The era of Smart applications has arrived. It is inevitable that every application of the future will be Smart. Wipro’s report on “Smart applications – the future of applications” details the ‘What, Why and How’ of Smart applications. It covers the 4 Smart imperatives: Smart Interactions (how applications interact with users); Smart Processes (processes that make core businesses smart); Smart Platforms (platforms that form the building blocks for smart apps); and, Smart Security (the need for security
through data-driven intelligence.)

Wipro’s applications framework called Smart Applications and AWS’ differentiated set of services are coming together to build a strong enterprise application foundation. Wipro’s Smart Applications have the power to understand latent user needs and create intuitive experiences, while AWS has the solutions to make it real and relevant for organizations. It is this blend that can show actual proof and drive business results.

Wipro’s report clearly defines the important role cloud plays in the Smart platforms imperative, doing most of the heavy lifting to deliver Smart applications. What’s the most logical step then? The answer lies in collaborating with AWS, one of the leading cloud computing companies to take smart applications to the next level i.e. making it real in industry scenarios.

Amazon Web Services to deliver smart applications – all the 4 smart imperatives

AWS has added a plethora of services for the creation of Smart Applications. Let’s take the 4 imperatives into focus here and explore how AWS can be leveraged.

Enabling smarter interactions requires services like Amazon Lex that allow businesses to quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots. Similarly, Amazon Polly uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize speech that sounds like a human voice. Amazon Sumerian helps in creating immersive experiences using augmented reality with very little coding.

Smarter processes are fuelled by automation that can be delivered by a suite of AWS services, which automate end-to-end business processes. Take for instance, Amazon Rekognition that offers image and video analysis, transcribes data for speech recognition and enables language translation. Cognitive process automation can be enabled by SageMaker (a machine learning platform) and its low code approach to ML, while MXNet (a deep learning software framework) and an array of data intelligence services such as Elastic MapReduce (EMR) and Elasticsearch can bring artificial intelligence into any process.

The real power of AWS lies in its platform services, which offer umpteen options to build Smart platforms for a business of any size and type. Consider AWS Elastic Load Balancer, which automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, and Amazon Kinesis which durably stores, encrypts, and indexes data streams. AWS server-less offerings like Lambda and DynamoDB bring the power of smart platforms without the hassle of maintaining them. With SQS, Greengrass and API gateway literally any ‘Thing’ that is powered on, can be connected to build smart business platforms. Along with X-Ray, CloudWatch and Cloud Trail, AWS platform services are ideal building blocks for creating autonomous platforms that host applications and provide elastic scaling, self-healing, and automated configuration.

Data-driven intelligence enables smarter security, and AWS is at the forefront with Amazon Macie, and GuardDuty. AWS Cognito & Single-Sign-on enable simple and secure user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to web and mobile apps, and Amazon Inspector - an automated security assessment service helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS.

Making it real: Smart Healthcare

Smart Applications enable patient centricity and personalized care. With Smart Applications, patients can have better awareness and transparency during the healthcare, doctors and healthcare practitioners can offer highly personalized and accurate care, thereby improving patients’ overall health and wellbeing.

To better illustrate the prowess of AWS in assisting the creation of smart applications, let us consider the example of a user, Jane, and see how her journey of health and wellbeing could be re-imagined using Smart applications.

Jane, a 30-year-old architect, uses a fitness tracker which in tandem with a conversational assistant, measures activity and guides her to upkeep day-to-day wellbeing. The wearable also monitors her blood glucose levels in real time. Any deviation from the optimum glucose levels triggers the conversational assistant to ask Jane some basic questions to gauge her wellbeing. Besides, the app connects with her insurance provider to check policy coverage, schedules an appointment with her preferred provider, reminds her when it’s time for renewal, and even helps her navigate to the clinic.

At the hospital, the doctor receives Jane’s history via a smart dashboard that summarizes her case. The doctor diagnoses Jane, and then dictates her prescription to a chatbot, which uses NLP to transcribe and then transmit it to the closest pharmacy. Upon arrival at the pharmacy, the medication is dispensed by the pharmacist after a QR code-based verification. At home, Jane uses a connected “smart bottle” which dispenses the right dosage of medicine.

Like with any data that moves across the internet, Jane has reservations about the safety of her sensitive medical records. Through seamless integration and systems interoperability, and the use of right encryption and authentication levels, smart applications ensure that her information is secured even as it is shared across various points including the app, services and the myriad systems involved.

Meeting each of the smart imperatives with multiple products and services, AWS is undoubtedly a powerful platform for building smart applications. Here is a realization of the architecture using various AWS offerings across the eco-system players and platforms involved to implement this scenario.

Way forward

Smart Applications are the future of applications. AWS, as a platform provider, has all the platforms services to build Smart Applications. Products and services offered by AWS comprehensively addresses the imperatives defined in Wipro's Smart applications framework, such as Smart Interactions, Smart Processes, Smart Platforms, and Smart Security.

To know more, read click Wipro’s Comprehensive Report on Smart Applications. To book a smart applications workshop for your enterprise write to aws.practice@wipro.com

Aravind Yarra

Chief Architect and Fellow, Wipro Limited.

Aravind is CTO for Wipro’s Application Services and drives new technology focus and offerings. His areas of focus are emerging technologies and digital architectures. With over 22 years of experience in the technology services industry, he helps enterprises adopt emerging technologies to build smart applications leveraging AI/ML and Cloud Computing. His current areas of research include Quantum Computing, Edge computing and Decentralized Applications. In his previous roles, he worked as a solution architect for several complex transformational programs across banking, capital markets, insurance, and telecom industries.

Aravind can be reached at @aravindajad on Twitter and https://www.linkedin.com/in/aravindajad/ on LinkedIn

Dr. Manish Govil

Global AWS Practice Head, Wipro Limited.

Manish is responsible for driving go-to-market solutions, competency, offerings, center of excellence and delivery for AWS-related services globally.

Maran Marudhamuthu

Partner solutions architect with the Global System Integrators & Influencers (GSII) team, Amazon Web Services

Maran works with large GSIs to provide guidance on enterprise cloud adoption, migration strategy, Container & Serverless strategy and adopting various other AWS services.globally.

Dushyant Roy

Global Business Leader, Amazon Web Services

Dushyant is an experienced and distinguished leader in the field of Cloud Computing and Infrastructure Services. He has more than 20 years of experience working for some of the biggest product and services companies. He has multiple publications and also speaks in conferences.