FeatureAs a customer reducing strategic partners, you can influence them to create solutions that meet your needs, writes Manisha Arora at ServiceNow.
Across industries, companies are consolidating technology platforms and providers to create efficiencies and cut costs like never before. As they rely more heavily on SaaS, technology decisions are becoming more strategic. Often, they are being made at significantly higher levels of the organisation. This trend is welcome because virtually every organisation is a software company nowadays, with nearly all underlying operations enabled by technology systems. The more processes that executives can convert into automated workflows, the greater the benefits throughout the organisation.
Getting there starts with company-wide mandates to consolidate software portfolios and standardise on a small number of strategic technology platforms. The other critical requirement is to get technology vendors to work seamlessly with one another.
I spent years in a global tech company’s IT organisation. It sometimes felt as if we spent more time building custom integrations between our systems than creating new functionalities that moved the business forward. To support business workflows, we needed to stitch together systems and data to present an easy-to-use interface for our end users, many of whom were not technologically savvy.
There is an easier way. Imagine if your platform partners instead offered native integrations that allowed users to share data and take action from one system to another, reducing the swivel chair effect from team to team.
IT developers could focus more on capabilities that provide a competitive edge. Great platform partners do not focus on just building data pipelines and plumbing integrations. They also listen to their mutual customers and build joint solutions whose value is greater than the sum of their parts.
In the traditional IT world, upgrading software systems, even SaaS offerings, often takes weeks or months, because of the time required to update custom integration code and test each new version of the code.
Platform partners can slash cycle times by testing and validating outside integrations and data pipelines before each release, so customers can focus on user testing and release management. By certifying integrations, customers reduce risk, because they know they will stand behind the work and offer support when needed.
Great platform partners can also provide a rich set of end-user and administrator training and documentation to ease the transition to new software versions. That reduces the risk of human error when setting up new applications and tools. CIOs, in turn, gain much-needed visibility into end-to-end workflows.
Companies waste a lot of money every year because their solutions do not mesh well. They also face opportunity costs in building integrations on their own. When developers spend too many cycles writing custom integrations, they cannot focus on more strategic priorities.
When platform partners maintain joint solutions, customers often see cost reductions in the total cost of ownership for both technologies. Their partners can provide joint training and support and can reduce friction in the sales cycle by working together to understand and solve customer challenges.
As a customer making increasingly larger bets on a smaller number of strategic platform partners, you have the power to influence them to create solutions that meet your needs. In doing so, they will deliver joint solutions that accelerate innovation, reduce corporate risk and save a lot of money along the way.
