How a service-based approach to your tech will scale capability and lower costs.
Transitioning from mailing DVDs to downloading files
In August 2008, Netflix experienced a major database corruption that made it impossible for the company to ship DVDs to its members for three days. That incident convinced the company that they needed to move away from vertically-scaled single points of failure (like their server centres) to more reliable, horizontally scaled cloud-based services.
The effort to move Netflix’s systems and database into the cloud took eight years, and last year, the company finally closed its last data centre. The shift has made it possible for Netflix to scale its operations to more than 130 countries and offer new data-heavy services—things they couldn’t offer when they had to rack the servers themselves.
Netflix isn’t the only company who has undergone similar seismic shifts in its business model due to technology disruptions. Adobe, SAP, Stripe, Airbnb, Intuit, Comcast and hundreds of other forward-thinking organisations have implemented comparing changes to not only survive but thrive through change.
Today’s most successful businesses in this industry are no longer hardware-based moguls like HP or Microsoft, but companies who are blurring the lines between hardware, software and services like Salesforce, Amazon and Google.
As-a-service models are revolutionising business
COVID is accelerating many societal and technology shifts and reversing others. The COVID era is a technology-driven season with widespread and often forced adoption of trends like work-from-home, online retail, pickup/delivery services, entertainment-as-a-service, telemedicine (well, tele-you-name-it), and machine-learning. Embodied in this change are deep behavioural shifts that, even given a decade, might never have reached these proportions. Enabling nearly all of these shifts is an “… as-a-service (XaaS)” capability be it data, infrastructure, platform, software, or experience.
XaaS (or whatever-value-you’re-creating as a service) was already on its way to becoming a juggernaut, with a market value of $93.8 billion in 2018 and projected to triple to $344.3 billion by 2024, but due to the incredulous effects of COVID on the world’s economy, it’s now on a whole new upswing.
Today, 70% of the world economy has moved away from a commodity-centred approach instead of relying on delivering services to add value, and this percentage continues to grow worldwide.
These new approaches in how technology is developed, delivered, commercialised and consumed are pushing innovation in how we create value and deliver it to customers and clients. Moving away from a strictly product-focused strategy to one where businesses are incorporating each and every aspect that surrounds their value-add into a holistic service, is one of the fastest-growing trends. This is especially relevant for those in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector.
This approach, which we call Technology-as-a-Service (TaaS), is not only the rising future for ICT providers but for everybody that relies on technology to run their business.
How does technology delivered as-a-service benefit my business?
As soon as you embrace business technology delivered as a service and not as a shelved product, a whole new world of possibility opens up.
Here are some of the immediate benefits of transitioning from commoditised technology to service-based ICT.
1. An integrated approach. When your technology is being delivered as a service by a single provider, all the components can be purposely designed to work well together and complement each other.
2. Scalability that is modular. This means that each function is self-contained with standardised interfaces so that it can be utilised to build different systems or run disparate processes.
3. Flexibility built-in. When your process is integrated and your components are modular, all of a sudden you have a new level of flexibility to adapt to fluctuating business circumstances.
4. Strategic input. Where strategy has previously been employed as an optional extra within the ICT process, it can now be offered as an integrated service by your provider, targeting your tech solutions and optimising its impact.
5. On-demand changes and updates. This includes the ability to add features and automatically update users to the latest available version of the technology, whether that be hardware or software.
6. Contextual application. A bespoke solution is customisable to different business contexts, making sure your business is agile enough to adapt if and when necessary.
7. Best experience design. When you have a comprehensive, flexible solution that bundles hardware, software and services into a single technology offering, you can guarantee a friction-free experience to both your team and your customers.
8. Increased compliance and security. Offering as-a-service technology solutions do not negate the need for compliance and security. In fact, it creates the opportunity to embed it even deeper into the fabric of your network.
9. Most cost-effective. Having all your technology solutions integrated under one roof does not only lower your costs but also makes it far more predictable.
10. Unburdened technology management. Allowing your provider to take charge of your complete technology stack through a service-based approach unburdens you from the task of daily IT management, and frees you to focus on growing your business.
Infoprotect – a full-stack technology service house
2020, as it turns out, is the year of IT efficiency and leveraging the full extent of service-based technology. And you can take the first step toward making that happen by entrusting all your technology needs to a service-orientated provider.
Companies that lead in this transition will create future prosperity for the industrial sectors and the enterprise businesses.
South African ICT provider Infoprotect is a complete-service house when it comes to designing and implementing the technology your business needs to succeed. Acting as a proverbial one-stop-shop, they cater to the complete ecosystem for businesses looking to streamline their technology infrastructure and support.
Partnering with Infoprotect in redesigning your overall technology system will benefit every aspect of your business. It can maximise how your sales team is structured and compensated. The finance team may finally get to adopt those new revenue recognition models. The service team is enabled to change its approach to better solve your customer’s challenges. Even your marketing team’s playbook will change for the better.
Make sure you partner with a technology provider that not only sells to your business but truly commits to service and position it for optimal growth.
