Archivo de la categoría: Enterprise IT

Enterprise IT, HPE, hybrid, News & Analysis, SMB

HPE targets SMB hybrid cloud market

cloud-hubHPE has launched ProLiant Easy Connect Managed Hybrid, a new offering designed for small and mid-sized businesses, educational institutions and branch offices.

As part of the offering, customers will receive an on premise server, as well as public cloud computing capabilities through HPE. The proposition is the first from the company’s Easy Connect portfolio, which will eventually be a collection of product offerings with the aim of making cloud adoption easier for smaller organizations.

“Small businesses want to focus on growing their core businesses, not spending their limited resources on deploying and managing IT,” said McLeod Glass, GM for SMB solutions at HPE. “This new solution is part of a broad HPE initiative, inspired by the unique needs of small and mid-sized businesses, to deliver innovative solutions that are easy for our channel partners to sell and easy for our customers to use.”

While the cloud market has to date focused on implementation in enterprise size organizations, there have been a number of plays for the SMB market in recent weeks, including from Go Daddy and Microsoft. Although the SMB market does not offer the same level of contracts as those in enterprise scale organizations, it could turn into a potentially lucrative segment. Research from BCSG highlighted that adoption levels are rising healthily.

SMB statsThe finding stated 64% of SMB’s are currently using at least one cloud solution to help them run their business, though the average number of cloud services was in fact three. 78% of the market is considering increasing the number of services they currently consume and by 2017, BCSG estimate that 88% will be using at least one service, and the average number of services consumed per company will be seven.

The ProLiant Easy Connect Managed Hybrid is marketed on the idea of simplicity of use for the customers, through it is not clear how large or significant the Easy Connect portfolio will be on the whole.

“Organizations of all sizes are transforming their IT to a hybrid mix of private and cloud technology,” said Nick East, co-founder and CEO of Zynstra, who’s virtualisation and cloud management software will be used in the offering.

“Together with HPE, we’ve done the heavy lifting for SMBs and their IT partners. This small form factor solution delivers the right business value without compromise or complexity, and is integrated with and managed centrally from the cloud. It’s how IT should be.”

EMC, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Transformation

UK businesses at threat of losing IT talent

Weg - Zukunft - Entscheidung - Neuanfang - KonzeptEMC has released a new study highlighting UK businesses are at risk of losing IT talent due to underappreciation of technology in the business on the whole.

The Great Skills Exodus report claims decision makers are failing to prioritise IT as a business enabler, while 88% of IT workers believe the growth and success of their organisation is fundamentally reliant on technology. Frustrations from the IT department can be linked to a lack of transformation in the company they work for as 26% has witnessed an unwillingness to change the way ‘things have always been done’ from the management team.

“IT has got to become a key aspect of the business strategy, not merely a function of the overall business,” said Ross Fraser, UK&I Country Manager at EMC. “Technology is potentially the definitive aspect of any business but it can be seen as a supportive function by a substantial amount of organizations at the moment. Decision makers now have to rethink what they are doing as the process of IT and move with the times.”

While there has been encouraging progress in the adoption of cloud technologies in recent months, it would appear board level decision makers are not realizing the full potential of the technology itself. Cloud as a technology could be perceived as now penetrating the mass market, though the digitally enabled business model, required to activate cloud for its greatest potential, could be seen as lagging.

“If you want to modernize, automate and transform your infrastructure, whether than means on premise or off premise, you have to embrace the idea of new IT,” said Fraser. “There are a few companies where their future probably depends on how well they embrace future IT and I think that there is also a lack of understanding that if they don’t embrace it they will come under huge amounts of pressure and competitive threats because they are not competitive enough as a business.”

Among the concerns put forward by respondents in the survey, 20% feel held back by their organisation’s restrictions on implementing new technologies, 30% feel they have few opportunities to demonstrate their ability, and less than 20% believe their organization has a significant focus on IT as a means of driving innovation.

“The worst case scenario could be that they won’t exist, think about Kodak or Blockbuster,” said Fraser. “Now this is on an extreme level but it does demonstrate how disruptive the digital business model is. It could mean death by a thousand cuts, but if you don’t get the technology question right it could mean major problems in the long run. Every business has the digital challenge, but if they get it right from a technology perspective it creates a workforce which sees where they are working is an important aspect of the business, they start to see career progression and new opportunities.”

EMC believe a stronger and more consistent message throughout the organization on technology, would not only provide the organization with a more competitive position in the market, but also highlight the importance of IT as a function to the on-going success, ensuring employee retention would be increased.

