Network Management to Accelerate Digital Transformation

Technology is creating a large amount of disruption and displacement, within retail organizations especially. For the tech industry as a whole, digital transformation has become a buzzword, and rightfully so.

Next-generation branch services are impacting every industry – from healthcare and hospitality to transportation and manufacturing — as organizations look to provide relevance to customers at their physical locations.

We know, as technologists, that it is extremely difficult to deliver certain experiences that we've become accustomed to as consumers: curbside pickup, automatic check-in and managed dashboards, among others. These are services that have quickly become business-critical, meaning that they must work, or brand loyalty and revenue can be lost.

At WWT, we've found the way to ensure an effective digital strategy and continued innovation is by aligning business groups with the infrastructure teams and taking a command center approach to managed services.

On-demand webinar explains WWT's Branch of the Future offering.

Considering business and IT challenges

There are many players that contribute to making decisions around digital transformation, and each has their own considerations.

For folks on the business side, like the CDO or CMO, their main focus is on creating differentiated customer and employee experiences that infuse relevance into their branch locations. They need access to real-time performance metrics that offer confidence in the internal execution details, all at a real-time deployment and monitoring speed.

The CTO or CIO, on the other hand, face another set of challenges. Right now, most of their time is spent "putting out fires," while also focusing on providing high performance and availability to the business.

Within technical groups in any industry, there is a huge focus on talent growth and retention, which can be difficult to maintain while attempting to quickly absorb and utilize new technologies. When marketing or digital teams come up with new ideas faster than IT can absorb them, it creates friction within the organization.

Our goal is to take ideas from the business groups and quickly make them real, while also getting to a position where technical teams can continuously innovate, scale and take the feedback that's given. The key to achieving this state is having the ability to innovate together and partner on new digital initiatives.

So how are we helping to make this a reality for our customers?

Managing experiences, not just devices

For over 20 years, WWT has acted as a world-class integrator on the infrastructure and technology side. Combining that with the ability to work on a global scale and the expertise we've gained around application development, customer experience, workforce enablement and custom integrations is what allows companies to quickly drive innovation.

WWT Chief Technology Advisors and Chief Digital Advisors ensure organizations modernize their infrastructure while undergoing digital transformation for unique experiences.

This is the concept behind our offering. It begins with infrastructure modernization and results in having the resiliency to support and manage outcomes for a complete digital transformation strategy.

WWT's managed service offering goes beyond just managing the network's devices and moves into managing the experiences, APIs and analytics. Tying in Thelios, our enterprise network engagement suite, we can provide visibility into the overall customer journey, as well as the larger organizational journey.

WWT's managed service approach

WWT's Branch of the Future Managed Services meets challenges faced by IT and lines of business simultaneously:

Lines of business

• Innovation opportunities through digital transformation and rich experiences.
• Location and consumer omnichannel marketing tools.
• Real-time access to analytics platforms that foster better decisions.

IT and operations

• Performance analytics as a service.
• Ability to be always on, always reliable.
• Zero-capacity planning surprises.

We've taken a command center approach, with a 24/7/365 monitoring solution, complete program management, service provider aggregation, global deployment team and supply chain management. This method, rather than a typical network operations center approach, dramatically shrinks the time from idea to outcome.

In a typical branch refresh, there would be a separate third party for each step of the engagement: the tech evaluation, site surveys, provisioning and configuration services, circuit aggregation, turn up/cut over and additional integrations. There's a great amount of start-up and tear-down included in each area, resulting in a lot of wasted money and time.

This approach creates micro-segments, where each party has to hand off work and knowledge to another vendor. The entire process can take anywhere from 18 to 24 months to complete for an organization, which means by the time they are able to provide these new services, they are already behind in the market.

Instead, WWT takes a complete lifecycle approach and starts at the beginning, tying in the command center concept throughout the engagement. The capabilities and expertise within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), professional services, global integration centers, software developers and branch and managed services teams provide a complete solution – from evaluating the technology and preparing configuration to handling deployment, integrations and infrastructure management.

By involving each group in the engagement from the beginning, we are able to shrink the time to market from 18 to 24 months to just five or six months for both national and international deployments.

In addition, customers have the ability to move into a continuous innovation loop, with WWT guiding digital strategy.

The operations team and command center are not only involved in managing the implementation time and experiences, they're constantly seeing different ways of doing things and informing customers on the ideas and innovations that can strengthen their infrastructure.

Ready to jumpstart your digital transformation? Check out this SD-WAN Webinar to learn how WWT can help you every step of your journey.