Conducting business has changed vastly and today’s business environment puts immense pressure on business teams to quickly adapt to perpetually changing conditions. Strategic partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, technology alliances and product pivoting add additional pressure on business decisions in this extremely competitive environment. But nearly 60 percent of partnerships fail due to the inability of enterprises to accurately govern, access and share sales activities across a partner ecosystem in a timely manner. This issue is exacerbated as the number of partners grows within the ecosystem and business teams try to manage this quagmire by relying on manual processes and spreadsheets. Business teams want the ability to spin-up a context-specific, collaborative pipeline management application, in real-time, so they can share information across their partners.
Challenges to BizOps automation in a rapidly changing economy
Business teams today rely heavily on IT to automate the flow of business. However, IT is unable to cope with the rapidly changing needs of the business. In a nutshell, IT has become a bottleneck. As a result, businesses are looking for a common ground that can provide their teams the autonomy they need to succeed without compromising IT’s policies on information security, scale and efficiency.
When it comes to achieving business automation in a rapidly changing environment, there are three common pitfalls to success:
- Fluctuating business conditions: Business teams are under immense pressure to adapt to fluctuating business conditions, prompting them to continually tweak their existing processes and perpetually capture new data sets.
- IT bottlenecks: Business automation initiatives frequently get stalled for years behind a myriad of other IT priorities. Unable to cope with continuous automation requests from business teams, and despite their best intentions, IT has become a bottleneck.
- Rise of operational silos: The advent of the cloud enables an enterprise to onboard new technologies and services, all the while retaining the vast majority of enterprise data and processes on its private infrastructure. Without a medium to converge private and public resources, organizations are left to manage them in parallel, which dramatically increases operational and informational silos.
Using business virtualization to put the business first
Business virtualization allows business teams to quickly build purpose-built apps on their own and over existing business systems, while enabling IT to retain control over information security, scalability and manageability. Business teams can quickly extend these apps and easily share with stakeholders inside and outside the organization without worrying about policy and governance. Business virtualization bridges the gap between IT and business teams to create extremely dynamic business environments.
Benefits of creating a modern business virtualization environment
Using virtualization technology, business users have the freedom, self-reliance and ability to enable business automation, while IT can retain total control over their data sources and ensure security and operational efficiency. More specifically the technology offers some significant benefits to both. The following are four key criteria for creating a modern business virtualization environment:
- Business agility: Unlike traditional methods, business virtualization allows business users to access and manage information across their enterprise, in a timely manner, the way they need it, with minimal assistance of IT.
- Breaking down operational silos: Business virtualization further offers businesses the ability to break down information silos, enabling them to visualize and assemble the resulting asymmetric data in new ways. The model allows enterprises to keep their IT systems wherever they are. The technology securely interfaces with an organization’s systems and intelligently translates the interaction into standard cloud endpoint services. This allows databases, legacy or private applications, file systems and public apps to work together as a single interconnected, policy-automated cloud fabric. This process breaks down silos, enables real-time intercommunication between systems and allows enterprises to seamlessly on-ramp to their cloud of choice.
- Distributed workflows: Virtualization enables real-time service orchestration through load balancing and distributed workload management. It is capable of executing workloads in parallel and bringing information together on demand at the presentation layer, which is imperative to enabling real-time business orchestration.
- Centralize policy management: The technology decouples policy management from underlying business systems and moves it to a control panel that can centrally enforce ACL policies, which are adaptable to any hybrid cloud environment. Decoupling makes these policies easily portable across applications, offering a single pane of glass to manage enterprise-wide policy governance.
Eliminate vendor lock-in
Using business virtualization, organizations have the freedom to rip and replace underlying systems anytime without bringing disruption to business outcomes. In addition to empowering users to perform at the pace of the business, it further eliminates vendor lock-in by giving IT operational independence to select the business infrastructure of their choosing.
More importantly, a modern business virtualization model, much like traditional virtualization technology, conforms to the principles of economy of scale. Enterprises are able to reduce the cost of business operations by at least 50 percent within a short span by adopting business virtualization techniques, at the same time greatly increasing operational efficiency.
By decentralizing the role of business automation and empowering business teams to create, extend and manage business apps on their own, enterprises can finally pave the way to true business transformation.
Ramesh Mahalingam is CEO and Founder of Vizru, providers of a modern business virtualization platform that allows users to build business automation apps in minutes, over existing cloud and on-premises systems. Email him at info@vizru.com.