DNA IT Solutions recently hosted a breakfast seminar, in conjunction with IBM (last Thursday 6th September) – I thought I would share some thoughts and insights from the day.
IBM ThinkSpace
Not with-standing the rain and a shunt on the M50, we welcomed over 50 guests to the Innovation centre at IBM Damastown. For those visiting the IBM Campus for the first time it was very much a case of “Who Knew?” Damastown is an impressive campus employing over 600 people, playing host to the European Cloud team, and clearly one of Dublin’s best kept secrets!
We heard first from IBM with an overview of their expansive cloud offerings, suitable for all sizes of organisation. There is a perception out there that the IBM Cloud offering remains big cloud for big business. We need to remove that myth.
DNA IT & IBM Relationship
The reason DNA IT have this relationship with IBM is to take enterprise grade IT Cloud Services to our customers – regardless of their size. Our heritage has always been a very business lead mindset where first and foremost we must spend the time educating clients on their strategic options and then planning real execution. We put the time and effort on the ground with clients to help them understand their needs.
The reality is that all business expectations have dramatically changed in recent years with an ‘always on’ mentality, flexibility of working, access to real time data and intelligence, emphasis on security etc.etc. … these are the things that are driving business and this demand is what is driving an appetite to leverage innovative cloud facilities and applications.
What DNA IT do is to assist organisations to access these key technologies in an innovative way to deliver on their business objectives. As you can see the options available are enormous and this brings its own challenges. So, we start with the business need, understand the objectives and then we bring in the experts to architect the desired result.
Blue Insurance
David Moore, CTO, Blue Insurance, then took us through his own Journey to the Cloud and his experience of working with DNA IT Solutions as his partner to get there.
His authentic story of how IT has progressed since the early days of Blue Insurance to the cloud-based service it utilises today resonated extremely well with the audience. He needed to show that IT could deliver on an aggressive business plan, be able to scale quickly as the business grew and all this whilst minimising risk and becoming increasingly security focused. They are still on this Journey but confident of success with a trusted partner onboard.
Strategic Overview
Both were then followed with a strategic overview from DNA’s own Principal Cloud Solutions Director, Declan Hussey, who talked about the value of finding the right technology partner.
There’s an old adage…. If you don’t know where you’re going any road will take you there.
Our advice to clients is to always start out with the end in mind. This is a statement that you will hear engineers say over and over, but now business leaders need to listen. Like never before, the demand is massive in areas of security, properly designed IT systems, resilience and overall excellence. A comprehensive plan is fundamental to delivering on business expectations.
DNA IT Solutions put huge stock in the first phase of the journey being all about the business, understanding the needs, the challenges and so on and getting all key stakeholders bought in. Then we can deliver innovation, acceleration and excellence.
We have clients come to us regularly migrations gone wrong (Not just cloud!). The key failures are easy to identify, and it boils down to a lack of planning and poor execution. This can be avoided if the right partner is selected in the 1st instance and a proven model of deployment is followed.
As I reflect I can say I took three main messages away from the day;
1. IBM, the best kept secret in the Cloud space in Ireland – have an excellent, comprehensive cloud offering in the market, suitable for business of all sizes
2. Moving to the Cloud is a journey not and event, cloud can bring significant benefits to business but its not a case of simply migrating everything in a big bang approach
3. Find a partner that takes time to understand your business and who can then provide the best advice to deliver the solution your business demands
If you would like to hear further insights and support for your journey to the cloud, we would love to hear from you.
Neil Mullaney, DNA IT Solutions