IT Managed services environments are on purpose to turn corporate IT into a “profit center” in the long term. At the same time, however, the complexity of the infrastructure is increasing. For this reason, service providers are becoming indispensable partners.
In times of cloud and DevOps, it is more a matter of finding the right time and the right speed as a company. Sustainably integrate external services into its own value chain.
For their part, consultants and service providers must respond to this new situation: Collaboration is becoming more partnership-based and long-lasting, and classic project business is dwindling in favor of orchestration and change management. Rosemarie Gross of cloud services specialist Advanced Unibyte knows what this means for a classic system house:
“Coming from the classic system house business, for some years now we have increasingly noticed the need to evolve in the direction of cloud and managed services because of the increasing demand. But you can’t make this transformation if at the same time you let the proven project business continue unchanged. Our goal from the beginning was to open up this new field together with our existing customers and tackle the transformation together.”
Transformation means change. But this simple idea has by no means been accommodate everywhere at the management level of German companies. Although the digital transformation is demonstrate quickly and with pleasure. It is far more important to anchor the corresponding mindset in the heads of the entire organization.
Offshoring of legacy architectures to the cloud, which is often required by decree from above, is a prime example. A “lift and shift” is rarely enough to achieve a real transformation. In fact, migration to the cloud often has the opposite effect. Without the right organizational measures, new technology complicates IT processes, resulting in additional costs.
Service providers need to respond with the right offer, as Mathias Szymansky from CEMA reports: “When it comes to services, we are seeing a growing trend towards modularity. The big question of the cloud is to settle, it is now a quite trending
queestion of when to outsource which services – or not. The important thing here is that the business case must be tailored to the customer.