From the last few years COVID pandemic has changed the whole Retail business spectrum in ways we could have never imagined before. Exploring new and accelerated trends gives us an indication of how this evolution will continue into the new normal. This pandemic also leads to closure of countless stores and bankruptcy. After surviving from the pandemic, inflation is hard hitting Retail business. Supply chain is also getting impacted with the Russia-Ukraine war. Now experts are saying that the greatest risk facing global supply chains has shifted from the pandemic to the Russia-Ukraine military conflict and the geopolitical and economic uncertainties.
With all this news for Retail industries, customer expectations and habits have shifted. Customers expect engagement on values to go beyond point of purchase to creating moments of engagement across the full journey. Now retailers have been compelled to find new ways to connect with consumers in a personalized and tailored way in-store as well as online to make a more intuitive experience. Retailers are going more digitized in their approach to connect with customers.
This is how retailers are moving forward to reach a wider customer base and lure their product.
e-commerce Technologies – In pandemic time if your business presence was not online then you will be out of business quickly. So Retailers have increased investment in e-commerce technologies. They increased the budget for digital transformation. To get ahead of competition, they are offering a mix of digital and physical experiences ahead of their rivals. Retailers are also focusing on customer service and providing seamless service experience across messaging, web and mobile channels. Retailers are creating a cohesive and connected customer shopping journey with e-commerce and unified data across systems.
Infrastructure– Retailers are upgrading their instore as well as online infrastructure. They are replacing traditional store signs with digital signs and screens to display ads and videos. They are also adding kiosks and self-checkouts within the store. This is making the shopping experience more convenient and personalized. Shoppers are in and out, without having to make small talk or wait in queues. Deployment of in-store technologies double in a year.
API-first and Cloud – Retailers are focused on Composable architecture. Composable architectures are key players to implement successful digital transformations and most engaging digital experiences. 2023 will be a year of focus for retailers to remove entirely their legacy monolithic architectures. API-first and Cloud based solutions help retailers to switch to new functionality without the need for significant investment and resources. This will reduce the incredible amount of time and cost of ownership of a fraction of legacy technologies. API-first connectivity helps customers to shop anytime, anywhere and anyhow.
Customer experience – Customer experience is the one the main focus for Retailers this year. The focus of customer experience is online as well as in store experience. Retailers are providing customers enhanced assisted-selling experiences through assisted Selling. They are also focusing online customers through distributed OMS (Order Management System), Omni-channel and remote Selling. Retails are preparing for next level customer experience through loyalty(customers long-term relationships), native App and AI based digital fitting room.
Merchandising & Supply Chain – Retailers are providing real time tracking and inventory information to their customers. They are also providing purchase incentives to their loyal customers so that they can keep engaging customers for their products. Retailers are also focusing on upgradation of warehouse management (WMS) to fulfill in-store as well as online orders.
Rajnish Kumar is CTO of Vanrish Technology with Over 25 years experience in different industries and technology. He is very passionate about innovation and latest technology like APIs, IOT (Internet Of Things), Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem and Cybersecurity. He present his idea in different platforms and help customer to their digital transformation journey.
The internet is full of buzz about the new AI based chatbot, chatGPT. ChatGPT reminds me of the early days of google, how google came and changed our internet search forever. We were using lycos search engine but google gave a new definition of search engine. Similarly I am seeing chatGPT is trying to define our search which is based on AI and AI models. It is coming as a new disruptive technology. Suddenly google is looking like old school.
Generative Pretrained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) from OpenAI, is the main component for Jasper.ai and other cloud based content writing, chatbot and machine learning applications. GPT-3 was first publicly released by OpenAI on June 11, 2020. GPT-3 is based on the concept of natural language processing (NLP) tasks and “generative pretraining”, which involves predicting the next token in a context of up to 2,048 tokens.
GPT-3 is based on Large language models (LLMs). Large language models (LLMs) are AI tools that can read, summarize, and translate text. They can predict words and craft sentences that reflect how humans write and speak.Three popular and powerful large language models include Microsoft ’s Turing NLG, DeepMind’s Gopher, and OpenAI ’s GPT-3.
ChatGPT was first publicly released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022 based on the GPT-3 framework. Initially developed as part of the GPT-3 research program, ChatGPT was built on top of the powerful GPT-3.5 language model to specifically address natural language processing tasks that involve customer service chat interactions.
