Five modernization trends in high-tech: how industry execs are accelerating development, team impact, and avoiding costly mistakes
Leaders at companies and independent software vendors (ISVs) must focus on accelerated smart development. They must look outside their organizations drawing upon refreshed talent, know-how, and investment programs to transform and evolve their business.
Acceleration means optimization. Optimizing resources, focus, and investments. Many organizations are struggling to find strong talent and development leadership needed to drive customer responsiveness and innovate.
Organizations must perfect people, processes, and products together while looking at smart partnerships and cloud service provider investment programs. This serves as a predictive catalyst in driving change, innovation, and results in application development plans.
This is a different type of reset. One that is needed during a time of fast-paced innovation, increasing customer demand, and a global talent shortage. The pace of change is daunting, so leaders need perspective and a plan to help accelerate — while avoiding costly mistakes.
Uncovering the secrets
Slalom is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. Slalom _Build is a uniquely structured organization, within Slalom, that focuses on providing clients with strategically placed development pods and accelerated delivery. The customer keeps their intellectual property while learning and accelerating, alongside our teams.
At Slalom, we work with AWS technologies to empower customers to drive impact while embedding the new skills, processes, and controls — delivering results and transforming the way they work.
With that, we’re sharing our secrets — five intriguing trends related to modernization and the journey to the cloud.
Trend 1: Cloud is used to increase agility, scale, and transformation
Most high-tech companies are shifting to a subscription / Software as a Service (SaaS) business model, which is a cross-functional transformation, affecting the full organization. This generally leads to a technology bet on a public cloud provider, such as AWS.
Modernization is a common organizational goal. Taking advantage of modern platforms helps ensure you do it right, avoid mistakes and potential re-engineering challenges later. Leveraging public cloud providers is smart long-term technology and business bet.
Luckily, AWS is deeply investing in a critical dependency for all customers — successful adoption and development, within the AWS cloud.
Whether you are in the AWS cloud and have a SaaS delivery capability or not, using the breadth and depth of AWS cloud-native services will dramatically change and improve your organization — how it builds software, structures teams, and engages/supports customers (new and existing). Slalom specializes in doing this effectively, through AWS programs.
For example, Slalom, with strong support from AWS, partnered with Zendesk, a San Francisco-based public company that supplies SaaS products related to customer support, sales, and other customer communications. Together, we envisioned and built a cloud-based product to support continuous delivery. In tandem, our collective teams increased awareness of planned product changes among product, engineering, and customer-facing teams.
With that, it’s clear that the cloud allows for an evolutionary journey, but it’s also revolutionary around how you think about data, services, and platforms.
Trend 2: Attacking talent supply shortage
Most high-tech firms hire talent to support existing product capabilities and lack people with cloud-native skills to develop and operationalize products in the cloud.
It all boils down to skills and leadership. Organizations must continue to meet existing customer expectations while considering innovative new solutions and offerings that meet future market needs. It’s best to do this without making hiring mistakes that need much effort to remediate or fix later.
While the cloud is not a new phenomenon, the journey to the cloud is often unique for each customer and often a road traveled for the first time. If you don’t have enough people to keep the lights on and modernize, and can’t find and hire “unicorn” leaders, this leads to tentative steps down the modernization path.
Acceleration, with assurance, is hard to find. This is where the concept of hiring a pod of product engineering leadership is something entirely new. Slalom _Build’s pod delivery model and product engineering method offer agility and a comprehensive perspective. Jumpstart acceleration with pragmatic experience and a clear plan.
Most high-tech companies and ISVs are already exploring supplemental resources, methodologies and seeking leadership abilities to implement transformational product builds. But don’t confuse this with classical staff augmentation strategies, which doesn’t get you the acceleration you need.
When it comes to people, most organizations face very real constraints around current deliverables, business goals, and timing. Slalom offers a repeatable, proven process and set of outcomes. Our highly skilled teams focus on what they are good at — building stuff, powered by AWS. We practice co-creation and delivery alongside you.
The intellectual property we create and deliver together stays with our customers and we ensure that when we leave, our customer’s team now has the skills to continue the journey. This is co-creation and cross-training in action.
With Slalom _Build, our teams ramp very quickly and bring discipline to accelerate our customer’s maturity. It’s a ‘no regret policy engagement, with products co-created and collaborated alongside our customers. As above, it’s your IP, not ours.
Trend 3: Quick understanding and response to customer-driven changes
The customers of high-tech companies are making their own moves to the cloud and expect to be able to consume services in new, modern ways.
Customers are demanding flexibility and the ability to manage costs. High-tech companies must learn how to listen to their customer's changing wants and needs and adapt accordingly.
Case in point, one of our expert teams recently helped a large, Fortune 1000 software company design, build, and implement a modern, scalable, secure AWS environment and deploy the application platform — resulting in a Connected Planning platform. The platform allows them to get and quickly onboard new customers onto their SaaS platform and internal development teams can innovate much faster.
Trend 4: Scattered migration risks customer experience
This is a quick one but packs a punch. Haphazard migration efforts poorly executed can deliver low-quality customer experiences.
A new approach is needed to clearly outline the business value of cloud migration and modernization, which directly addresses competitive concerns.
Trend 5: Using AWS incentives
By now, you might be thinking, “This is all great, but I need to think about the cost per outcome.”
Believe it or not, you can actually bring down the cost of your engagement when working with Slalom, powered by AWS.
How? This is a cloud ground war and AWS is making smart investments. Plus, Slalom runs on a cost per head versus cost per outcome basis.
You can use AWS incentives to mitigate risk, test, and learn, ultimately avoiding costly mistakes. With Slalom, it’s easy to get started, as we know how to navigate these programs. We believe no other partner acts as ambassadors the way we can.
Explore funding now
Slalom has helped our AWS customers use tens of millions in Migration and Modernization Acceleration (MAP) funding this year, up 400% in 2021 compared to all of last year. That’s just one sample program to get you modernizing faster. In fact, some customers have received up to $1M in funding with MAP.
We’d love to chat through some of your visions and explore what kind of incentives might make sense for you. Look forward to discussing an accelerated, efficient delivery. Reach out to your local Slalom leader to discuss.
