In the world of IT, change is constant. But in this new digital age, change is accelerating, which has consequences for many, including organizations looking to manage their data.
How transformation looks depends on the organization. If you’re a start-up or a new company, paying a subscription fee to purchase services in the cloud may make more sense and save you money that can be invested elsewhere. In that situation, you don’t have to think about hiring to manage your data centre or worry about servers going down in the middle of the night.
If you’re a financial institution or oil-and-gas firm and can’t move everything off site because of regulatory compliance, moving your email and exchange services to the cloud may work best for you: a hybrid of on-premise servers and cloud services. In the digital age, the transition and needs are different for everyone.
But organizations need a partner to make the transition. Digital transformation is part of COMPAREX’s DNA. “We accelerate those organizations adoption of cloud through a very rich portfolio of cloud-management services and reduce their risk around making such a large transformation for their organization,” says Jason Mackay, General Manager at COMPAREX Canada.
COMPAREX is a 30-year organization based out of Germany that has grown to an unprecedented level in the market. It entered the Canadian market in 2015 through a relationship with Microsoft.
“Our partnership with Microsoft is a primary pillar for our organization globally,” Mackay says. “They’ve been a huge supporter of ours as we look to expand our global reach.”
“We are part of a select partner group with Microsoft known as a Global Partner and one of their key partners specifically in North America as they accelerate their customer’s transformation to the cloud.”
Often the best time for an organization to consider a transition to the cloud is when it is faced with a decision to refresh hardware and/or software. Such a refresh can lead to costly investments. Making the right decision has become a frustrating topic for organizations as they transition investments away from IT and focus on innovation. But it’s also a time to find new ways to be efficient, transparent and find cost savings that can be better spent elsewhere. Now, organizations find themselves asking what they are doing, why they are doing it that way, and, more importantly, how they can do it better.
No organization is immune to the need to refresh. When Microsoft was facing a major hardware refresh, it examined and decided to move its private cloud to a public-hybrid cloud (Office 365/EMS/Azure).
There are several reasons organizations should move to public cloud. The first is agility. Moving to the cloud means your IT is delivering value to the business. Second is cost. Organizations can save more than 50 per cent because in the cloud they pay only for what they need. Transformation also offers flexibility as organizations can scale up and down as needed. There is more security with economies of skill, scale, and investment capability. Firms can also access higher-value services such as PaaS, SaaS and new capabilities such as Big Data and Advanced Analytics.
Traditionally, IT was solely focused on reducing its total cost of ownership. Firms spent 70 to 75 per cent of their IT budgets on operational costs, not new project development. The paradigm shift is that IT is now forced to transition towards being a broker of cloud services from the previous total cost of ownership focused organization. This is where COMPAREX will provide significant value by facilitating this paradigm shift.
COMPAREX provides industry leading services such as state of the art licensing analysis services, Unified Cloud Management services, Cloud Complete for SMB customers and SoftCare a Managed Services for Software Asset Management and automated procurement.
“We’ve been able to transform and innovate our expertise in licensing to better address cloud solutions,” Mackay says. “Our Microsoft Cloud Managed Services portfolio is an extension of our clients Microsoft cloud investments by focusing efforts towards unlocking the value through full utilization of licensing and reducing the time in which employees can take advantage of these incredible solutions. Along with Cloud Managed Services, COMPAREX has recognized the increasing complexity of our client’s environments to which we have created an industry-leading Managed Service portfolio for Software Asset Management and Procurement. These are the key aspects to our market strategy and again, all wrapped around this idea of helping to enable Canadian customers to the cloud and helping them become more agile and innovative in the way they deploy and take advantage of the opportunities as a cloud customer.”
The transition also depends on expertise. COMPAREX has some of the most seasoned talent who have years of experience in licensing and software, but who also understand how the IT world is changing, and how organizations can effectively transition.
“The journey to cloud is a complex one and it takes a significant investment in the development of thought leadership and expertise by having the right people to enable this transformation and accelerate the pace customers are able to drive value back into their organizations,” Mackay says.
Peter Barontseff is a Senior Account Manager with COMPAREX Canada. He says COMPAREX is very hands on with the transition it helps clients make.
“Yes, we are headquartered in Germany, but we have a significantly talented team in Canada,” says Barontseff. “It’s of tremendous value having an incredible team which we can leverage to support our local customers, and having global expertise is of great value to our Canadian customers who have a similar global footprint. Our philosophy is to ensure we have the right talent applied in the right locations to address our client’s requirements.”
He sees firsthand the struggles firms have with transitioning and keeping up in the digital age. “We are at the beginning of another significant wave of technology advancement. Customers cannot continue to do business the way they have and at the same time increase their speed of innovation their client’s demand,” says Barontseff. “Eventually, the speed of innovation will cause every organization to transform their approach to this market evolution. That’s why I love doing what we do at COMPAREX because we have the skills, a great team, a great culture, everybody helps each other to advance our customers success.”
Jonas Jasinskas is a Microsoft licensing and Software Asset Management expert at COMPAREX. He says over the past four to five years, he’s seen a complete shift in terms of how C-level executives evaluate investments in technology. “No longer are these executives primarily looking at ways to reduce TCO, but how innovative investments can also help their organizations become more agile, collaborative and profitable,” Jasinskas says. “In years past, executives sunk investments into technology without fully understanding how those investments were being applied and had less confidence in the value it provided back to their business; cloud has change the game.”
And while there is a cost to pay to refresh an organization’s systems, the cost is often bigger if you don’t think of moving forward. “If you’re not in a constant state of innovative thinking in terms of how cloud services can transform your business, clients are going to miss opportunities to capture new markets and become more competitive,” Jasinskas says.
Learn More: Navigating the Cloud and Software Asset Management with COMPAREX Solutions