OpenAI’s Chat GPT3 has demonstrated the capability of performing professional tasks such as writing software code and preparing legal documents. It has also shown a remarkable ability to automate some of the skills of highly compensated knowledge workers in general. ChatGPT has immense potential for ecommerce customer experience automation. ChatGPT allows customers to personalized shopping and fully automated 24 x 7 customer service on-demand.
In spite of chatGPT buzzwords, ability to content writing and customer service on-demand, I am little careful to use this technology for my business. I tested a few use-cases in chatGPT. It is working fine with some simple use-case and problem solving. But as soon as I added a few more variables to my problem, the chatGPT response was not correct.
Here is screenshot from ChatGPT for my problem and solution from chatGPT
The problem shown above chatGPT directly calculated from equation and response came as 5 min.
In chatGPT’s response it is not calculating a person’s waiting time in the queue.
So from above question right answer would be
Average Waiting Time = Average Processing Time x Utilization / (1-Utilization).
Average Waiting Time = 5 x (5/6) / (1 – 5/6) = 25 minutes
So, the correct answer is 25 minutes waiting in line. If we add the 5 minutes at the kiosk, we obtain a total of 30 minutes.
So from the above issue, I would like to highlight a few points if your company is trying to implement any ChatGPT solution.
Does the ChatGPT AI model is configured based on your company use case?
Do you have enough historical data to run and test AI based chatGPT LLM models?
ChatGPT runs on the big model like LLM model. Big models incur a big cost, and LLM are expensive.
Since ChatGPT runs on a big model (LLM), ChatGPT needs to overcome performance constraints.
Keep an eye out for GPT-4, which may be released as early as the first half of 2023. This next generation of GPT may be better at their results and more realistic.
Rajnish Kumar is CTO of Vanrish Technology with Over 25 years experience in different industries and technology. He is very passionate about innovation and latest technology like APIs, IOT (Internet Of Things), Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem and Cybersecurity. He present his idea in different platforms and help customer to their digital transformation journey.
API is a key component of digital transformation. API is the interface of your legacy and SAAS data. The goal of APIs is to facilitate the transfer and enablement of data between your system and external users. APIs are typically available through public networks like the internet to communicate to external users and expose your data into the public domain.
Since your data is exposed into the public domain through APIs, It can lead to a data breach. APIs can be broken and expose sensitive personal as well as company data. An insecure API can be an easy target for hackers to gain access to your system and network. Rise of IOT devices and usage of APIs by these IOT devices, APIs are now more vulnerable.
According to owasp, these are 10 main API vulnerabilities.
Broken Object Level Authorization – Expose endpoints that handle object identifiers, creating a wide attack surface Level Access Control issue.
Broken User Authentication – Authentication mechanisms are implemented incorrectly.
Excessive Data Exposure – Developers expose all object properties without considering their individual sensitivity
Lack of Resources & Rate Limiting – APIs do not impose any restrictions on the size or number of resources that can be requested by the client/user, lead to Denial of Service (DoS) attack on APIs
Broken Function Level Authorization– Complex access control policies with different hierarchies lead to authorization flaws.
Mass Assignment – Without proper properties filtering based on an allowlist, usually leads to Mass Assignment.
Security Misconfiguration – Misconfiguration or lack of Security configuration is commonly a result of insecure APIs
SQL Injection– SQL Injection occurs when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query.
Improper Assets Management – APIs tend to expose more endpoints than traditional web applications lead to improper expose APIs.
Insufficient Logging & Monitoring – Insufficient logging and monitoring fail to find your vulnerability and broken integration.
How to mitigate API security risk?
API supports secure sockets layer (SSL), transport layer security (TLS), and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) protocols, which provide security by encrypting data during the transfer process.
Apply Basic Auth minimum with API or if you want to more secure your API then enable 2 way authentication through OAuth framework .
Apply Authorization on each API resource to more control on API security through external Identity and access management provider (IAM).
Use encryption and signatures to all your API exposed personal and organizational sensitive data.
Apply API throttling through API manager to control number of user access per API (Rate Limiting).
Implement best practice of exception handling on your APIs to hide all your internal server and database information to mitigate SQL injection security risk.
Use Service Mesh to manage different layers of API management and control.
Audit your APIs and remove all unused API from your API catalog.
Add proper logging, Monitoring and Alerting on your APIs to keep track of your APIs activity.
Conclusion: APIs are a critical part of modern AI, mobile, SaaS, IOT and web applications. APIs Security should be the main focus on strategies and solutions to mitigate the unique vulnerabilities and security risks .