“Technology is at the heart of business transformation and the IT team is ideally placed to help any organisation navigate new opportunities and threats in the market,” said Fraser. “With employment of IT professionals forecast to grow at 1.62 percent per year by 2020, businesses must ensure that they offer the most compelling career opportunities in order to retain the best staff, or risk losing as many as three quarters of their IT team in the coming months – something which would have a hugely detrimental impact on any organisation.”

containers, Enterprise IT, hybrid, iPaaS, Opinion, Resilience

Head in the clouds: Four key trends affecting enterprises

New trends, concept imageCloud is changing the way businesses are functioning and has provided a new and improved level of flexibility and collaboration. Companies worldwide are realising the cloud’s capabilities to generate new business models and promote sustainable competitive advantage; the impact of this is becoming very apparent: a Verizon report recently revealed that 69 per cent of businesses who have used cloud have put it to use to significantly reengineer one or more of their business processes. It’s easy to see why there’s still so much hype around cloud. We’ve heard so much about cloud computing over the last few years that you could be forgiven for thinking that it is now universally adopted, but the reality is that we are still only just scratching the surface, as cloud is still very much in a period of growth and expansion.

Looking beyond the horizon

At present, the majority of corporate cloud adoption is around Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings such as AWS, Azure, Office 365 and Salesforce.com. These services offer cheap buy-in and a relatively painless implementation process, which remains separate from the rest of corporate IT. Industry analyst Gartner says IaaS spending is set to grow 38.4 per cent over the course of 2016, while worldwide SaaS spending is set to grow 20.3 per cent over the year, reaching $37.7 billion. However, the real promise of cloud is much more than IaaS, PaaS or SaaS: it’s a transformative technology moving compute power and infrastructure between on-premise resources, private cloud and public cloud.

As enterprises come to realise the true potential of cloud, we’ll enter a period of great opportunity for enterprise IT, but there will be plenty of adoption-related matters to navigate. Here are four big areas enterprises will have to deal with as cloud continues to take the world by storm:

  1. Hybrid cloud will continue to dominate

Hybrid cloud will rocket up the agenda, as businesses and providers alike continue to realise that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to cloud adoption. Being able to mix and match public and private cloud services from a range of different providers enables businesses to build an environment that meets their unique needs more effectively. To date, this has been held back by interoperability challenges between cloud services, but a strong backing for open application programming interfaces (APIs) and multi-cloud orchestration platforms is making it far easier to integrate cloud services and on-premise workloads alike. As a result, we will continue to see hybrid cloud dominate the conversation.

  1. Emergence of iPaaS

NASA is teaming up with IBM to host a code-a-thon for developers interested in supporting space exploration through apps

The drive towards integration of on premise applications and cloud is giving rise to Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). Cloud integration still remains a daunting task for many organizations, but iPaaS is a cloud-based integrations solution that is slowly and steadily gaining traction within enterprises. With iPaaS, users can develop integration flows that connect applications residing in the cloud or on premise, and deploy them without installing any hardware or software. Although iPaaS is relatively new to the market, categories of iPaaS vendors in the market are beginning to emerge, including ecommerce/B2B integration and cloud integration. With integration challenges still a huge issue for enterprises using cloud, demand for iPaaS is only set to grow over the coming months.

  1. Containers will become reality

To date, a lot of noise has been made about the possibilities of container technology, but in reality its use has yet to fully kick-off. That’s set to change as household name public clouds such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google are now embracing containers; IBM’s Blue Mix offering in particular is set to make waves with its triple-pronged Public, Dedicated and Local delivery model. Building a wave of momentum for many application and OS technology manufacturers to ride, it will now become increasingly realistic for them to construct support services around container technology. This does present a threat to traditional virtualization approach, but over time a shift in hypervisors is on the cards and container technology can only improve from this point.

  1. Cloud will be used for Data Resiliency/Recovery services

With cloud storage prices coming down drastically and continuous improvements being made to cloud gateway platforms, the focus is set to shift to cloud-powered backup and disaster recovery services. We are in an age where everything is being offered ‘as a service’; the idea of cloud-powered on-demand usability suits backup and disaster recovery services very well because they do not affect the immediate production data. As such, this should be an area where cloud use will dramatically increase over the next year.

With all emerging technologies, it takes time to fully figure out what they actually mean for enterprises, and these four cloud trends reflect that. In reality we’re only just getting started with cloud, now they understand how it works, the time has come for enterprises to turn the screw and begin driving even more benefits from it.

