Over the last decade, Cloud has undoubtedly been the biggest game changer on the technology front, coupled with the explosion in data and devices. Whether it is IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, Open Source on Cloud, or even allied areas such as Analytics and Mobility, the pace of adoption has been incredible.
Increasingly, we find that businesses no longer just view technology as an expense, but as an investment that can help them differentiate and stay ahead of competition. We see business owners being an integral part of the decision making, along with the CIO’s office.
Also, we find that customers no longer come asking for specific products; rather they simply seek solutions to address their business challenges. In line with this, our approach has evolved too. We take a solution-centric approach rather than focusing on individual products.
Aligning for Digital Transformation
At Sonata, we’ve positively embraced the advent of Cloud, with a deep commitment to be leaders there as well. We’ve made deep investments in people - in terms of reskilling and adding new skillsets; processes - including new templates and tools; and assets - such as Centre of Excellence etc. We’ve developed our own platform IP solutions for Digital Transformation in focused industries like Retail, Distribution and Travel which we are taking to the market.
We’ve worked closely with our partners such as Microsoft to build mindshare for platform based solutions. In India, we’ve been selected as the Country Partner of the year for Microsoft in 3 of the last four years.
With all these, we’ve transformed ourselves as a Digital Capable Partner.
Addressing Adoption Challenges
While leaders increasingly understand the transformative power of technology, there are still certain factors that affect adoption:
• Inherent Resistance to Change
When change is driven by the leadership, getting end users toadopt and appreciate new technologies and understand their impact on their lives is often the biggest roadblock; because people are inherently tuned to resist change.
• Limited Knowledge
Given the plethora of new technologies, businesses have a limited understanding of what works best for their organization; and they lack skilled manpower to deploy them, which are major challenges. The absence of relevant real-life use cases, especially for new technologies, also inhibits adoption.
• Risk Perception
Customers are conscious of specific risks when going Cloud and Digital – data security, interoperability, user adoptions and fear of loss of control of data and systems; which can make them wary. But it is important to understand the business benefits and imperative to go digital for customers to remain competitive.
At Sonata, our focus has been on easing our customers’ digital journey and helping them make the transition. We’re helping our customers adoption challenges through the following:
- Centres of Excellence and Proof of Concept for key technologies with a range of demos to overcome these challenges. We are also handholding the customers at every stage of new technology adoptions with our services team.
- Invest adequate effort in hand holding the customer, helping to educate and build awareness among end users, and support adoption effectively. A clear migration path and assurance on support at every stage of the process becomes important. A clear ROI case is also needed to convince other business stakeholders, such as CXOs.
- Our managed services offerings help customers gain from our deep expertise, such that they are able to run their applications smoothly, without the need to invest in an extensive IT team. We’ve also been working closely with Microsoft on trials, building PoCs and Centers of Excellence to explore product applications and use cases.
We’re thrilled to be at the forefront of driving digital transformation for our customers – helping them make the leap to the next generation of technology; enabling them to use technology in the most effective manner to further their business objectives.