Network Transformation — Big Topic at TEMIA Conference

By Tanya Seda

A few of us just returned from the TEM industry association’s bi-annual TEMIA Conference in San Francisco last week with some interesting shifts within the industry.  One of the more important topics that came up in discussions and sessions with IT professionals in particular was Network Transformation and how TEM vendors need to understand it thoroughly in order to better assist our customers.  A key challenge is that customers are increasingly questioning where—and if–to invest in their IT infrastructure and network architectures. Problem is, when they do this they miss out on the potential benefits a network transformation could bring to their customer interactions, product delivery capabilities, overall operating model and especially their bottom line!

It was clear from our discussions at the conference that companies are more inclined to adopt new technologies for client-facing processes. That makes sense, of course; allowing customers to take advantage of smarter, faster and more accurate systems is hugely important to maintain the critical customer relationship. That said, when it comes to their back-end platforms, there’s not much appetite for investment according to expert after expert. As a result, they could be (and often are) decades old, poorly integrated, slow and carry a larger risk profile than the rest of the infrastructure.   To make matters even worse, there’s a pretty good chance that these back end systems are also costing them money. That’s pretty shortsighted.

The hard part is, legacy system re-platforming is usually a priority for the CIO, but typically seen as too large of an expense by the CFO. Often, and oddly, the CMO does not see this transformation as necessary and the CEO typically sees it as too risky to the business. Since it is important to get all the stakeholders involved to get any project off the ground, these efforts often stall.

As we were listening to one particular presentation, it occurred to me that I see many companies struggling with this transformation process. The question that came to mind was: why spend an enormous amount of money on maintaining the current state when they could invest in technology that will drive cost savings and improve network performance?  They are going to need to do this down the road and the investment costs will be even greater for any new network architecture, infrastructure and back-up systems in order to stay competitive.

At Network Control, we have a practice that plays a large role in helping enterprise companies to quantify their need, assess current environment and contracts and create a roadmap for the change they need. Network Transformation provides a roadmap for the enterprise to modernize its information technology infrastructure by focusing on cost reduction, providing performance improvement and enabling cloud deployment for both SaaS and IaaS offerings.

There are many tools everyone can use to deal with the challenge and the opportunity they have in front of them. Very interesting fast moving times ahead of us – let us know if we can help.