Written by Kalyan Kumar, Chief Technologist at HCL Technologies.

Enterprise IT, Huawei, News & Analysis, Open Cloud

Huawei’s enterprise business unit grows 44% to $4.5 billion

Maintaining ProfitsHuawei’s Enterprise Business Group (EPG) has reported healthy growth over the last 12 months generating $4.5 billion over the period, an increase of 44% year-on-year.

Speaking at Huawei’s Global Analyst Summit 2016, the company highlighted growth was fuelled by customer demand for new ICT solutions, and outlined it strategy for 2016 under the tagline “Leading new ICT, building a better connected world”. The new proposition is focused around developing open, flexible and secure platforms for customers worldwide.

“In 2015, Huawei EBG experienced rapid growth in the public safety, finance, transportation, and energy sectors,” said David He, President of Marketing and Solution Sales at Huawei EBG. “With the development of innovative ICT including cloud computing, big data, Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Internet of Things (IoT), customers’ business models, enterprises’ IT architectures, and industry ecosystems are changing profoundly. To address our customers’ challenges and strategic demands, Huawei works closely with our partners to develop joint innovations, through which we provide our clients with differentiated and leading products and solutions to help them thrive in the new ICT era.”

The announcement comes after Huawei launched its All-Cloud strategy at the event this week, as a means to capitalize on digital capitalization trends. Building on the ROADS experience model, All-Cloud centres on network modernization and aims to enable digital transformation within enterprise.

The enterprise group’s focus to date has been on the traditionally high-value contracts, though it is not clear what industries have been prioritized for the next 12 months. 76% of Huawei EBG’s 2015 sales revenue was generated from channels and partners, an increase of 47% year-over-year, owing to the fact that the company has now developed partnerships with more than 300 distributors and value-added partners, as well as more than 8000 tier-2 channel partners.

“In line with our ‘being integrated’ strategy, Huawei will continue to support our partners and help them succeed in the new ICT era by enhancing our products, brands, logistics, services, businesses, and IT systems,” said Raymond Lau, President of Global Partners and Alliances at Huawei EBG.

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

Public cloud spend to increase by 14.1% in 2016

Searching. Search for opportunities. Business illustrationResearch firm IDC have released findings which demonstrate healthy growth in the cloud market throughout 2016.

IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker estimates spending on public cloud infrastructure is to increase by 14.1% over the course of the 12 months to $24.4 billion, and spending on private cloud platforms could be up 11.1% to $13.9 billion.

“For the majority of corporate and public organizations, IT is not a core business but rather an enabler for their core businesses and operations,” said Natalya Yezhkova, Research Director for the storage systems group at IDC. “Expansion of cloud offerings creates new opportunities for these businesses to focus efforts on core competences while leveraging the flexibility of service-based IT.”

Total spend for IT infrastructure products is expected to increase by 18.9% over the course 2016 to reach $38.2 billion, though it is still yet to surpass traditional, non-cloud, environments, which will decrease by 4%. Non-cloud platforms will still account for the majority of enterprise IT spend, accounting for 62.8%. From a cloud-deployment product perspective Ethernet switching spend will increase by 26.8%, with investments in servers and storage to grow at 12.4% and 11.3%, respectively.

The report also detailed vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products over the course of 2015, which grew 21.9% to $29 billion. Revenues for Q4 grew at a slower rate, 15.7%, but still accounted for $8.2 billion, with public cloud grabbing the lion’s share $4.9 billion. Japan saw the largest margin of growth, 50%, whereas Central and Eastern Europe declined 9.3% seemingly owing to political and economic turmoil, which could be linked to a reduction in IT spend.

“The cloud IT infrastructure market continues to see strong double-digit growth with faster gains coming from public cloud infrastructure demand,” said Kuba Stolarski, Research Director for Computing Platforms at IDC. “End customers are modernizing their infrastructures along specific workload, performance, and TCO requirements, with a general tendency to move into 3rd Platform, next-gen technologies.

“Public cloud as-a-service offerings also continue to mature and grow in number, allowing customers to increasingly use sophisticated, mixed strategies for their deployment profiles. While the ice was broken a long time ago for public cloud services, the continued evolution of the enterprise IT customer means that public cloud acceptance and adoption will continue on a steady pace into the next decade.”

HPE continued as market leader for cloud IT infrastructure vendor revenues bringing in around $4.55 billion over the course of 2015, increasing its market share from 15% to 15.7%. Dell, Cisco, EMC and IBM completed the top 5, with only IBM dropping market share over the period. The company’s market share decreased 24.6% to roughly $1.24 billion, down from 6.9% to 4.3% of the overall segment.

