De-risking digital transformation for long-term customer success

These are challenging times for running a business, but there’s no sign organizations are taking that as an excuse to pull back on digital investment. 

In fact, they are increasingly investing in cloud-native technologies and modernization initiatives to do more with less, and to drive agility and competitive differentiation. 

Yet any major IT modernization project comes with an element of risk. The Boston Consulting Group claims that 70% of such initiatives fail, which sometimes entails serious financial and reputational consequences for the organization and its service providers. 

Systems integrators therefore need to ensure they have the processes and guardrails in place to minimize the risk that their customers’ transformation initiatives could be derailed. 

The building blocks of transformation

Software provides the building blocks of modern transformation projects. It underpins everything from banking, government, and healthcare services to online shopping, gaming, and social media. 

This has led to every company, to some extent, becoming a software company today – whether they use it to deliver compelling customer-facing services or drive back-end efficiencies. Both are essential in a world of ongoing business and economic uncertainty.  

In this context, digital transformation starts with the transition of customer-facing applications and critical business software to modern multi-cloud environments. 

Systems integrators have played a leading role in advancing these migration journeys for their customers for the past decade. In doing so, they’ve helped their customers to unlock significant advantages, including improved availability and resilience, rapid provisioning, and accelerated time-to-value.  

Service providers in the hot seat

Cloud-native environments also introduce risk for future transformation projects, however. They are dynamic and complex, supporting millions of lines of code and creating billions of dependencies to manage. Their sheer scale and complexity makes it incredibly challenging for organizations and their partners to deliver rapid software innovation without compromising on quality. Legacy dashboards, siloed alerts, and manual troubleshooting are simply no longer fit for purpose.  

Faced with this complexity, many digital transformation projects either fail or are delayed, putting the pressure on those tasked with delivering them. The problem is that development teams are often still laboring with manual processes, siloed tools, and fragmented, inconsistent data. 

This makes it difficult for systems integrators to automate software delivery and cloud operations processes to improve consistency and reliability for their customers. Their skilled developers therefore spend too much time getting involved in quality assurance, incident response, and other key stages of delivery.

They should instead be working on higher value work that drives transformation projects forward for their customers.  

Towards automated cloud operations 

To overcome these challenges and de-risk their customers’ transformation projects, systems integrators need continuous insight across both development and production environments. 

They need real-time data that enables them to anticipate problems before they arise, and to automate development and operations processes to deliver quality software at scale. 

Observability is therefore a prerequisite for any transformation project. Systems integrators need to arm their internal teams and customer stakeholders with an observability platform that gives them a single source of truth they can align around – to observe, measure, and act on unexpected problems, both in development and in production environments. 

This means less finger pointing, enhanced productivity, and better working relationships between systems integrators and their customers. 

AI is the second critical success factor for keeping transformation projects on track. With the right AI solutions, systems integrators can enhance their delivery capabilities by driving automated cloud operations for their customers.

This enables them to minimize the risk of defects slipping into their customers’ cloud environments by enabling self-healing applications that can auto-scale and adapt to security threats in real time. 

As a result, they can increase confidence in the quality and security of their software so they can improve time to value for customers.

When systems integrators combine observability and AI effectively, it’s like having an extra team of engineers on hand 24/7. AI never gets tired, and – when fuelled by high quality observability data, it doesn’t make mistakes. 

These capabilities are not a nice to have for systems integrators delivering cloud-first transformations. They are absolutely essential. Partners can finally shift from the back to the front foot—from sifting through logs to accelerating innovation with reduced risk. 

A virtuous cycle 

Organizations know they must adapt to the new reality of cloud-enabled transformation or slowly lose relevance. They need to do so with the confidence, however, that their innovation drive will not disrupt critical business activities or customer experiences. 

For systems integrators, this represents a fantastic opportunity to drive revenue and burnish their reputation, by de-risking their customers’ digital transformation projects through automated cloud operations. 

However, they cannot do so with the approaches and solutions of yesterday. Modern AI capabilities and observability platforms hold the key to driving a virtuous cycle of software-powered innovation and growth.