Rajnish Kumar is CTO of Vanrish Technology with Over 25 years experience in different industries and technology. He is very passionate about innovation and latest technology like APIs, IOT (Internet Of Things), Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem and Cybersecurity. He present his idea in different platforms and help customer to their digital transformation journey.
IOT (Internet of things) is revolutionizing our lives. As per Gartner report by 2025 IOT market will expand a 58-billion-dollar opportunity. It is affecting all parts of our life. In our pandemic era we found more use of IOT device to maintain social distancing.
IOT is also one of the main disruptive technologies in our
businesses. It is affecting all business domain including healthcare, retail, automotive,
security.
There are wide range of IOT benefits in business.
Enhanced productivity
Better customer experience
Cost-effectiveness
CRM system is keeping all your customer relationship like
data, notes, metrics and more – in one place. CRM is helping small business to
take off all burden from the IT management team by automating the business
process. It is also helping employee to keep the focus on the critical business
areas.
API is helping to integrate these two unrelated systems.
APIs are enabling this system to optimize process and streamline whole business
process. API is the main communication channel to build robust process and
keeping real time update to these systems. APIs are allowing to build context-based
application with IOT and CRM to interact with the physical world.
Now here are few areas where IOT is helping CRM system with help of APIs to optimize business process.
Optimize customer service – Before your customer finds any error in your service/product you proactively acting on error and fixing those error. This will help to build relationship with customer.
Increase sales – With help of IOT and CRM system you are finding untouched opportunity and using those opportunity to increase your sale.
Personalize customer experience – You are analyzing data provided by IOT and CRM system and building user based predictive model to enable personalize experience to user.
Customer retention – CRM provide customer data and relationship. IOT data providing customer behavior. This will help any business to personalize and target marketing for their customer.
Omnichannel instore experience – IOT and CRM is helping business to enable 360 omnichannel customer experience. This process will help and suggest the products which the customer might purchase.
APIs integration with
IOT and CRM helping business to enable higher degree of personalization, target
marketing, optimize price model, higher revenue and enhance customer
satisfaction.
Rajnish Kumar is CTO of Vanrish Technology with Over 25 years experience in different industries and technology. He is very passionate about innovation and latest technology like APIs, IOT (Internet Of Things), Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem and Cybersecurity. He present his idea in different platforms and help customer to their digital transformation journey.
Fiscal year 2019, government estimated $45.8 billion on IT investments at major civilian agencies, which will be used to acquire, develop, and implement modern technologies.78% of this budget goes to maintain existing IT system. In a constantly changing IT landscape, the migration of federal on-premise technologies to the cloud is increasing every year. Federal agencies have the opportunity to save money and time by adopting innovative cloud services to meet their critical mission needs and keep up to date with current technology. Federal agencies are required by law to protect any federal information that is collected, maintained, processed, disseminated, or disposed of by cloud service offerings, in accordance with FedRAMP requirements.
What is Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRamp) ?
FedRamp is a US government-wide program that delivers a standard approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. The stakeholders for FedRamps are
Federal Agencies
FedRamp PMO & JAB(Joint Authorization Board)
Third Party Assessment Organization
FedRamp Process— There are 3 ways a cloud service can be proposed for FedRamp Authorization.
Cloud BPA — Cloud Services through FCCI BPAs
Government Cloud Systems — Services must be intended for use by multiple government or government approved agencies.
Agency Sponsorship — This is the most popular route for cloud service providers (CSPs) to take when working toward a FedRAMP Authorization. CSP to establish a partnership with an Agency and agree to work together for an Authority to Operate(ATO).
Mulesoft FedRAMP Authorize Integration Platform
Mulesoft recently announced, FedRAMP process implementation of Anypoint Platform. MuleSoft is one of the first integration platform companies with FedRamp authorization and enabling both on-premises and cloud integration in the federal government and state government. Enablement of FedRamp of Mulesoft Anypoint platform, government IT teams can leverage the same core Anypoint Platform benefits in the cloud to accelerate their project delivery via reusable APIs.Anypoint Platform allows all government integration assets to be managed and monitored from a single, secure, cloud based management console, simplifying operations and increasing IT agility.