Enterprise IT, Huawei, News & Analysis

Huawei launches All-Cloud strategy

business cloud network worldHuawei has launched its All-Cloud strategy the Huawei Global Analyst Summit 2016, as a means to capitalize on digital capitalization trends.

The new strategy builds on the ROADS experience model – Real-time, On-demand, All-online, DIY, and Social – which was launch at the same event 12 months ago. While the ROADS framework focuses on delivering improved user experience, All-Cloud centres on network modernization and aims to enable digital transformation within enterprise. The new campaigns have been billed under the tagline of “Growing together through digitalization and building a better connected world”.

“Global digitalization is accelerating, and this is improving efficiency and user experience in many areas, including vertical industries, public services, and every aspect of our lives. Our Global Connectivity Index (GCI) 2016 reveals that global connectivity improved by 5% in 2015,” said Deputy Chairman of the Board Eric Xu. “We can work together in the areas of enhancing connectivity, enabling the digital transformation of vertical industries, improving the connectivity experience and expanding access under all scenarios, and to accelerate global digitalization.”

“In the All IP era, we proposed our Single strategy, which effectively supported the development of operator customers,” said Xu. “Nowadays, as we face the digital transformation of different industries, we advocate full cloudification to build efficient networks and agile competitiveness. Driven by end users’ needs for a better experience, Huawei proactively advocates the All Cloud strategy, promotes network modernization, and works to enable digital transformation across industries, thus meeting end user needs to enable customer success.”

The All-Cloud proposition is built on a data centre-centric architecture, with all network functions, services and applications will run in the cloud data centre. The company has claimed that through a unified and open architecture, it will be able to meet customers’ needs for business transformation on all cloud platforms, public, private, industry, and hybrid.

Within the company’s carrier business, the team plan of developing cloud-based IoT, video services, and service platforms, to win new business, but will also promote the cloudification of operations systems.

“Network Functions Virtualization standardizes and virtualizes equipment and hardware on ICT networks,” said Xu. “However, even with NFV, we still adopt a traditional method for managing the software architecture and operations model. If we can move another step forward and use the cloudification concept to make network software fully distributed and automated, we can realize Network Functions Cloudification (NFC).”

In the enterprise unit, cloud computing, SDN, and big data technologies will form the central pillars of marketing messages. The company has seemingly prioritized digital transformation as a means for enterprise to transform towards agile and smart operations.

On the company’s blog it highlighted that the transformation will take place over three stages. “First, Huawei will need to encourage enterprises to move their IT systems to the cloud to fully utilize resources and improve efficiency. Second, Huawei will accelerate the pace of transforming enterprise networks into SDN, and then use a unified SDN controller to centrally integrate telecom, enterprise, and DC networks and achieve agile operations throughout the entire process. Third, Huawei will enable smart enterprises with Big Data.”

AWS, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis

AWS to breach $10 billion barrier through fail-fast business model

Plant Growing In Savings Coins - Investment And Interest ConceptAmazon Founder and CEO Jeffrey Bezos has announced the company has become the fastest ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales, while AWS will also breach the $10 billion milestone in 2015, owing the success to the company’s “fail-fast” business model.

Bezos claims in a letter to the company shareholders the cloud computing business unit has grown at a faster rate than the business on the whole as it celebrates its tenth birthday this year. The company launched its first major service in 2006, a simple storage service, but now offers more than 70 services for compute, storage, databases, analytics, mobile, Internet of Things, and enterprise applications.

“AWS is bigger than Amazon.com was at 10 years old, growing at a faster rate, and – most noteworthy in my view – the pace of innovation continues to accelerate – we announced 722 significant new features and services in 2015, a 40% increase over 2014,” said Bezos in the statement.

“Many characterized AWS as a bold – and unusual – bet when we started. “What does this have to do with selling books?” We could have stuck to the knitting. I’m glad we didn’t. Or did we? Maybe the knitting has as much to do with our approach as the arena. AWS is customer obsessed, inventive and experimental, long-term oriented, and cares deeply about operational excellence.”

Throughout the statement Bezos referred to the company as “the best place in the world to fail” as he coupled numerous failures within the business as the catalyst for innovation. The concept builds on a popular industry model of “fail-fast” and while numerous companies around the world claim to incorporate the model into their innovation models, industry insiders have told BCN the management team are less than happy to accept failure.

