Looking to Innovate in the Cloud? Don’t Overlook This Key Element of Success
When it comes to the cloud, success is not guaranteed. Digital transformations often fall short of expectations—70% of transformations fail to meet targets, according to Boston Consulting Group. What’s going wrong?
The simple answer is that it’s hard. It’s hard to define the scope, method, and approach of migration, timelines, budgets, and security considerations, and drive the culture shifts cloud adoption demands.
Business leaders today are under immense pressure to deliver innovative business outcomes. Numerous factors need to be considered, and many of these, such as operations and environments, are in constant flux. On top of that, you’re limited by budgets, talent, and capability. It can be very challenging for organizations to achieve their goals if they have to navigate everything on their own.
Not even a public cloud provider can build all the services and expertise to cover every use case. But cloud partners—partner companies associated with cloud providers—act as trusted advisors often guiding the entire journey, through strategy, customized technology solutions, and change management.
It’s easy to simplify partners as extra people power or a one-time exercise to lift and shift your systems. However, the decision is far more strategic for today’s innovators.
Over the last decade, organizations have been migrating to the cloud to realize cost savings, scalability, improved security, and faster development, but the primary aim was to change the operating model. Today, their focus is on embedding transformation so every person and team can drive change and innovation.
This larger-scale transformation requires more complete approaches that combine cloud services and a variety of partner solutions to solve specific problems such as security, data and analytics, or machine learning (ML). That may call for several specialist partners working together to solve an end-to-end problem, such as cloud services partners that offer expertise, guidance and custom solution development as well as technology partners (also known as ISV partners) that provide software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.
Ulta Beauty, the largest beauty retailer in the U.S., partnered with MongoDB, commercetools and HCLTech on a recent cloud project with the goal of providing the best experience to its end customers.
HCLTech provided expert guidance, defining the solution blueprint and cloud-native deployment architecture through cross-functional workshops. MongoDB contributed a database solution for dynamic scaling, ease-of-use, and integrations with Google Cloud. commercetools supported Ulta Beauty’s evolution of its application programming interfaces (APIs).
“Working with the right technology partners has helped us to avoid analysis paralysis that can happen when developer teams spend a lot of time trying to understand and manage every detail,” says Sethu Madhav Vure, IT Architect at Ulta Beauty. “Instead, we convert a proof of concept into a working solution, and quickly bring it to market. It’s been a major shift in our IT culture as we try out new things weekly and see incredible support from leadership.
