3 Ways Businesses Can Optimize Their Tech Investments

Joe Schramm

Today’s businesses are looking for new ways to leverage technology to reduce their dependence on human capital to perform low-value, repetitive tasks. Given the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), technology vendors are bringing solutions to the market that enable organizations to reallocate those human resources to more meaningful, rewarding and valuable tasks.

Here are some ways to determine your company’s most valuable tools, demonstrate meaningful business impact and reallocate repetitive tasks.

Getting Started

1. Minimize risk. De-risking technology purchases (PDF) is a big value driver that solution providers can offer their customers and prospects. While big deals are always welcome, not all customers are ready to make large scale, enterprisewide purchases, particularly in an uncertain economy in which budgets are tightening. Furthermore, the return on investment (ROI) on these types of deals can often take years to materialize. As a result, the customer is often the party that bears the most risk.

With the rapid rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based solutions and subscription-based pricing models, organizations can rapidly acquire capabilities without massive up-front expenditure. Now, newer models such as consumption-based pricing and use case-based packaging provide alternate starting points for customers. This added optionality for how customers start with a solution provides them with the ability to start small, minimize risk and demonstrate business value in a condensed time frame.

As solution adoption spreads and as additional use cases are deployed, the consumption-based pricing scales in parallel to the value curve for the customer.

With automated IT operations, it often makes sense for a customer to start with only the components or features they need when taking a step forward in their digital transformation journey. For example, they can start with the objective of reducing observability and monitoring event “noise,” and then later move to other use cases over time, such as automated ticketing, faster detection of incidents, and tool rationalization.

2. Provide business value. Building on the previous point, today’s businesses should avoid implementing technology for technology’s sake. They need to focus on deploying new tools and technologies that demonstrate meaningful business impact as quickly as possible. For solution providers who are looking to bring innovative solutions to their customers, this is a great opportunity to provide more value and deepen your relationships.

In the world of IT operations, the idea is to improve business resiliency and continuity to ensure their digital assets are running efficiently and with high uptime. This ultimately translates into revenue protection and other value drivers that ensure the business captures as much opportunity as possible while also minimizing losses. This can also translate into cost savings through tool reduction, reduced mean time to respond (MTTR), and automation that frees expensive human capital to focus on more valuable tasks (versus monitoring and responding to incidents).

For example, if an online gaming company suffers an outage, this can cost more than $20,000 per minute in lost revenue. In addition, a loss of goodwill with its customers can lead to customer churn. Lost revenue is bad enough, but it’s even tougher to recover from losing disgruntled customers due to subpar experiences and low satisfaction. By reducing the number of incidents and further reducing the mean time to detect, respond and resolve, organizations can protect revenue and improve customer satisfaction.

3. Reduce costs. In the current economic environment where organizations are focusing on reducing costs due to the specter of a looming recession, it’s wise to look for ways to save money. However, sometimes you must spend a little to save a lot.

To put it in personal terms, over the last several years many of us set out to cut the cable cord. Folks were probably already subscribing to one or two streaming services. The cost of a simple attic antenna (if you want access to local TV broadcasts) is less than $100, and more choices of subscription services emerged, offering cord-cutters more options to mix and match what they want to see. Sure, you will incur some up-front costs to make the switch, but in my case, the ROI was delivered in about four months and my ongoing at-home entertainment costs were reduced by about half.

This trend is often found across a wide swath of businesses. Due to the digital transformational shift that has occurred, organizations have had to invest in a wider range of observability and monitoring tools to manage their ever-growing complex digital infrastructure. This has resulted in large-scale tool sprawl across many organizations. In addition, siloed teams of staff have emerged, each leveraging different sets of tools to manage their respective pieces of the digital landscape. When outages occur, there’s often a mad scramble to arrange bridge calls that involve many team members and consume considerable time.

There are ways for IT organizations to take a holistic view of the tools in their arsenal to determine which are most useful. Expensive bridge calls can be reduced. Furthermore, with the wide-scale adoption of AI- and ML-based solutions, many of the low-value tasks performed by expensive human resources can be automated, freeing those resources to focus on more meaningful work.

Joe Schramm is vice president of alliances and channels at BigPanda, where he works to forge mutually beneficial partnerships that will help BigPanda scale while delivering results to customers and clients. He previously worked as head of Americas partner sales for Sailpoint, vice president of strategic partners for BeyondTrust and vice president of alliances and channels for Trusona. You may follow him on LinkedIn or @bigpanda on Twitter.