As companies around the world are figuring out what it means to digitalise, SIs have a role to play in their digital transformation. 

So, it’s no surprise SIs have their customers increasingly looking to them for support with digital transformation. They need help embracing innovations and technology, such as moving to the cloud, digitising their sales, connecting their machines, and transforming their IT application landscape.

As many of these customers lack the resources and skills to do this in-house, it’s providing a valuable opportunity for SIs to expand beyond their traditional expertise in infrastructure and application integration, and drive customers’ digital transformation. In fact, over the coming years, we expect a 10% annual growth for SIs as they start to capture this new gap in the market.

At the same time, SIs face new challenges they’ll need to overcome if they’re going to step up. So, what’s standing in their way?

The pandemic accelerated companies into a future of work where employees are now spread between the office, home, and on the move. SIs must find ways to work successfully with their customers in this new environment.

Also, while IT integration has always been a strong suit for these companies, the rapid transformation to the cloud requires a more modular and software-driven integration approach.

As most SIs don’t have a network of their own, they depend on telecom service providers to provide network connectivity, infrastructure management, and security services – often over multiple sites across the globe. If SIs will move their focus higher up the stack and quickly drive more value at the top of the value chain, they’ll need strong partners they can rely on in the infrastructure and application platform space.

Given this need for support, SIs should look for two key attributes in a partner if they’re going to successfully deliver innovative solutions to help their customers digitally transform:

Trust is vital to any strong, long-lasting partnership. A reliable partner will deliver on their promises the first time, and every time. They’ll always keep to deadlines and structure their propositions and pricing around you – not the other way around.

It’s also critical they offer complete transparency into how they’re working, such as a clear roadmap for deployment, and real-time insight into what they’re doing. A trust-based relationship means that partners can depend on each other to generate business growth.

A great partner shouldn’t just be great at what they do, they should also understand your business model and integrate their services smoothly. The partner’s propositions must seamlessly complement yours. They must have a dedicated commercial team that can quickly turn around attractive proposals, and engage with you early on big deals.

Their designs should fit your wider architecture, and their service delivery model must integrate into your Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) approach. That way, if the customer experiences a problem, you’ll have end-to-end visibility of it and be able to troubleshoot and resolve issues efficiently.

To successfully help your customers transform, you’ll need the best-in-class partner to support you. They should bring fantastic products that seamlessly integrate into your portfolio, thoroughly understand your service management environment, and deliver clear visibility across their solutions, end-to-end.

You’ll want someone who can offer a go-to-market model, that’s adaptive and agile to the requirements of your business. And most importantly, they need to value your partnership and build trust so you can work out how to make it to market together.

An indirect approach is at the heart of our strategy. We’re proud to provide solutions with choices of vendors at competitive prices, unparalleled insight into global security threats, legal and compliance frameworks for multiple regions, and proactive service management for all our solutions.