Following up on Joe’s blog, I’m going to talk about how we helped a client to focus on outcomes that would deliver maximum value from a managed service.

Read the IDC Analyst Connection to discover how your managed service provider can help you to achieve business outcomes that deliver real business value.

The client had a business-critical platform that had become end of life, costly to maintain in terms of both cost and effort, and was increasingly unreliable. This unreliability had the potential to cause significant business impact. As an organization with a cyclical business pattern, platform stability is critical at certain key periods of the year, to the extent that failure during a critical period could ultimately damage its reputation and cause the business to fail. They needed to rethink their path forward in order to become a more resilient business.

• Reliability and stability – particularly for the moments that matter
• Lower maintenance costs, and maximum value from cloud investments
• Increased scalability and elasticity
• Business agility through ongoing platform evolution
• Access to deep cloud expertise, freeing up talent to focus on other business activities

Prioritize efforts that deliver on outcomes
Working closely together with the Avanade team, the client took the bold decision to build their new platform in Azure. With our blend of detailed business knowledge and unrivalled technical expertise, they knew that this would be the best way to future proof this major investment.

From our initial analysis and exploration of the platform, alongside conversations and workshops held with executives and stakeholders, we commenced the work to create this business critical platform, using the latest technology. By leveraging the power of the Microsoft cloud and our market leading Azure expertise to meet the full spectrum of client requirements, the final, modernized platform was entirely cloud native and modular, built to be evolutionary and future-proof.

Shared risk and creative commercials
We reduced their risk exposure by agreeing a fixed price, outcome-based delivery of the core platform, giving them confidence that we would overcome any obstacles with no additional investment required.

Such was the confidence of the CIO, the organization’s need to manage the existing platform and the requirement to maintain currency of the new cloud native solution, they decided to commit to a 5 year “manage and evolve” agreement. Following the build of the new platform, this enabled us to evolve the solution and deliver continuous value for the client

Our approach included using our intelligent toolsets to analyse the full Azure landscape, quickly identifying a number of areas where costs could be optimized, and rapidly eliminating wasted cloud spend.

An evolutionary mindset
Our manage and evolve approach allowed great flexibility to pivot to the most important initiative as required. The pandemic required a rapid reassessment of priorities, as market influences created an urgent need for new critical functionality. This new functionality, enabling them to quickly shift how they operated, was delivered in a matter of weeks, and scaled at speed to meet the previously unforeseen requirements. Not only were they able to shift their operating model, they were also hungry to explore further ways in which we could help them to take advantage of new Azure functionality, safe in the knowledge the platform would perform and scale during their business critical periods.

Check out the IDC Analyst Connection for answers on how you can achieve business outcomes and business value with managed cloud services.