Top expectations of CIO’s today from IT service providers

CIO (Chief Information officer) is the stakeholder who controls a major budget in an enterprise for IT operations. Traditionally, CIO and his protégés (as infrastructure heads, datacenter manager etc.) has been key customers for a lot of service providers, as they are the buyers of infrastructure services in the form of managed services, staff augmentation and other sourcing models. In the last few years, however, the relevance of this stakeholder is at stake, as business users and communities have started shopping and exploring out of the enterprise boundaries to buy infrastructure as cloud (IAAS , SAAS or PAAS). This trend is primarily driven by two factors:

• Increased pace in procurement and the agility required today for businesses to build new digital applications.
• The decreased cost, where cloud services cost 2-3 times less as compared to on-premise infrastructure.

There is no one else to blame here other than inability the internal ecosystem to fulfill the business user demands.

The 21st Century Enterprise CIOs need to rise against the demands of the business in the form of adopting a new strategy against the traditional models. Below is a depiction of CIO-NOW and CIO-NXT

What it means for service providers

Service providers in the context of servicing the next gen CIO’s can’t afford to offer the same solutions or services which they got away with in the last decade. Last decade of service providers has primarily been around labor arbitrage and labor consolidation from low cost delivery zones where automation was considered a complementary feature in the operating model, cloud & automation is considered to be a threat for service providers as it means revenue cannibalization. CIOs today are looking at service providers who can be partners in making their vision a reality, which includes cloud, operational automation, business process as a service etc. as included in the base solution and not as complementary services – this means service providers to run at extremely low margins and low profitability – which a lot of service providers are finding difficult to maintain, often this flexibility is shown when there is a push from the customer and not pro-actively

At Hexaware, we have taken the mission to empower CIO’s to be CIONxt in the way most of our solution offerings and products are evangelized and then created.

• For us, Automation is not a feature, it’s embedded in our Target Operating Model and is not charged separately to customer, Our Tensai^® for AIOps platform powers our delivery framework.
• Our Cloud First strategy cloud ensures as a service based deployment viz-a-viz build based deployment architecture. Our Hybrid Cloud framework powers cloud first for enterprises.
• Our continued focus on creating integrated application & infrastructure services PAAS propositions on critical applications like SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft enables enterprises to develop, build, deploy applications faster.
• Lastly, our focus on enabling true business process as a service (BPaaS) with various industry verticals enables true outcome based service delivery model.

Author Bio:- Saurabh Vadhera is the Director – Hybrid Cloud Practice of Infrastructure Management Services at Hexaware Technologies. He has more than 12 years of experience in product management for cloud & infrastructure practice.