Customer Advisory Board: Tell Us How You Really Feel

We’ve long prided ourselves on becoming seamless extensions of our clients’ IT teams. As we build on that heritage, the new Ensono is taking our relationship with customers to a new level of collaboration, notably with our recently created Client Advisory Board.

We are serious about collaboration, having made it one of our five core values along with honesty, reliability, passion and curiosity. So the motivation behind the board is straightforward: We want to make sure we have the services and capabilities that our clients need now and in the future to leverage technology to grow, innovate and build new digital businesses and products. In turn, our clients have a greater hand in shaping services to meet their requirements.

At the first meeting in April, we introduced the board to elements of our strategy and asked for candid feedback on whether our proposed services would fit a real need in their business and in the industry. The advisory board, made up of IT leaders from 10 clients, helped us validate, refine and prioritize several new services:

Managed cloud services

The board agreed with us about the growing demand for providers that can fully manage public cloud services for companies. They affirmed the direction and features we had planned for our integrated public cloud solution, which we plan to roll out at the end of the second quarter. With the Ensono service, companies can:

• Test, learn and adapt quickly
• Leverage on-demand compute resources domestically and globally
• Scale to meet changing demands
• Right-size environment through proactive monitoring and management
• Integrate with and or migrate applications from legacy infrastructure
• Consolidate infrastructure tracking and billing
• Reduce risk by understanding usage and governing access and provisioning

Flexible spend

The board enthusiastically endorsed an approach we are developing that would allow clients unprecedented flexibility for their infrastructure spend. Our new flexible spend model will allow our clients to:

• Scale up and scale down standard mainframe, IBM i, and dedicated hosting environments in much the same way they can right-size their public cloud environments today
• Move between technology platforms rather than lock into a long-term commitment for one type of system or capacity
• We are in the business of enabling the right technology for our clients to meet their growth goals and operating needs, and these offerings will make it possible for clients to adjust their environments as their business needs change, or move from one platform to another, such as from hosted open systems to cloud or mainframes to open systems as they continue to evolve their applications. We will be making a more formal announcement about these new services in a few months.

Consulting

In another service aimed at helping our clients achieve their stretch objectives, we are creating a consulting practice focused on driving IT transformation and greater efficiencies. Together we discussed where we should focus our attention as we begin to build the practice:

• Assessment
• Migration
• Disaster recovery
• Transformation, including rationalizing applications across different platforms and moving  workloads to different technologies

We are really grateful for the time, interest and input that our Client Advisory Board is giving us. We see these efforts as creating a virtuous circle that benefits not only Ensono and the board members but all of our clients. We are convinced that our success lies in helping our clients succeed.