Mulesoft Anypoint platform enables FedRamp-compliant iPAAS for government organization. Government IT integration project deploy in Anypoint platform within Mulesoft Government cloud
Accelerate government IT project deliveries by deploying sophisticated cross-cloud integration applications and create new APIs on top of existing data sources
Project deliveries improve efficiencies at lower cost by allowing IT integration teams to focus on designing, deploying, and managing integrations in the cloud and allowing agencies to only pay for what they use, .
Reduce risk of your IT project integration and increase application reliability by using of self-healing mechanism to recover from problems and load balancing.
What is Mulesoft Government Cloud?
Mulesoft government cloud is a FedRamp-compliant, cloud based deployment environment for Anypoint platform.
It is built on AWS GovCloud with FedRamp control.
Mule Runtimes configured in secure mode to support the highest encryption standards and FIPS(Federal Information Processing Standard) 140-2 hardware and software encryption compliance.
It is FedRamp-compliance at the moderate impact level.
It is continuous 3rd party(3 POs) auditing and monitoring of security control.
If you are accessing FedRamp-compliant Anypoint platform, after logging you get end user agreement as a consent. It is very typical for FedRamp-compliant government application.
Conclusion — Executing any government or state project and working on different integration as well as API enablement, FedRamp-compliant Anypoint platform is one of the best options. It accelerate IT project deliveries, improve efficiencies and reduce IT risk .
Rajnish Kumar is CTO of Vanrish Technology with Over 25 years experience in different industries and technology. He is very passionate about innovation and latest technology like APIs, IOT (Internet Of Things), Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem and Cybersecurity. He present his idea in different platforms and help customer to their digital transformation journey.
Much awaited Mulesoft 4 was officially announced in Mulesoft
Connect 2018 in San Jose. When Mulesoft was born, it was really to create
software that helps to interact systems or source of information quickly within
or outside company. So the speed is an incredibly important thing over the
years to develop and interact within systems. Need of speed for application and
development hasn’t change drastically over the years but needs and requirement
of customer’s application have changed. The integration landscape has also
magnified. There are hundreds of new systems and sources of information to
connect to, with more and more integration requirements. This integration
landscape gets very messy and very quickly.
Mule 4 provides
a simplified language, simplified runtime engine and ultimately reduces
management complexity. It helps
customers, developers to deliver application faster. Mule4 is really radically
simplified development. It is providing new tool to simplify your development,
deployment and management of your integration/API. It is also providing a
platform to reuse Mule component without affecting existing application for
faster development. Mule 4 is evolution of Mule3. You will not seem lost in
Mule 4, if you are coming from Mule3. But Mule 4 implements fewer concepts and
steps to simplify whole development/integration process. Mule 4 has now java
skill is optional. In this release Mulesoft is improving tool and making error
reporting more robust and platform independent.
Now let’s go one by one with all these new Mule4 features.
1. Simplified
Event Processing and Messaging — Mule event is
immutable, so every change to an instance of a Mule event results in the
creation of a new instance.It contains the core
information processed by the runtime. It travels through components inside your
Mule app following the configured application logic. A Mule event is generated when a trigger (such as an
HTTP request or a change to a database or file) reaches the Event source of a
flow. This trigger could be an external event triggered by a resource that
might be external to the Mule app.
2. New
Event and Message structure — Mule 4 includes a
simplified Mule message model in which each Mule event has a message and
variables associated with it. A Mule message is
composed of a payload and its attributes (metadata, such as file size).
Variables hold arbitrary user information such as operation results, auxiliary
values, and so on.
Mules 4 do not have Inbound, Outbound and Attachment
properties like Mule 3. In mule 4 all information
are saved in variables and attributes. Attributes in Mule 4 replace inbound properties. Attributes
can be easily accessed through expressions.
These
are advantages to use Attributes in
Mule 4.
They are strongly typed, so you can easily see
what data is available.
They can easily be stored in variables that you
can access throughout your flow
Example :
#[attributes.uriParams.jobnumber]
Outbound properties— Mule 4 has no concept for outbound properties like in Mule 3. So you can set status code response or header information in Mule 4 through Dataweave expression without introducing any side effects in the main flow.
Session Properties–In Mule 4 Session properties are no longer exist. Data store in variables are passes along with different flow.
3. Seamless data access & streaming – Mule 4 has fewer concepts and steps. Now every steps and task of java language knowledge is optional.Mule 4 is not only leveraging DataWeave as a transformation language, but expression language as well. For example in Mule 3 XML/CSV data need to be converted into java object to parse or reroute them. Mule 4 gives the ability to parse or reroute through Dataweave expression without converting into java. These steps simplify your implementation without using java.
