Alexandre de Saedeleer, COO, draws a rather positive outcome of 2016 for Tapptic, mobile agency.
What does the balance sheet of your digital activities for 2016 look like (growth, stagnation, fall)?
Tapptic has known a rather significative growth in their business in 2016 thanks to the gain of new important clients, but also with the consolidation of our relationships to already existing clients, who have required our help and services for important digital transformations. In parallel to the mobile applications development, which are becoming more and more intelligent, we’re now working on some new digital interfaces that are emerging on the digital market such as bots, virtual reality and augmented reality, conversational interfaces, and so on.
One of our other missions is to accompany our clients in their strategies and guide them in their choice of digital interfaces. The development of our activities in France, Switzerland, Poland and in Germany has also been an interesting growth lever in 2016.
How would you qualify the market of the digital in 2016? How has Tapptic adapted to it?
There has been a break in 2016 on the market, with a drastic reduction in the project that can neither offer a positive ROI, nor interesting business opportunities (data gathering, growth in the sales, new services offer…). Developing an application or a digital interface, only to follow a trend or to be on the same page as the competition makes nowadays no sense.
The real stake lies here: identifying what are the advantages an enterprise could benefit from by digitalizing their processes, products or services, and at the end, what will be its impact on the ROI. Societies are in a constant search for accompaniment or for a greatest expertise. The digital technology sector evolves so fast that very few enterprises can truly follow up to its evolutions.
The promising markets are the ones where digitalization is an crucial element for a business’ survival, such as the medias sector, banking or insurances, Fintech, transportation, luxury or even telecommunications.
We have also identified many opportunity in the business-to-business sector, where digital interfaces have an essential role to play (in training the teams, improving the client relationships, getting a better profitability in the mobile teams, accelerating the reporting processes, etc).
We thus focus our efforts on two main axes:
- accompanying our clients in helping them choosing the right strategy, and measuring the results
- developing the interfaces previously identified in the strategic plan (mobile apps, virtual reality, bots, TV, connected things, augmented reality with the HoloLens, etc), while focusing our efforts on the use of data, in order to provide intelligent digital services.
What are the activities or projects that have particularly stimulated your business in 2016 (mobile applications development, websites creation, artificial intelligence integration, machine learning, data analyses, IoT, bots, etc)?
Thanks to the expertise we’ve acquired in the conception and development of numerous mobile apps, we’re still accompanying our clients on these mobile interfaces. Our biggest projects in 2016 were mainly made on smartphones, tablets, or even TVs. But we’ve also identified more and more projects integrating new interfaces such as Chat Bots or even virtual reality. Amongst our biggest projects of 2016, we can quote M6, who are still developing their digital tools, by integrating more intelligence into their dispositives, but also Opéra National de Paris, Fortuneo, Brussels Airlines, VOO, Netgem…
In parallel to this, we’re seeing more and more opportunities for the development of prototypes on new technologies, such as Amazon Echo, Google Home, HoloLens, HTC Vive, Gear VR, etc. Our clients’ will is to be able to apprehend technology before having to integrate it in the production process. It’s also important to note that projects integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning are slowly increasing. It will probably be our focus for the year 2017.
How do you imagine the sector’s evolution during the year 2017 (mobile applications development, design, e-commerce, SEM, social marketing, mobile, web, video, e-mailing,etc)?
The demand on the market will certainly grow in the consulting needs. Entreprises need to be guided regarding their choices when operating in this digital world, regarding the methods and process that have to be put in place, the technologies to consider, and the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning, powerful vectors of the new consumer interactions.
Simple mobile applications will gradually be replaced by intelligent applications boosted by artificial intelligence. This transition will be able to provide adapted content and a fully customized experience to each user. Consumers were in a discovery phase until 2016. Now, they begin to have expectations regarding their digital experience. It is now the enterprises’ role to hop on the train. Netflix is a very good example: they use gathered data to make the customer service more customised and intelligent.
Virtual reality and augmented reality will also find a place on the market, when focusing on very specific sectors, that have themselves specific needs, where the world’s virtualization will allow the enterprises to gain time, spare money, and/or share knowledge more easily.
The last trend that will also heavily impact the year 2017 are the virtual assistants via voice interfaces, on devices such as Amazon Echo (Alexa) or Google Home. By analyzing all these changes and evolutions, enterprises will have to face always more frequent doubt situations where they will need advice and accompaniment.
We concentrate our efforts in order to offer a 360° recommendations to our customers, centered on Tapptic’s strengths, , which are the development of innovative digital interfaces that integrate data and artificial intelligence. From the reflexion phase, to the identification of eventual weaknesses to the upload, we are able to answer to all of our clients’ expectations. In some specific cases, we can also reach up to one of our external partners when it consists of a specific work in which we do not have the required expertise.
