A Fast Secure Digital Workplace with Microsoft, Fujitsu and Citrix
Modern IT departments have enormous budgets and there’s a veritable feast of technology out there to choose from. IT spending worldwide will total $3.5 trillion this year, according to Gartner. The challenge lies in selecting the right technology to drive your business forward and successfully integrating it into your stack. The proliferation of new cloud services, with countless players working to maximize cloud value, has led to a serious management challenge.
Thankfully, IT departments do have a way out: they can look for vendor partnerships that do some of the integration legwork for them and they can consider service orchestration and work with a systems integrator.
Vendor Partnerships Offer a Shortcut to Your Digital Journey
“In financial services, we spend an increasing amount of overhead managing third parties, and when we can forge close partnerships, it minimizes that overhead,” Thomas Phillips, CIO of Elavon told CIO.com.
Many major players in the Cloud and Desktop world have been putting their heads together and analyzing how they can maximize their value. A great example of asserting value from partnership is the alignment of Fujitsu with Citrix and Microsoft. Citrix offers a cloud service that delivers secure apps from Azure to any device, and XenDesktop enables secure productivity in the cloud with Office 365. In the past, an IT department would have had to allocate resources and work out how to integrate these services internally, but with strong partnership and execution the Fujitsu, Microsoft, and Citrix alliance provides customers with accelerated assured results.
The result — when vendors form partnerships themselves — is invariably more secure and efficient. When they tailor their toolsets to work natively with each other, the integration burden evaporates, adding real business value. It frees up resources for clients, because they don’t have to develop internally. Instead, they can pick what they need from a fixed menu and dive straight into the innovation and creativity that will really drive their business success and differentiate them in the marketplace.
Marco Iansiti of Harvard Business School described companies like Walmart and Microsoft as keystones within their own business ecosystems. He suggests:
By continually trying to improve the ecosystem as a whole, keystones ensure their own survival and prosperity. They don’t promote the health of others for altruistic reasons; they do it because it’s a great strategy.
Microsoft’s Brad Anderson and Fujitsu’s Karyn Jeffery recently discussed how Fujitsu, Microsoft and Citrix are working together to fast track customer value. “The real key is to keep talking and keep evolving” Karyn Jeffery, Fujitsu Head of End User Services.
Seeing the Opportunity
This isn’t just about selling or re-selling a software product; it’s about sharing valuable aggregated experience based on interactions with multiple companies over years. The business value is in understanding the software to the level of being able to see what type of value it could release in any particular business. With a deep knowledge of other vendors through these partnership agreements, service orchestrators and forward thinkers, such as Fujitsu, with Microsoft and Citrix, can guide clients to the right tools for them and prove that they’re working with the right metrics.
Dealing with Disruption
In a recent survey by Fujitsu, 71% of IT decision-makers say digital disruption means organizations need to innovate faster in order to remain relevant. This creates the need for a Digital Workplace — powered by a partnership between Citrix, Microsoft, and Fujitsu — to increase information intensity and connectedness of just about everything, leveraging mobility and cloud to help people accomplish tasks faster and make better decisions.
In a recent Redmond Magazine webcast, Fujitsu’s Karyn Jeffery goes further into the challenges organizations face shifting to a digital workplace, why it’s so important to focus on user experience and the roadmap to a true digital workplace.
Outcomes
Speed-to-market offers obvious benefits, enabling companies to surpass their competitors. Agility is an increasingly vital component of long-term success, because organizations must be able to pivot and exploit new technologies as they emerge. Bottom line, through a connected workplace you arrive quicker at a Digital Workplace, delivering the two major benefits to come out of Fujitsu exploiting their strategic engagements with Microsoft and Citrix, flexibility and reduced time-to-value.