4. Dataweave 2.0 — Mule 4 introduces DataWeave as the default
expression language replacing Mule Expression Language (MEL) with a scripting
and transformation engine. It is combined with the built-in streaming
capabilities; this change simplifies many common tasks. Mule 4
simplifies data iteration. DataWeave knows how to iterate a json array. You
don’t even need to specify it is json. No need to use <json:json-to-object-transformer /> to convert data into java object.
Here are few points about Dataweave 2.0
Simpler syntax to learn
Human readable descriptions of all data types
Applies complex routing/filter rules.
Easy access to payload data without the need for
transformation.
Performs any kind of data transformation,
normalization, grouping, joins, pivoting and filtering.
5. Repeatable
Streaming – Mule 4 introduces
repeatable streams as its default framework for handling streams. To understand
the changes introduced in Mule 4, it is necessary to understand how Mule3 data
streams are consumed
In above three different Mule 3 flows, once stream data is
consumed by one node it is empty stream for 2nd node. So in the above
first example, in order to log the stream payload , the logger has to consume
the entire stream of data from HTTP connector. This means that the full content
will be loaded into memory. So if the content is too big and you’re loading
into memory, there is a good chance the application might run out of memory.
So Mule 4 repeatable streams enable you to
Read a stream more than once
Have concurrent access to the stream.
Random Access
Streams of bytes or streams of objects
As a component consumes the stream, Mule saves its content
into a temporary buffer. The runtime then feeds the component from the
temporary buffer, ensuring that each component receives the full stream,
regardless of how much of the stream was already consumed by any prior
component
Here are few points, how repeatable streams works in Mule 4
Payload
is read into memory as it is consumed
If
payload stream buffer size is > 512K (default) then it will be persisted to
disk.
Payload
stream buffer size can be increased or decreased by configuration to optimize
performance
Any
stream can be read at any random position, by any random thread concurrently
6. Error Handling — In Mule 4 error handling has been changed
significantly. Now In mule 4 you can discover errors at design time with visual
interface. You no need to deal with java exception directly and it is easy to
discover error while you are building flow. Every flow listed all possible
exception which potential arises during execution.
Now errors that occur
in Mule fall into two categories
Messaging errors
System errors
Messaging errors — Mule throws a messaging error (a Mule error) whenever a problem occurs within a flow. To handle Mule
errors, you can set up On Error components inside the scope-like Error Handler
component. By default, any unhandled errors are logged and propagated.
System errors — Mule throws a system error when an exception occurs
at the system level . If no Mule Event is involved, the errors are handled by a
system error handler.
Try catch Scope — Mule 4 introduces a new try scope that you can use within a flow to do error handling of just inner components/connectors. This try scope also supports transactions and in this way it is replacing Old Mule 3 transaction scope.
7. Class Loader Isolation — Class loader separates application completely from
Mule runtime and connector runtime. So, library file changes (jar version) do
not affect your application. This also
gives flexibility to your application to run any Spring version without worry
about Mulesoft spring version. Connectors are distributed outside the runtime
as well, making it possible to get connector enhancements and fixes without
having to upgrade the runtime or vice versa
8. Runtime Engine — Mule 4 engine is new reactive and non-blocking engine. In Mule 4 non-blocking flow always on, so no processing strategy in flow. One best feature of Mule 4 engine is, It is self-tuning runtime engine. So what does this mean? If Mule 4 engine is processing your applications on 3 different thread pools, So runtime knows which application should be executed by each thread pool. So operation put in corresponding thread pool based on high intensive CPU processing or light intensive CPU processing or I/O operation. Then 3 pools are dynamic resizing automatically to execute application through self-tuning.
So now self-tuning creates custom thread pools based on specific tasks. Mule 4 engine makes it possible to achieve optimal performance without having to do manual tuning steps.
Conclusion
Overall Mule 4 is
trying to make application development easy, fast and robust. There are more features
included in Mule 4 which I will try to cover in my next blog. I will also try
to cover more in depth info in above topic of Mule 4. Please keep tuning for my
next blog.
Rajnish Kumar is CTO of Vanrish Technology with Over 25 years experience in different industries and technology. He is very passionate about innovation and latest technology like APIs, IOT (Internet Of Things), Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem and Cybersecurity. He present his idea in different platforms and help customer to their digital transformation journey.