgreSQL is versatile and expandable, so it can support various use cases with a powerful extension ecosystem, covering different things from time-series data types to geospatial analytics.

Easier and faster development

With the advanced and numerous features that come with PostgreSQL, developers can quickly and easily build applications and administrators can protect data integrity and build fault-tolerant environments. PostgreSQL helps you manage your data no matter how big or small the dataset. For example, you can define your own data types, build out custom functions, and even write code from different programming languages without recompiling your database.

One size fits all database solution

Companies looking for cost-effective and efficient ways to improve their database management systems frequently choose PostgreSQL. As an open source database solution, PostgreSQL is completely free from licensing restrictions, vendor lock-in potential, or the risk of over-deployment. Expert developers and commercial enterprises who understand the limitations of traditional database systems heavily support PostgreSQL.

Extend PostgreSQL for multiple uses

PostgreSQL has a vibrant community of developers that write ancillary software. This includes plugging in any language, and using it to extend PostgreSQL in any way that seems helpful. It allows developers to create their own functions, data types, operators, aggregates, window functions and other database-related functions.

PostgreSQL also provides some hook functions that allows developers to extend the database without having to go to programming extremes.The ability to assimilate any feature of any other language is unique to PostgreSQL.

Developers can follow the standards, keep up with changes, and update PostgreSQL while it’s live — all of these tasks can be performed for free.

Performance and scalability for large data bases

PostgreSQL supports large database systems where data authentication and read/write speeds are critical.  PostgreSQL enables performance optimizations typically found in proprietary database technology, such as geospatial support and unrestricted concurrency. This makes PostgreSQL extremely efficient when running deep, extensive data analysis across multiple data types.

Broad language support

Due to its compatibility and support of multiple programming languages, PostgreSQL is considered one of the most flexible databases. Popular coding languages such as Python, JavaScript, C/C++, Ruby, and others offer mature support for PostgreSQL, allowing developers to perform database tasks in any language without generating system conflicts.

 

Business continuity

In the event of a disaster, business must maintain continuous operations. Enterprises need a sustainable solution to ensure that production databases remain available at all times. PostgreSQL offers high availability of services through either asynchronous or synchronous replication methods across multiple servers.

The benefits of open source developers collaborating and working together to create scalable and sustainable solutions for your enterprise can help your business grow and adapt to new technologies, while supported by the skilled and knowledgeable database developers. Another major economic benefit is the no-cost use of PostgreSQL which includes its own license, allowing companies to save money on database license fees.

Charter Global Client Spotlight: Successful conversion from a licensed database to an open source database

A Charter Global client converted its Oracle database to open source, license-free PostgreSQL.The client experienced several benefits from the conversion and significantly reduced its license costs by one million dollars.   

Five Microservices Trends in 2020

The future of microservices in 2020 will unfold in different and challenging ways. The rate of microservices adoption is growing at a rapid pace as companies strive to take advantage of the increased agility and scalability.

Microservices Trends that will become prominent and pervasive in 2020 include cloud adoption, frameworks, and the critical need for observability. Developers can expect frameworks to evolve for web services to make them faster, lighter and easier to develop.

1. High microservice market growth

Research and Markets forecast the global cloud microservices market will grow at a rate of 22.5 percent, with the U.S. market projected to maintain a growth rate of 27.4 percent. Companies recognize that the benefits of the microservice architecture and adoption of hybrid cloud across various end-user industries are major factors influencing growth in the microservice market.

Microservices allows a development team to implement a new feature or make changes without having to rewrite a large portion of the existing codebase. As for scalability, the independence of microservices makes it easier for an app to grow and change with increased demand.

2. Cloud adoption

Developers will increasingly move away from locally hosted applications and shift into the cloud. Cloud vendors are following this microservices trend, offering all the tooling to build cloud applications natively. Microsoft can even directly integrate tooling with its own programming languages. Cloud adoption will allow companies to implement working service buses that actually manage the functionality.

Many organizations are transforming from a traditional to a digital mode of business and are using a hybrid cloud—a combination of a public cloud provider with a private cloud.In addition, enterprises will use big data analytics to gain better business insights and consider hybrid cloud services to make significant cost savings operations.

3. Observability Tools

An important and relevant factor that will affect the future of microservices is observability when the application is designed to expose information about its performance and availability. Observability tools allows app support to track all system calls and service interactions in the case of a failure, to determine where things went wrong. Application teams need to get that data to solve problems. Most companies recognize how important observability is for distributed, microservices-based architectures.

IT organizations will benefit from microservices if they determine the best way to implement observability to support their business needs. Developers should identify the right strategy to implement observability tools without creating performance problems. IT organizations will get ahead with microservices if they figure out how to best implement observability.

4. Frameworks for web services

In 2020, developers can expect frameworks to evolve for web services as microservices will make them faster, lighter and easier to develop. Software developers will be able to use a framework for web services as microservices continue to evolve and offer development out-of-the-box capabilities and implementation of the service design patterns and code automatically.

5. Increased demand to update applications

In response to user demands for interactive, rich and dynamic experiences on various platforms, many organizations need to update their applications frequently, sometimes several times a day. Microservices can support the frequency demand. Plus, microservers provide scalability and agility to the applications having high availability, scalability, and easy-to-execute on the cloud platforms.

Charter Global Client Spotlight: Successful conversion to a microservices design

A Charter Global client converted its monolithic applications to a microservices design which used open source products for cost efficiency. The client experienced several benefits from the new microservices design:

• Accelerated its deployment schedule
• Decreased the development team’s time to rewrite 100 services in six weeks
• Helped to deploy any service with the click of a button
• Improved the maintenance of the application and performance

The future of microservices

Experts predict by 2022, 90 percent of all apps will be developed using microservices architectures. The demand for software to produce and release software at an accelerated pace has paved the path for a significant spike in microservices. As companies continue to adopt the cloud, they realize the flexibility to try out the new technology stacks that microservices provide. In 2020, microservices architectures will continue to help businesses minimize downtime,optimize resources, and reduce infrastructure costs.

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