Business is a balance between practicality and promise — supporting today’s revenue producers while funding new growth opportunities. Continual reinvention is essential for long-term success, but it’s rarely easy. Moving where you need to go while contending with what is left behind requires foresight and fortitude in equal measure.
Scalable technology services give you the flexibility you need to meet challenges head-on as technologies, markets and customer preferences shift.
Solving OEM Challenges: Why Service Scalability is Key to Long-Term OEM Success
Scalable technology services give original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) the ability to dial resources up and down quickly, ensuring that their capital is optimized for short-term gains and long-term profitability. That agility is critical when addressing of-the-moment challenges, such as:
- Improving resiliency: The supply chain disruptions brought to bear by the COVID-19 pandemic shot business resiliency to the top of the list for companies worldwide. Ensuring business continuity in the face of geopolitical issues, economic headwinds, labor shortages, regulatory volatility and unforeseen challenges is of utmost importance for many.
- Reducing complexity: Many OEMs have vast partner ecosystems that can be expensive and time-consuming to manage. Their complexity also makes it difficult to coordinate solutions, scale quickly and provide a consistent customer experience. Preferences are shifting toward fewer business partners with broader, deeper expertise in complementary services, but getting there takes time.
- Maintaining excellence: The customer is the center of gravity for any company. Brand preference and loyalty are the Holy Grail, but sophisticated digital technologies make every touchpoint throughout the customer lifecycle a potential make-or-break moment. Grappling with digital transformation to provide a consistently exceptional customer experience keeps many an executive up at night.
- Accelerating transformation: Transitioning legacy business and consumption models to new ones, such as everything-as-a-service (XaaS) models, has taken on greater urgency as OEMs strive to keep their processes in sync with those of their customers — many of which are more agile. But transformation is multifaceted and has profound implications for every aspect of the business, as does winding down associated product lifecycle management infrastructures.
- Managing operational costs: The speed of change and the ever-present threat of being leapfrogged by competitors have put operational efficiency front and center for many OEMs. Continuous improvement, automation and analytics can be used to free up resources in support of core initiatives and forward-thinking strategies, but discipline is required to choose the right investments and to mitigate the demands of stakeholders looking for immediate returns.
Case Studies: What Does Technology Service Scalability Look Like?
OEMs are engaging technology service providers to enhance operations and accelerate business transformation while providing a consistently exceptional customer experience. Scalable technology services enable you to enhance core capabilities with complementary offerings and accelerate growth with cost-effective customer and product lifecycle management solutions that overcome skill gaps, bandwidth limits and geographic challenges. Offloading technology services also frees up capital to invest in product/service innovation and forward-thinking strategies.
Here’s what scalability looks like for companies that have already engaged a technology service partner:
- AHEAD: AHEAD’s sweet spot is helping companies navigate digital transformation using modern applications, intelligent operations and cloud infrastructures. To overcome gaps in resources and infrastructure that were hindering growth, AHEAD engaged a partner to provide integration and deployment services at scale. The partnership has since expanded to include firmware updates, stocking, configurations, custom packaging and more.
- Cohesity: Cohesity helps customers protect and simplify data management. In its quest to offer a complete solution, Cohesity needed a technology service provider to help deliver scalable hardware installation and implementation services globally. The relationship has since grown to include services ranging from hardware maintenance and tech support to partner training and certification.
- CTG Federal: US government agencies use CTG Federal to help them design and implement modern technology, cybersecurity, data center and networking solutions. They turned to a technology solutions provider to streamline the integration of multi-vendor solutions — an approach that enabled them to lower operational costs and shift their focus to solving complex customer challenges.
- Lenovo: To accelerate sales, Lenovo sought a technology services provider that could help it build its partner community. An initial telesales outreach engagement has grown exponentially, evolving into an inside sales organization offering customer management, channel management, customer success and revenue retention services across the entire Lenovo portfolio.
- Silk: With its transformation to a software-centric business model in full tilt, Silk partnered with a technology service provider to deliver hardware support services as part of a fully integrated solution. The relationship has expanded to encompass integration, installation and supply chain management on a global scale, empowering Silk to give customers the software data services they need alongside the expert hardware services they require.
Reinvention Through Partnership
Reinvention is a cycle both virtuous and vexing. Success is a springboard to innovation. Innovation leapfrogs legacy, and the future becomes the norm. To bridge the gap and accelerate business transformation, consider engaging a technology service provider that can help you:
- Extend scalability and reach with a global footprint
- Increase flexibility with supply chain management
- Deepen relationships through channel management
- Expand capacity with integration services
- Deliver multi-vendor deployment and maintenance services
- Seize opportunities for revenue retention
- Offer comprehensive depot repair services
- Enhance the customer experience and build lasting loyalty
- Free up resources to fund innovation and strategic change
Explore additional case studies to learn more about what technology companies like yours are doing to scale their business and meet the ever-evolving needs of customers in an industry defined by change.
About the Author
Ron Brinckerhoff serves as Senior Vice President of Shyft Global Services. In this role, he is responsible for managing Shyft’s global sales, marketing, business development and sales operations teams in North America, Costa Rica, EMEA and Asia Pacific. With more than 30 years of industry experience, Ron is a results-driven executive skilled at consistently building strong teams, growing sales, driving operational excellence and exceeding customer expectations.
