Technology is all around us and it is impacting the business success (or failure!) more than ever. Successful organizations embrace technology to empower their business and flourish, while those reluctant to change experience more and more pressure to stay. More customers than ever are approaching us to help them to empower their business.
The role of IT is of critical importance to this transformational journey. Before, when IT was solely an infrastructure provider and used IT-centric solutions to manage the infrastructure, the applications, and the users, the conversations we had were always driven by IT. We helped customers by standardizing and automating IT processes, digital workspaces, securing applications and building new infrastructures. The conversations we now have with customers aren’t necessarily driven by IT but are either directly or indirectly driven by the business.
Empowered Employees Are at the Heart of Digital Transformation
For example, HR teams have a hard time to onboard new employees or even have challenges finding new employees because their IT services are often experienced as cumbersome and rigid. IT used to be a cost center so efficiency was king. IT spent years standardizing, optimizing and locking down the digital workspace to drive efficiencies. We now can’t all of a sudden hold IT accountable for not meeting the modernized standards of employees. Employee needs have changed dramatically! Employees now have modern devices at home and everything they need to manage from a personal perspective (such as utilities, banking or even something like child daycare), can be done through apps, portals and a lot of self-service. Employees need to feel that same level of empowerment at work because if you want to digitally transform your business to stay competitive, you need digitally empowered employees. They are at the hearth of digital transformation…
Deliver innovation and differentiation to your business
Innovation and differentiation are key ingredients to stay successful and competitive. This all revolves around your strategic applications. These are the applications that set your business apart from your competition. They are your ‘systems of engagement’ applications that directly connect your business to your customers and this is obviously where you want to innovate, experiment, deliver new features, get fast feedback and ultimately differentiate. Yes, you need a DevOps culture! Yes, you need Agile software development practices! And Yes, you need Lean principles … but you also need a platform. A platform that allows you to focus 100% on modernizing your applications, and not having you need to focus on the platform itself. You need a platform that enables cloud-native, 12-factor applications out of the box, without you having to bolt on several different solutions. You need a Cloud-Native Platform to modernize your applications and stay competitive.
Run, manage, connect and protect all of your apps on any cloud
Cloud is a way of working, not a place. When we at ITQ talk about “cloud” in general, we can talk about a Software-Defined Private Cloud, a Hybrid Cloud or a Public Cloud. It doesn’t really matter who owns the physical facilities, hardware, software licenses or who operates it. What’s important to your business is that storage, compute and network resources are ubiquitous and available on demand. For traditional, hardware-defined data centers, this is not the case. Chances are you will be operating your on-premises data center in a hybrid cloud model for many, many years to come, so a fundamental step of any cloud journey is modernizing the data center. To finally successfully and securely extend your private cloud into the public cloud, it is imperative you transform and software-defined networking and security. This will allow you to consistently run, manage, connect and protect all of your applications on any cloud.
These are some examples of what we are going to talk about at our annual Transform! conference. After two successful editions of Transform!, we are proud to announce the third edition is in the making. The 26th of September, Fort Voordorp in Utrecht will be the stage for a day of sharing knowledge, meeting subject-matter experts and experiencing the ITQ-vibe for yourself. You will walk away with everything you need to empower your business!
For more information about the conference and registration, visit the website at https://itq-transform.com
We hope to meet you at Transform! 2019!
