Building high performing applications: Insights from the Application Strategy Summit

At this year’s Application Strategy Summit in Sydney, one theme was clear: businesses need to think carefully about how they build, run, and scale applications to stay competitive. With evolving technologies, rising user expectations, and increasing budget pressures, how can leaders ensure their applications perform seamlessly while maintaining cost-effectiveness?

The Application Strategy Summit, held on 25 February, brought together senior leaders in applications, development and engineering for a day of strategic discussions on building and maintaining first-class applications. It featured fascinating discussions on the future of application development in rapidly changing technology and business environments and Equal Experts was proud to partner at the event as part of the Forefront Events Tech Leaders Community.

From innovation to impact: Our four-step approach

With our extensive experience helping some of Australia’s biggest and most well-known organisations build and run industry-leading applications, we shared our insights into how organisations move from innovation to benefits realisation with the event attendees.

Our four-step digital transformation journey includes:

1. Start with a digital health check – You can’t chart a course to success without knowing where you are now. Find out more about our 10-day health checks and how they can be a catalyst for digital transformation or technology optimisation.
2. Optimise cloud for scale – Invest in the cloud in the right way at the right time to maximise business value and get a firm handle on costs before they spiral out of control. Learn more about optimising your cloud infrastructure.
3. Engineer data for actionable insights – Clean, accurate and actionable data that flows throughout an organisation is vital to enhance customer services. Find out how we help build data platforms for next-generation innovation
4. Unlock value with AI-powered services – With an optimised cloud infrastructure and engineered data platform, businesses can maximise the effectiveness of AI and other next-generation technologies to deliver exceptional customer experiences and reduce costs.

AI is undoubtedly a hot topic in technology at the moment and it was refreshing to hear so many leaders talking about how AI can enhance and empower teams, rather than just viewing it strictly as an opportunity to save costs.

One area where AI can deliver transformation is within application architecture. Many organisations struggle with bottlenecks, but AI can help speed up processes and support teams to better handle demand as a business evolves and grows. Our AI-enabled ticketing triage solution brought to life a practical example of how AI can tackle this challenge by enabling the scaling of engineering efforts from requirements through to producing a solution-on-a-page or other high-level design in alignment with a well-architected cloud framework.

Accelerating AI with well-defined application architecture

With AI transforming application development, many attendees at the event see a direct line between AI and solution architecture. Without the right architecture and foundations in place, organisations risk wasting their investment or failing to meet their business goals. As an event guest speaker, our Managing Director & CTO in Australia Andy Canning shared practical strategies for designing architectures that maximise AI impact while ensuring business alignment and operational efficiency.

During the talk, he shared the key elements of an AI architectural blueprint including:

• Operational excellence
• Data and AI model management
• Security and privacy
• Cost optimisation, reusability and maintenance
• Governance and compliance
• Ethics and sustainability

Andy also explored how AI can support Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) processes to increase speed, improve quality and help mitigate risk. One standout example that caught the attention of the audience was our work with the UK Government’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) to integrate GenAI into software development workflows effectively.

Unlocking business value with architecture building blocks

The summit was also the perfect opportunity to share our insights on Architecture Building Blocks (ABBs), the foundational components of modern digital enterprise architecture. ABBs represent the critical systems and capabilities that work together to enable businesses to deliver engaging, secure and integrated services for customers.

Without a cohesive framework that ensures alignment between business objectives and technological capabilities, organisations cannot capitalise on new opportunities, create engaging experiences for customers or react quickly to changing regulatory requirements and emerging threats.

Take a look at our recent blog all about how architecture building blocks can unlock business value by Abbe Majeed. Or you can download our two-page guide to ABBs.

The Application Strategy Summit reinforced a critical message – to stay ahead and remain competitive, businesses need to develop robust technology foundations as they prepare for innovation and wider digital transformation. Whether it’s optimising cloud investments, engineering data for AI, or leveraging architecture building blocks, the right strategy makes all the difference.

No matter what step you are on in your digital transformation, whether you need a rapid health check to get your journey started,  looking to implement ABBs or even accelerating your AI adoption contact our team now to find out how we can help you realise your goals sooner.