Digital technology is integrated into every aspect of business today, changing how enterprises operate and bringing new processes and services on board via the cloud and enhanced collaboration tools. An accelerated move to hybrid working due to the pandemic and disrupted supply chains as a result of global conflicts and rising energy costs have further intensified the need for transformation.
Enterprises struggle to master change
However, technology transformation can be difficult to achieve for multinationals that are fragmented from both organic growth and merger and acquisition. Assets are often managed locally or regionally with no single glass-pane view across the entire IT estate. The IT skills drought has also made overall control difficult to achieve.
Change demands the modernization of legacy solutions. But many of these infrastructures are unwieldy, with a vast assortment of technologies and extensive ecosystems. As a result, many enterprises don’t know exactly what assets they have, making transformation onerous and holding back business initiatives.
Complexity has made it difficult for enterprises to manage new technologies. Take cloud spend, for example. Managing cloud spend has overtaken security as a top cloud challenge for the first time in a decade.
These issues can be solved by standardizing, consolidating and integrating the infrastructure globally to provide a centralized view – simplifying and automating where possible. This increases agility and scalability and lays the foundations for a future-ready transformation infrastructure. At the same time, it reduces costs while streamlining IT management, speeding up deployment and resolving problems more quickly.
Why consider WITO?
Integration and service management best practices ensure that the ecosystem is properly orchestrated for maximum business benefit. This is where WITO comes in: working with an experienced supplier who can take over your existing infrastructure, manage it more effectively and prepare the groundwork for transformation. WITO helps manage this complexity and provides a single point of accountability for multiple technologies, partners and cloud services across various providers and applications.
More and more of our customers, old and new, want a WITO approach because they don’t have the time or the resources to maximize their IT investment and align it with business outcomes. Technological complexity has become a bigger issue due to the ongoing skills drought and difficulties hiring experienced staff. By choosing a robust, experienced partner and adopting WITO, enterprises can also minimize risk and enhance resilience.
WITO is built on a one-partner, one-umbrella concept. A single SLA covers the entire infrastructure, significantly reducing complexity and providing greater insight into budgets, end-of-life of products and future roadmaps, previously blurred by local and regional management teams.
This approach provides enterprises with global visibility and control. It is especially advantageous to multinationals who are transforming their infrastructures and want to better match technology with business goals but find themselves drowning in complexity.
In addition to providing clearer visibility, WITO lowers the cost of ownership and paves the way for continuous technological improvement, providing the scale and elasticity to navigate market uncertainties. Automation procedures are introduced to handle data spread across multiple IT and business applications. Data automation is an important process to easily extract, transform and load data, as required. Automation can also be invaluable in managing large data migrations.
Orange Business partnered with a global healthcare company, for example, to transform its IT infrastructure, modernizing it to create a lean, centralized command center to help lower total cost of ownership, while providing an advanced and stable IT platform to host innovations. It is estimated that the total cost of ownership can be reduced by 5% per annum. This results in a more efficient center with more automated services orchestrated to deliver better performance.
On another project, Orange Business is helping a global not-for-profit to ensure robust, secure connectivity and the availability of applications in the cloud 24/7, wherever their users are. This has enabled them to better connect with communities and quickly perform services in life-saving scenarios.
A consultancy-led approach to WITO
Here at Orange Business, we take a consultancy-led approach to WITO. We understand that every enterprise is unique and wants to ensure that its technological ambitions are aligned with business outcomes.
Our consultancy team performs initial, deep-dive assessments into your technology estate to create an inventory of existing assets for comparison against requirements. We work closely with each customer to co-innovate and co-construct where necessary to develop a robust roadmap for future transformation. Following a due-diligence and shadowing process, the transition to complete takeover spans approximately 45 days. Highly-sensitive areas in industries such as finance, supply chain and health can be ring-fenced, where appropriate.
This approach is designed to provide a set of best practices and solution optimizations to achieve enhanced, measured results from an enterprise’s technology investment. Ultimately, enterprises will see the impact their digital budgets are having and the returns they can expect.
Another global not-for-profit needed to guarantee its users a high-performance, high-availability experience but was running into complexity issues with its local connectivity capabilities. Orange Business carried out a WITO, enabling the organization to improve its quality of service and increase productivity with better control over operating costs. It has also enabled them to connect with their suppliers more quickly and to scale up more rapidly.
Digital transformation is not a tick box; our customers expect continuous improvement. Orange Business is vendor agnostic, and we bring processes into play utilizing advanced hyperautomation solutions, such as cognitive automation, process/task mining and AI-driven automation and integration platform for operations (AI/Ops), for example. These derive meaningful insights for faster and better decision-making to scale business performance, manage the growing size and complexity of IT environments, preempt outages and improve the overall user experience.
IT teams are under more pressure than ever to support and manage expanding global digital infrastructures. Taking on a trusted external partner to WITO means internal resources can focus on activities directly related to growth, allowing the business to transform and stay one step ahead of the competition digitally.
Learn more about Orange Business consultancy services.
Bibek Padhy, Head of International Integration for Orange Business, has 28 years of experience in IT and network services, including business acquisition, service integration and transformation. He is committed to offering customers business agility and flexibility by combining best-of-breed technology and services.