Inside the vastness, engulfed by trusses of the JFK airport, I and Aliah found ourselves in the midst of a chirpy human gathering. This was in the pre pandemic days when travel was not fearful. Here I should mention that Aliah Bose is Global Client Partner of a telecommunication giant; and we had been on a tour to demonstrate our technological capabilities to a prospective client. It had been an eventful two weeks at California where I got to meet and discuss business with various IT industry stalwarts.
And what I learnt is…
The Goal for Digital Transformation might be Operational Efficiency but the Reality is Different
While waiting at the lounge, Aliah had gotten into an interesting conversation with a gentleman, who was animatedly scribbling something on his iPad. I could figure out that the gentleman was Larry, CIO of a tech startup in the Silicon Valley. He was complaining about how difficult life has become for the IT department of his company.
Larry became increasingly annoyed as he kept talking about the ‘problem of many’. While describing their cloud practices, he said how the department had to use a variety of technologies today for simple cloud operations. It was overwhelming to use different frameworks and tools from many vendors to fulfill their cloud needs.
Security on cloud was another reason for his agony as there had been a couple of instances when hackers took control over the landing zone of their cloud infrastructure. He and his team started with making operations efficient for their organization by strengthening the backbone of infrastructure and there were multiple vendors engaged for different outcomes that never really resulted in the collective vision that the company had.
Soon our flight took off and we were among the clouds. Larry’s concerns got me thinking; cloud as a technology can bring about a bit of complicacy especially for an in-house IT department without cloud experience. The decision of whether to migrate legacy apps to the cloud or build cloud native apps could be a taxing exercise for CIOs. Having worked in the IT industry for more than two decades, I could [AK1] imagine how a simple misconfiguration can prove to be detrimental to the integrity of data.
The Journey to Cloud need not be Complex, We must SIMPLIFY
I realized that our company, Tech Mahindra has been one of the global leaders in cloud optimization practices. Being an enabler of digitization, I have always advocated an easy-to-use interface of technology. So, the intent is right. The customer also requires it. Its high time we include this in our customer propositions. These thoughts led me to the idea of formulating a toolkit that would include all major aspects of digitization – be it cloud, ESRM, data and analytics (D&A), artificial intelligence (AI), or blockchain.
How Our Toolkit can SIMPLIFY Digital Transformation
Soon I shared this idea with my team in the office, they got just as excited. After multiple interactions and discussions, we decided to call it ‘SIMPLIFY’.
This is an end-to-end digitization toolkit that helps organizations in all facets of their digital journey. For instance, it includes security services which takes care of data compliance issues, provides layered protection, and ensures data-visibility norms are followed within the organizations. Similarly, it also includes services on the D&A front which takes care of the entire data warehousing solution for organizations—right from cloud migration to analyzing huge data lakes to providing supply chain and warranty analytics.
SIMPLIFY also includes SAP on cloud and Tech Mahindra is in fact one of the few companies capable of migrating entire enterprise systems into the cloud. The most difficult part while building this toolkit was to onboard all the competency heads under the same umbrella. It was a laborious ask as they were spread all across the world. Working under the SIMPLIFY umbrella would also mean a tremendous level of cross functional work being exhibited by employees, especially at the associate level. We did face some hiccups in the beginning but soon, the coordination levels were on point and all the competencies started working in tandem.
What Happens NXT When You SIMPLIFY
Since then, we have worked with several organizations and helped them with a comprehensive digital services portfolio.
- We have provided cloud advisory services for a US-based aircraft manufacturer and helped them reduce 30% of cloud operations cost and 70% in software license cost.
- We helped a Swedish car manufacturer with hybrid cloud deployment with the help of our managed Platform for Adaptive Cloud (mPAC).
- We have also migrated applications and data for a various American healthcare and telecom organizations.
- One of our more interesting engagements was when we delivered infrastructure as a code for a European retailer.
There have been many such instances where we were able to deliver cloud services very efficiently to organizations all over the world. This initiative saw the leadership team of Tech Mahindra coming together as one. I hope as a Tech Service provider we will now be able to provide the much-needed breather to CIOs like Larry who are lost in the maze of options looking for the NXT best sum total solution for their organizations.
Disclaimer: The names (Aliah, Larry) have been changed to maintain confidentiality. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
