January 23, 2018

January 23, 2018 | Karen Blazek | Director, Product Marketing

Spinnaker Support is delivering digital transformation through people for people.

January always brings a wealth of material outlining expected trends for the upcoming year. Hundreds of new IT-driven articles offer insight on technologies that CIOs and IT Directors should focus on to advance their competitive positioning in 2018 and beyond.

For this blog, I chose to take a different spin, focusing on people rather than technology. One IDC study estimates that the worldwide market for digital transformation exceeds $20 trillion. Yet, according to Gartner, 50% of enterprises will lack sufficient artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and data literacy skills to achieve business value in 2020.

Implementing new technology doesn’t impact the business overnight. It often requires a culture shift that starts with people. It’s people that must learn the new tools, analyze the data, and deliver the benefits. So, organizations must invest in people today to drive their technology advancements tomorrow. Your people and partners must possess the skills necessary to implement your IT strategies and leverage them to their full potential.

Spinnaker Support has been delivering enterprise application services since inception in 2008. Whether you need a partner to advise your innovation, help fund your innovation, train your staff, or free up your staff, we can help you more efficiently navigate the journey from on-premise to hybrid to cloud.

Three emerging technology trends that will be compromised without deploying the right people

Security

Security and vulnerability management requires as profound a paradigm shift as did the internet transformation of two decades ago. IT leaders must focus on blocking, detecting, and responding to threats to prevent attacks and other abuses. Simultaneously, digital business requires more advanced access protection when systems and information are opened up in a digital arena. Digital trends such as mobile, IoTs, and AI are substantially exposing the number of devices and users connecting to your network.

In 2017, we saw a consolidation of threats in the topmost layers of the computing model. New approaches and fresh thinking will be required for organizations looking to increase their security stance and manage risk in cloud and hybrid environments. It is no longer sufficient to react to threats but rather to have a knowledgeable security team in place to analyze and prevent attacks.

Big Data Analytics

Big data has such a vast size that it exceeds the capacity of traditional data management technologies; it requires the use of new technologies to manage the sheer volume. Social networking alone brings huge external data sets into the enterprise, either as actual data, metadata, and links from blogs, communities, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. Importantly, volume does not only refer to the management of storing data, but also the analytics processing the information. Too much information is a storage issue, but too much data is also a massive analysis issue. Today’s landscape requires organizations to analyze the data and distribute it in a readable, usable means to a plethora of different varying audiences.

The amount of data generated from digital event-driven technology demands continuous monitoring, instant assessment, and real-time decision making. For example, event processing when a purchase order is entered from your external website and triggers actionable items in your ERP applications. Such technology requires an infrastructure that ensures: (1) both people and machines can find and use information when needed; (2) that unauthorized use does not occur. A knowledgeable staff paves the way to success.

User Experience (UX)

Human-centered design and usability is a creative approach to innovation that begins with people who shape ideas that become innovative differentiators in the marketplace. Prediction and proactive delivery of experiences that satisfy current and future user needs is a must for succeeding in the IT services industry. Customer experience (CX) continues to be at, or near, the top of CEO, CMO, and CIO agendas, according to Gartner 2017 executive surveys.

IT’s role doesn’t end with the design and implementation of the experience, but also encompasses the evaluation and subsequent satisfaction level. True success requires that actual people assess and grade the experience. Are your users (internal or external) satisfied with the product, process, and services? How do you accurately measure their satisfaction?

How does Spinnaker Support address customer “people” problems?

Nearly 1,000 Spinnaker Support customers benefit from our unique blend of third-party Oracle and SAP support, managed services, and consulting capabilities. Their people trust our people to keep enterprise applications running at peak performance while helping them navigate their digital transformation from on-premise to hybrid to cloud. We take care of the tactical tasks, so they can focus on innovation and differentiators that directly impact the bottom line. Our customers initially seek our service due to significant cost savings; however, they stay with us because of our people.

Let’s use our security offerings as a prime example. Spinnaker Support applies a holistic security philosophy since no single control can be relied on to prevent threats from impacting a business. Our layered security approach crosses all deployment combinations and all layers of the full technology stack, which enables a combined set of controls that integrates People, Processes, and Technology. Our security solution goes well above just an alert or patch tool because we have an entire team of security experts that monitors, analyzes, and provides customers with actionable responses.

We constantly evaluate the data and drive new measures to ensure your organization remains safe. Based on data captured by our security experts, there is 141% higher rate of security incidents per customer for hybrid installations – that is, those who have some combination of public cloud, on-premises network, and hosted private cloud in use – than did for purely public cloud installations. On-premises installations experienced about 69% more security incidents per customer than did for enterprises relying strictly on public cloud services, while hosted private cloud entities saw about 51% more. You don’t need to hire an entire security team to understand and implement what we already know. Our security experts become an extension of our client’s team of security professionals, partnering together to combat all forms of security threats.

Spinnaker Support’s difference

Although application maintenance and support is our core competency, more than one-third of our clients have leveraged at least two of our three service offerings to have a full-service ERP application partner. We pride ourselves on our people and long-term relationships with clients.  Per annual surveys, our clients have consistently rated our support quality at 98+% satisfaction. They give us high marks for responsiveness, fast issue resolution, and professionalism of engineers.

For more detailed information on how we have advanced customer’s digital transformation initiatives with Big Data and User Experience, look for a future blog post and read our customer case success stories.

Start 2018 by contacting us to learn more.