How can Systems Integrators drive digital transformation?

Right now, every company in the world is figuring out what it means to digitise.

So, it’s no surprise SIs are finding their customers are increasingly looking to them for support with digital transformation. They need help with embracing new innovations and technology, such as moving to the cloud, digitising their sales, connecting their machines, and transforming their IT application landscape.

As many of these customers lack the resources and skills to do this inhouse, it’s providing a valuable and exciting opportunity for SIs to expand beyond their traditional expertise in infrastructure and application integration and drive customers’ digital transformation. In fact, over the next couple of years we’re expecting a 10% annual growth for SIs as they start to capture this new gap in the market.

At the same time, SIs face new challenges they’ll need to overcome if they’re going to step up. So, what’s standing in their way?

Strong partners for new challenges

For a start, the pandemic has accelerated companies into a future of work where employees are now spread between the office, home and on the move. SIs will need to find ways to work successfully with their customers in this new environment. Also, while IT integration has always been a strong suit for these companies, the rapid transformation to cloud requires an integration approach that’s much more modular and software driven.

As most SIs don’t have a network of their own, they depend on telecom service providers to provide network connectivity, infrastructure management and security services, often over multiple sites across the globe. If SIs are going to move their focus higher up the stack and quickly drive more value at the top of the value chain, they’ll need strong partners who they can rely on in the infrastructure and application platform space.

Given this need for support, SIs should look for two key attributes in a partner if they’re going to successfully deliver innovative new solutions to help their customers digitally transform:

1. A partner you can trust

Trust is key to any strong, long-lasting partnership. A reliable partner will deliver on their promises, first-time and every time, always keep to committed deadlines, and structure their propositions and pricing around you, not the other way round. It’s also critical they offer complete transparency into how they’re working, such as a clear roadmap for deployment, and real-time insight into what they’re doing at any time. A trust-based relationship, finally, means that partners can depend on each other to generate business growth.

2.   A partner embedded into your processes

A great partner shouldn’t just be great at what they do, they should also understand your business model and integrate their services smoothly. The partner’s propositions must seamlessly complement yours. They must have a dedicated commercial team that can quickly turn around attractive proposals, but also engage with you early on big deals. Their designs should fit into your wider architecture and their service delivery model must integrate into your ITSM approach. That way, if the customer experiences a problem, you’ll have end-to-end visibility of it and be able to resolve and troubleshoot issues quickly and efficiently.

Finding the right partner

To successfully help your customers transform, you’ll need the best-in class partner to support you. They should bring to the table fantastic products which seamlessly integrate into your portfolio, have a thorough understanding of your service management environment, and deliver clear visibility across their solutions end-to-end. You’ll want someone who can offer a go-to-market model, that’s adaptive and agile to the requirements of your business. And most importantly, they need to value your partnership and build trust so you can work out how to make it to market together.

An indirect approach is at the heart of our strategy, and we’re proud to provide solutions that feature a wide choice of different vendors at competitive prices, unparalleled insight into global security threats, legal and compliance frameworks for multiple regions, as well as proactive service management for all our solutions.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could help you drive your customers transformation please get in touch with us.