The model builds on the idea that failure within the innovation team is an acceptable practise, assuming it is done quickly and lessons are learnt to improve the product offering. Failing fast, in theory, enables the team to remove inadequacies in the product offering, encouraging innovation and efficiency. Sources said while the model can drastically improve the product offering, the management team can rarely come to terms with the idea that failure can lead to greater success.

On the surface, the organization wants to be seen to incubate innovation, though the management team rarely accepts failure. According to Bezos, Amazon is seemingly one of the few companies to have successfully embedded such a business model.

“Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there,” said Bezos. “Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten.”

Bimodal IT, Enterprise IT, Opinion

Digital Transformation: Seven Big Traps to avoid in Implementing Bimodal IT

Zumos de verdura ecolcica‘Bimodal IT’ is a term coined by Gartner. It describes one approach for both keeping the lights on with mission critical, but stable core IT systems (Mode 1), whilst taking another route (Mode 2) to delivering the innovative new applications required to digitally transform and differentiate the business.

Both streams of IT are critical. Mode 1 requires highly specialised programmers, long and detailed development cycles. Control, detailed planning and process adherence are of priority. Projects are technical and require little involvement from business teams. Mode 2 requires a high degree of business involvement, fast turnaround, and frequent updates; effectively a quick sprint to rapidly transform business ideas into applications.

According to a recent survey by the analyst group, nearly 40 per cent of CIOs have embraced bimodal IT, with the majority of the remainder planning to follow in the next three years. Those yet to implement bimodal IT were tellingly those who also fared worst in terms of digital strategy performance.

If you’re one of the recently converted, you won’t want to rush blindly into bimodal IT, oblivious to the mistakes made by those who have already ventured down that path.

Based on experience over many customer projects, here are seven mistakes and misconceptions I’ve learned firms need to avoid when implementing bimodal IT:

1. Thinking bimodal IT impacts only IT – In transforming how IT operates, bimodal IT changes the way the business operates too. Mode 2 is about bringing IT and business together to collaboratively bring new ideas to market. This requires the business to be much more actively involved, as well as take different approaches to planning, budgeting and decision making.

2. Lacking strong (business) leadership – Strong IT and business leadership is absolutely critical to implementing bimodal IT. The individual responsible for operationally setting up Mode 2 needs to be a strong leader, and ideally even a business leader. That’s because the goals and KPIs of Mode 2 are so completely different from Mode 1. When Mode 2 is set up by someone with a Mode 1 mind-set, they tend to focus on the wrong things (e.g. upfront planning vs. learning as you go, technical evaluations vs. business value etc.), limiting the team’s chance of success

3. Confusing Mode 2 with ‘agile’ – One of the biggest misconception about bimodal IT is that Mode 2 is synonymous with agile. Don’t get me wrong; iterative development is a key part of it. Because requirements for digital applications are often fuzzy, teams need to work in short, iterative cycles, creating functionality, releasing it, and iterating continually based on user feedback. But the Process element extends beyond agile, encompassing DevOps practices (to achieve the deployment agility required for continuous iteration) and new governance models.

4. Not creating dedicated teams for Mode 1/2 – Organisations that have one team serving as both Mode 1 and Mode 2 will inevitably fail. For starters, Mode 1 always takes precedence over Mode 2. When your SAP production instance goes down, your team is going to drop everything to put out the fire, leaving the innovation project on the shelf. Second, Mode 1 and Mode 2 require a different set of people, processes and platforms. By forcing one team to perform double duty, you’re not setting yourself up for success.

5. Overlooking the Matchmaker role – When building your Mode 2 team, it’s important to identify the individual(s) that will help cultivate and prioritise new project ideas through a strong dialog with the business. These matchmakers have a deep understanding of, and trusted relationship with the business, which they can leverage to uncover new opportunities that can be exploited with Mode 2. Without them, it’s much harder to identify projects that deliver real business impact.

6. Keeping Mode 1 and 2 completely separate – While we believe Mode 1 and Mode 2 teams should have separate reporting structures, the two teams should never be isolated from each other. In fact, the two should collaborate and work closely together, whether to integrate a Mode 2 digital application with a system of record or to transfer maintenance of a digital application to Mode 1 once it becomes mission critical, requiring stability and security over speed and agility.

7. Ignoring technical debt – Mode 2 is a great way to rapidly bring new applications to market. However, you can’t move fast at the expense of accumulating technical debt along the way. It is important to ensure maintainability, refactoring applications over time as required.

