Recovering from the business impact of COVID-19 with ActiveState’s help

There are many examples of industries that have had their business models seriously impacted by COVID-19, including:

• Finance – whose anti-fraud systems broke when consumers changed their behavioral patterns, suddenly making all their purchases from home rather than at restaurants and malls.
• Logistics – whose predictive supply and demand models broke when manufacturers, shippers, and retail- ers based their behavior on last year’s data.
• E-commerce – who suddenly find themselves to be the primary purchase point for a majority of the population, invalidating their demand estimation models.

But while COVID-19 is a dramatic example, businesses are affected by industry-changing events on a regular basis, from the gig economy displacing market incumbents, to the imposition of tariffs that disrupt trade with key partners, to new technologies that obsolete old business models.  And of course, access to capital is always constrained during times of upheaval.

The lesson is loud and clear: the world changes slowly until it doesn’t, and the impact can be sudden, disruptive, or even fatal if your existing infrastructure is too rigid to change.

Pivoting Faster With ActivePython

While it largely depends on the type of project you want to undertake, rapid development in Python is a good bet due to its expressiveness and rich standard libraries.

ActiveState’s version of Python, ActivePython is the distribution of choice for many enterprises because it allows them to quickly react to disruptions in their marketplace. Consider:

• A multinational insurance corporation, challenged by competitors’ Machine Learning-based offerings, used Python to disrupt the wider insurance industry with their own ML-based solutions.
• A major vendor of Computer Aided Engineering software was lagging behind competitors’ open, APl-based solutions. In response, they used Python to expose both client and server APls so customers can more easily integrate their own tools and data.
• The IT department of a US State Legislature lost much of their ability to remotely manage thousands of Windows-based systems when PowerShell reached end of life, but were able to use Python to rewrite their PowerShell scripts on the fly.

ActiveState’s Python removes many of the variables that can slow down development by providing:

• Precompiled builds – including linked C libraries, which means you can get up and running quicker than building your own Python runtime environment.
• Source Code Provenance – to ensure security and open source license compliance, helping to reduce delays caused by code review audits.
• Indemnification –  which removes the need for legal reviews that can delay time to market.
• Automated Dependency Resolution – which can eliminate the need to wrestle with conflicting dependencies when adding new packages to your development or test environment.
• Standardized Builds – that can be deployed with a single command across development, test and production systems help reduce the kind of “works on my machine” issues that delay code delivery and deployment.

ActivePython bundles a standard version of Python with hundreds of the most popular and useful third-party packages in a single, pre-built distribution that’s vetted to ensure all packages are:

• Well maintained.
• Free of vulnerabilities.
• Licensed appropriately for use in commercial products.

Whether you’re doing web application development, data analysis, machine learning, or cybersecurity, ActiveState can help you do it in a faster and more securely. And we can free up your resources from having to manage their runtime environments so they can focus on coding new features instead.

Get in touch with us about your unique situation, and give us a chance to show you how we can help turn it around. When you can build your open source language distribution in minutes, not months, and keep your open source language distributions up to date and consistent across teams at scale, pivoting from disruptions like COVID-19 will be faster and easier.

Next Reads:

ActiveState Platform: Get Python Applications to Market Faster

https://www.activestate.com/resources/datasheets/top-10-python-use-cases/