Category Archives: transformation services

Customer experience, Miscellaneous IT, Project management, transformation services

GreenPages is Helping Dead River Become a Transformational Services Provider

David Widener is the Director of IT & Project Management at Dead River Company and is one of the most cutting edge people we work with. Dead River Company is New England’s largest energy marketer which means they provide wholesale commercial and residential energy services in the form of oil, propane, and, in some cases, natural gas. David is the senior most leader for both IT and Project Management with 20 years of IT experience.

From an IT perspective, Dead River is just rounding that curve from being infrastructure blockers and tacklers to becoming the transformational services provider they know they need to be. David understands that even as a traditional energy marketer, he needs to change the way he does business in order to gain a competitive advantage including integrating new tools, new services, and new processes. This directly falls in line with GreenPages’ launch of our Transformation Services Group.

Watch the video to hear David discuss the projects he has worked on with GreenPages, including Managed Services, Cloud Services, and Project Management initiatives, his experiences in doing so, and his recommendations to his peers that want to transform their IT departments in a similar fashion!

Watch the video on GreenPages’ YouTube Channel

 

 

We’ll be holding a webinar on 11/18 entitled, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality.” Register now!

Featured, Mobility, transformation services

The Emerging Technology Landscape: The New, the Hot, and the Unconventional

I recently did a video to discuss the emerging technology landscape around three primary areas:

  1. Revamping traditional customer-owned infrastructure
  2. Mobility
  3. Security

On the traditional side, hyper-converged infrastructure is huge. Players including SimpliVity, Nutanix and VMware with EVO:RAIL will be making a big impact over the next 12 months. We’re also seeing a lot of traction with our customer base around what they should move to a cloud environment. How do you rationalize your application portfolio? What about the people and process piece? How are you going to operationalize the technology you implement? How do you get your teams trained to be able to handle new challenges? This is where GreenPages’ Transformation Services really comes into play.

As far as mobility goes, security and access are huge here. Organizations need to look into segmenting mobile devices. For example, cutting a phone in half – having a personal side of the phone and a business side of the phone. Employees can have personal apps and games on one side and have the other be for business critical applications. The business side can be locked down and if an employee leaves, the business side can be wiped while leaving the personal side of the phone alone.

Enjoy the video & please reach out with any questions or comments!

 

Download eBook – The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department

 

 

By Chris Ward, CTO, LogicsOne

applications, Cloud computing, Featured, transformation services

If You Could Transform Your IT Strategy, Would You?

GreenPages-Transformation-Services-LogoAs you may know, GreenPages recently launched our Transformation Services Group, a new practice dedicated to providing customers with the agility, flexibility and innovation they need to compete in the modern era of cloud computing.

This move was designed to allow us to help companies think beyond the near-term and to cast a vision for the business.  As we look at the market, we see a need to help organizations take a more revolutionary and accelerated approach to embracing what we call “New World” IT architectures.  While this is something we have been helping companies with for many years, we now believe that this is a logical evolution of our business that builds on our legacy of delivering high quality and competency deploying advanced virtualization and cloud solutions.

When we think about some of the great work we have done over the years, many examples come to mind.  One of these is a complex project we completed for The Channel Company, that helped them truly transform their business. Coming off a management buyout from its parent company, UBM, The Channel Company was tasked with having to migrate off the parent company’s centralized IT infrastructure under a very tight timeline.

Faced with this situation, the company was presented with a very compelling question: “If you had the opportunity to start from scratch, to transform your IT department, resources and strategy what would you do?”

Essentially, as a result of their situation, The Channel Company had the opportunity to leapfrog traditional approaches.  They had the opportunity to become more agile, and more responsive. And, more importantly, they took it!

As opposed to simply moving to a traditional baseline on-prem solution, The Channel Company saw this as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink its entire IT strategy and chose GreenPages to help lead them through the process.

Through a systematic approach and advanced methodology, we were able to help The Channel Company achieve its aggressive objectives.  Specifically, in less than six months, we led a transformation project that entailed the installation of new applications, and a migration of the company’s entire infrastructure to the cloud.  This included moving six independent office locations from a shared infrastructure to a brand-new cloud platform supporting their employees, as well as new cloud-based office and ERP applications.