While 75 per cent of IT organisations will have a bimodal capability by 2017, Gartner predicts that half of those will make a mess. Don’t be one of them! Avoid the mistakes above to you implement bimodal IT properly and sustainably, with a focus on the right business outcomes that drive your digital innovation initiatives forward.

Written by Roald Kruit, Co-founder at Mendix

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, NTT, SAP

NTT achieves SAP Global Certification

multi cloudNTT Comms has achieved SAP Global Certification for hosting services, cloud services and SAP HANA operations services.

The certification will enable NTT to build and manage SAP applications by utilizing the company’s enterprise cloud and its Global Management One platform. The offering will be made available on all NTT infrastructures across private, public and hybrid clouds, through a consumption-based delivery model.

“We’re set to see more organizations place key infrastructure and applications in the cloud. However, for global enterprises it is often a difficult and complex journey,” said Damian Skendrovic, CEO at NTT Comms Managed Services. “Our new cloud solutions for SAP put our customers in pole position to migrate to the cloud and manage their applications more effectively. This ensures that business operations are enhanced as quickly as possible and without disruption.”

To achieve the certification, a provider’s cloud platform must undertake comprehensive testing by SAP to authorize the integration with its complete application set. Aside from the company’s infrastructure being tested against the standards, NTT’s technical staff in the EMEA, Americas and Asia Pacific regions were also placed under the same scrutiny.

Outside of the managed services business unit, the NTT team have continued efforts to diversify its revenue channels and grow its business in new markets. NTT Data recently announced plans to acquire Dell Services for $3.06 billion, as it prioritized growth in international markets.

“NTT Data is pleased with the unique opportunity to acquire such high-calibre talent, and a corporate culture that shares common values with NTT Data, with emphasis on client first, foresight, teamwork and a commitment to innovation,” said Toshio Iwamoto, President and CEO of NTT Data Corporation. “Welcoming Dell Services to NTT DATA is expected to strengthen our leadership position in the IT Services market and initiates an important business relationship with Dell.”

The acquisition is the fourth made by NTT over the course of 2016, though it would appear that EMC are not in such a favourable position. Dell Services as a business unit was reportedly to be valued in the region of $5 billion, which could highlight Dell’s urgency in completing the sale. If reports are correct, it would appear NTT Data has negotiated a good deal.

Customer experience, Digital Marketing, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM acquires Salesforce consulting partner

IBMIBM has announced plans to acquire Salesforce specialist consulting business Bluewolf, which will bolster the Global Business Services Interactive Experience (iX) department.

IBM iX, marketed as a next-generation hybrid consultancy and digital agency, has been bolstering its ranks in recent months, as the Bluewolf deal is set to be the fourth since the turn of the year. In January the business bought US ad agency Resource/Ammirati, February saw the purchase of Berlin-based digital agency Aperto and earlier this month the acquisition of ecx.io, another digital marketing agency, was announced. While previous deals have taken IBM iX down the route of digital marketing and advertising, the Bluewolf deal takes the department back down more traditional IBM routes.

While it has not been announced when the deal will be completed, IBM hopes the deal will provide an edge in the market for medium-sized businesses and enterprise scale organizations. Bluewolf, which specializes in helping companies integrate Salesforce’s CRM services into their IT systems, is believed to be one of Salesforce’s oldest consulting partners, claiming to have delivered more than 9,500 successful worldwide.

“I’m so proud of Eric (Eric Berridge, Bluewolf CEO), who built Bluewolf from a start-up into a leader in Salesforce services,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce. “The powerful combination of our strategic partners, IBM and Bluewolf, will help clients transform and demonstrate the growing client demand for our Customer Success Platform.”

IBM said the acquisition of Bluewolf would give the Global Business Services division deeper consulting capabilities, as it continues efforts to differentiate the brand in a crowded market place. “There is no question that the consumer-grade experience has emerged as a fundamental element in modern business strategy,” said Bridget van Kralingen, SVP at IBM Global Business Services. “Meeting that expectation defines next-generation differentiation and competitive position, and with Bluewolf, we add expertise to scale that capability to the cloud-based capabilities of Salesforce.”

The series of acquisitions seemingly build on the trends more demanding customers and evolving consumer expectations on the digital landscape. An IBM survey stated 81% of C-suite leaders anticipate more digital and virtual engagement by 2020 and 66% anticipate a stronger focus on customers as individuals. It would appear IBM is attempting to get a jump-start on competitors through strategic acquisition, as opposed to organic growth and transformation.