Shortage of materials, health crises, increases in cyberattacks, war in Ukraine or even tensions weighing on the global Supply Chain… Companies have never had such low visibility on their economic development. Companies must prepare for the unexpected and have been forced to reorganize, review their strategy vis-à-vis the “Digital Workplace” and face the growing risks of cybersecurity explains Paskal Desuert, from Jiliti. The result is an increase in IT costs, to which was added at the start of the year a rise in the prices of certain suppliers and manufacturers. Added to this is the multiplicity of technologies and the IT environment which are changing very quickly and which require having the skills in-house or surrounding yourself with a partner, such as IT infrastructure managers, to the right choices for the next few years.
At the same time, the CIO’s job has changed a lot in recent years: initially a technical expert, he is now responsible for managing projects, teams and also budgets. He is a strategic player in the development of his company and may be subject to pressure from the business teams or even from management on the negotiation of budgets, growth, business expansion, takeover, etc.
The need to optimize IT spend and reduce waste is imperative today. Switching to a Lean approach is a way for a company to free up resources for innovation projects but also to ensure its sustainability in the event of unforeseen events, such as price increases or longer supply times.
In addition, a FinOps approach, ie financial engineering applied to all IT resources, should be applied.
This approach breaks with the usual relationship between the company and its suppliers because it is carried out in a collaborative mode (far from calls for tenders) to optimize responses according to their real material and financial needs. The must, favor a long-term partnership approach between the supplier and its customer, whose mutual knowledge is the backbone to achieve both qualitative and financial gains.
The classic call for tenders reaches its limits
The approach consists in establishing what are the business objectives that the company seeks to achieve and working with them on the real technical means that it will need over time to achieve them.
Having this information and being able to work over time allows IT infrastructure experts to negotiate better with manufacturers. This is the real added value that an integrator must have for his client. The fact of being truly independent vis-à-vis equipment suppliers allows us to put them in competition on each project and the gains generated can be very significant. On a classic call for tenders, the company can expect a gain of around 5% of the amount.
At iso services, a collaborative approach allows savings of up to 20% of the amount of the contract. Today, this approach needs to be duplicated with SMEs, which obviously do not have the same weight as a large account in negotiations with their suppliers. Adopting a collaborative approach will give them leeway in their purchases.
More generally, SMEs are increasingly seeking to outsource the management of their infrastructure, entrusting the optimization of their IT to a specialist and the collaborative approach are fully integrated into this underlying trend. The approach very often includes a process of rationalizing the information system. The SME that operates 8 or 9 software packages can often reduce its application portfolio to 2 or 3 large applications. This harmonization of the IS and this massification also represents a powerful lever in the simplification of the information system and major financial gains at stake. Companies are increasingly looking for a third party who can manage the entire project cycle.
The role of the integrator evolves towards more advice
Today, general management is more and more convinced that IT is a means of accelerating business. The DSI who had full powers over IT is now challenged by his management, by the business departments and by the CFO. The integrator must assist the DSI in the optimization of its infrastructures (needs, budgets and desired services), the identification of the risk factors of new projects, in its ROI calculations and in its communication vis-à-vis its interlocutors.
In this sense, a classic approach totally based on calls for tenders is no longer suited to this need for permanent communication with the trades. On a closed call for tenders, it is impossible to assess the risks, calculate the ROI and suppliers who do not have a complete view of the context necessarily have less leeway to adapt their offers.
On the other hand, agility is an increasingly present demand from our customers because companies have less and less visibility in the medium term on their activity as well as on the scalability of IT technologies which is increasingly fast. CIOs need help to develop their technical skills internally or get them from a partner, like Jiliti, who will be able to make the right choices for the coming years.
In addition, this partner must also have the knowledge and the network necessary to negotiate with the manufacturers the conditions of exit from the contract. Companies are looking for this contractual agility both in their purchases of services and for their applications and their IT resources. CIOs want to pay more and more on consumption, which avoids the pitfall of having purchased an undersized infrastructure and having to operate it for the 5 years over which the ROI of the infrastructure was initially calculated. calculated. Going from an investment budget to a monthly invoice frees up financial resources to gain the agility required by the businesses.
Towards increasingly global contracts
Personalized contracts and the massification of IT resources must lead CIOs to question application needs. In a computer maintenance contract, the third-party maintainer supports the hardware aspect of the infrastructure. Mainframe manufacturers sell their solutions, but also long-term support. This reinsurance is extremely expensive for CIOs and sometimes useless. Working on what is really useful and what is not is a way to achieve significant savings in terms of operating budget.
More and more international clients are looking for hybrid contracts that cover outsourcing and this reinsurance component. On certain types of equipment, there is a real need for a manufacturer’s reinsurance contract, but with a hybrid contract the third-party maintainer can negotiate significant discounts with the manufacturer.
The collaborative approach allows the different parties to be winners: the manufacturer builds customer loyalty, the integrator maintains a long-term relationship of trust with its customer and over time the IT department obtains an optimization of its IT budgets through massification of its contracts which considerably simplifies its processes and much larger discounts than what it could have hoped for with calls for tenders.