What do flexible deployment, investment protection and the hybrid cloud have in common?
Our New Way to Work research has shown that employees value flexible work terms (‘anywhere working’, flexible hours) more highly than a double-digit percentage pay raise. It shouldn’t surprise anyone then that flexibility is also the name of the game in the world of IT systems deployment.
Imagine you are an IT manager (or maybe you are an IT manager) – just when you get your premise-based applications humming along nicely, the vendor you work with is pushing “OK now, everyone and everything move to our public cloud”. That might be convenient for the vendor, but for the enterprise customer this leads to disruption, stranded investments and broken integrations. Additionally, a lack of flexibility in the migration approach really does not serve the customer’s interests in terms of deploying in the way that works for them.
Flexibility provides choices, fosters evolution and delivers value
Some vendors are only mapping out one choice – drop your existing systems and move to a public cloud. We think there is customer value in offering a different approach – here are some examples to illustrate what we mean:
Scenario 1: you have modern and highly capable on-premise systems in place for enterprise voice – why abandon them when adding on next-generation team collaboration Web-based applications? Our answer is: you don’t have to abandon your investment, in fact through packaged connectors you can connect the premise systems with the public cloud and have everything work seamlessly together. Smart.
Scenario 2: you feel more comfortable with the security benefits of having an in-house managed ‘private cloud’ for certain applications, but still want to embrace next-generation public cloud team collaboration solutions. Again, having options to run your own data-center solution where it makes sense (or have it run for you as a managed service) is a good thing.
Scenario 3: when a vendor’s strategy is to only offer a hammer, then everything looks like a nail to them. We think differently – we know enterprises have a diversity of infrastructures, approaches to migration and mixed-vendor investments. We can work with that, not only to preserve your investments but to make everything work together – and keep it that way.
So, it’s all about being customer-centric, it’s about careful listening and understanding the customer needs rather than pushing our own agenda. At the end of the day, our enterprise customers are more in control of their destinies and embrace solutions that meet their needs rather than the providers’. If this makes sense to you, we’d like to continue the conversation.
