In today’s hyper competitive environment, the need to transform is imperative. Successful transformation may be the difference between creating an environment that offers a future wave of growth and becoming irrelevant in a market dominated by innovative disruptors. These new operators are leveraging the capabilities of virtualisation and cloud technologies to offer new services, applications and business models. And they are quickly capturing the attention and monetary spend of businesses and consumers.

In order to remain relevant in this rapidly changing environment, organisations will need to overcome a growing list of challenges. Like the proliferation and penetration of connected devices, changing consumption models and competition from non-traditional operators to name but a few.

Adapting to Change

Transformation strategies will vary and conclude at different business outcomes. But there are three key areas which are interrelated and needed to transform in pretty much every organisation:

• Business – enable rapid service creation and automated service delivery
  The introduction of both cloud and virtualisation technologies provides a foundation to change the economics of business. They provide the infrastructure that facilitates the ability to rapidly launch new services. Enter new markets and geographies, as well as new business models. SDN enables more automated, programmable and self-service applications. These allow customers to easily add or change services, scale bandwidth to meet their changing needs and manage their network, all in near real time.Utilising big data analytics will optimise the user experience by dynamically adjusting network resources to meet the requirements of a particular service and will offer information on user behaviour and consumption patterns to create new revenue streams.
• Technology – develop the tools necessary to meet existing demands while supporting business transformation
  New technologies such as NFV and SDN provide multiple benefits to networks. Capital efficiency is achieved by replacing fixed costs with variable costs. Operational efficiency is achieved by automating and simplifying key processes. Networks based on these technologies, create an agile service creation environment that is the foundation for innovation. Implementing virtualisation technologies will build a more flexible architecture that is programmable and automated, elastic and dynamic, as well as open and interoperable. While big data analytics will provide the necessary intelligence to anticipate not only issues within the network, but the ability to dynamically adjusting network resources to better service customers.It will be important to choose solutions that enable integration with existing infrastructure. While embracing an open-source approach that leverages investments from a community of developers and solution providers. This gives a unified approach to implementation that offers economies of scale, interoperability, reliability and scalability, as well as a shorter time to market.
• Organisational – ensure the skill set is available to leverage the technology, deliver the business value and maximise the benefits of both business and technology transformation
  Within an organisation this will include business process, skill sets and corporate culture and will require alignment of the transformation vision across both the technical and business sides, as well as commitment at all levels of the organisation. The introduction of both NFV and SDN simplifies the tasks of building services. And defining the workflows that activate and manage services. As the environment moves toward a software-centric focus, the need for an internal culture of innovation becomes increasingly important. As does the need for software development skills.A DevOps approach puts in place the tools, processes and culture that enables development and operational teams to work collaboratively and iteratively to accelerate the development process. It enables services to be created and offered in days versus months and years.

Conclusion

Transformation is no longer an option, but a necessity. A successful transformation will create an environment that can drive new revenues. And pave the way for lasting relevancy in highly competitive and changing markets. We partner with Juniper Networks to provide automated, scalable and secure network solutions that offer agility, performance and value.

‘A Strategic Approach to Transformation’ taken from Heavy Reading and Juniper research ‘Navigating a Strategic Approach to Transformation’.