In addition to achieving the independence and technical autonomy The Channel Company needed, the savings benefits and operational efficiencies achieved were truly transformational from a business standpoint.

It is these types of success stories that drove us to formalize our Transformation Services Group. We have seen first-hand the benefits that organizations can achieve by transforming inflexible siloed IT environments into agile organizations, and we’re proud to be able to offer the expertise and end-to-end capabilities required to help customers achieve true business transformation.

In our view, the need for business agility and innovation has never been greater. The question is no longer “is transformation necessary?” but rather  “if you had the opportunity to start from scratch and achieve business transformation, would you take it?”

If you’re interested in hearing more about how GreenPages has helped companies like The Channel Company transform their IT operations, please reach out.

 

By Ron Dupler, CEO

advanced virtualization, Cloud computing, Featured, transformation services

Launching GreenPages’ Transformation Services Group

GreenPages' Transformation ServicesI am excited to announce that today, with the launch of GreenPages’ Transformation Services Group, GreenPages took a major step in the continuing evolution of our company. This evolution was done for one reason, and one reason only –to meet the needs of our customers as they strive to compete in today’s rapidly-changing business and technology environment.

GreenPages’ new Transformation Services Group is a practice dedicated to providing customers with the agility, flexibility and innovation they need to compete in the modern era of cloud computing.  We see the establishment of this focused practice area as a way to help clients take a revolutionary, accelerated approach to standing up New World, Modern IT architectures and service delivery models that enable business agility and innovation.

Disrupt or be Disrupted

With each day’s latest business headlines we learn of new ‘up-start’ companies that are finding a new way to compete in what was once a mature market.  You know the names – its Uber, it’s Airbnb.  These companies have found a way to leverage advanced technologies as a strategic weapon and were able to completely turn existing industries on their heads without even owning cabs or hotels (respectively).

How’d they do it?  They were agile enough from a business standpoint to understand the disruptive force that technology can play, and they were fortunate enough not to be encumbered by existing infrastructure, policies and procedures.  While these companies clearly were smart and innovative, they were also fortunate — they had a blank slate and could start from scratch with an offensive game plan capable of delivering value to customers in new ways.

These market disrupters share the benefit of not being encumbered by legacy technologies, platforms and processes and as a result, are out-performing and executing their larger competitors.  These companies were born to be agile organizations capable of “turning on a dime” when their competitors could not.

To compete effectively in today’s environment, every company needs to find a way to become more agile.  Business leaders have the choice, play defense and respond to disruption, or play offense and become the disruptor.  The need for business agility has never been greater.  To support this needed agility and innovation, enterprises need nimble, agile IT platforms, as legacy platforms cannot meet this need.

If it were just about technology, modernizing IT would be a more straightforward situation, but it’s about more than that. This is more than a technology problem. This is a people and process problem. It’s about command, control and compliance… Needless to say, “high velocity change” is no walk in the park.

Fortunately, helping companies achieve transformational change is something we have been doing for many years and is an area where we have deep domain expertise.  Throughout our history as a company, we have become adept at guiding companies through IT and business transformation.  What we are doing today is formalizing this expertise—which has been forged working with our customers in the trenches and in the boardrooms—into a unique Transformation Services practice.  Transformation Services represents the next logical evolution of GreenPages and builds on our prior legacy of high quality and competency deploying advanced virtualization and cloud solutions.

Our Approach

We have always believed that while many companies face similar challenges, no two scenarios are identical. Through our more than 20 years of experience we have established a methodology that we use in each engagement, regardless of the challenge, that allows us to identify the best solution for each customer, drive organizational and technical change, and create positive outcomes for the business.

We hope that you share our excitement about this unique moment in the IT industry and our continued evolution as a company.   We all know that technology can produce tangible benefits, but sometimes the road to deployment can be daunting.  Transformation Services was founded to ensure our customers are able to successfully navigate that road with agility and velocity.

If you’re interested in learning more about our new Transformation Services Group, please reach out!

 

By Ron Dupler, CEO