This leader in digital supply chain and omnichannel demand fulfillment enables top retailers, manufacturers and logistics providers to seamlessly predict and pivot in fulfilling customer demand. The client’s intelligent end-to-end platforms serve more than 600 customers, including 65 of the world’s top 100 retailers; more than 100 major manufacturing, automotive and high tech companies; and nine of the top 10 global logistics companies. Because the client’s customers rely heavily on supply chain solutions, the client initiated SaaS application offerings about five years ago. Since then, they have grown their SaaS environment user base to two million people. Due to the client’s strong strategic partnerships with Microsoft, they sought to migrate their SaaS offerings from a private cloud to Azure’s public cloud. The client knew that even more success would ensue when they found their true north—transform to a true digital business model, automate analytics, build technology initiatives and to continually improve customer experience. In its two-year partnership with the client, HCLTech has been entrusted to execute and maintain the back end of the client’s customer-facing infrastructure operations in a SaaS environment. This is a unique and innovative strategy, since most companies keep their customer facing SaaS infrastructure operations in house.
The Challenge
Suboptimal operations and resources hinder business transformation
Before the client could reach its true north, they had to address several issues that hindered progress: suboptimal operational processes, high technical debt and outdated software and infrastructure. At the time, 80 to 90% of the company’s budget was devoted to operations, so they didn’t have adequate resources to innovate and transform the business. The client knew they needed to separate core operations from context activities and outsource context activities. It was time to engage with a partner that could turn the company’s transformation goals into reality.
The Objective
Digital business transformation and continued success
The client’s leadership team sought to:
- Transform to a true digital business model where solutions ramp up and down quickly and technology drives business agility
- Provide end-to-end lifecycle support for customers and continually improve the customer experience via omnichannel capabilities
- Develop automated analytics that lead to wise business decisions
- Build proactive technology initiatives that increase revenue
The Solution
Partnering with HCLTech
The first step was to help the client map out their route to its true north. The roadmap included:
- Migrating the client’s solutions to Azure
- Automating to improve time to market, enhance the integrated customer experience and scale operations without adding human resources
- Evolving the SaaS business model to align with strict customer-measured SLAs (e.g., 99.9% customer availability)
- Developing a Service Integration and Management (SIAM) delivery model that aligns with the SaaS engagement model
- Transforming service management to manage digital workflows, enhance business services and enrich application mapping by integrating the ServiceNow cloud computing platform with the larger tools landscape
- Maturing operations processes to improve visibility and enhance productivity
- Providing predictive analytics by integrating the enterprise monitoring ecosystem with Splunk IT Service Intelligence
- Elevating security posture by increasing compliance to patching leveraging HCL BigFix and implementing new use cases in the SIEM platform
- Delivering other technology transformations such as CMDB and software currency management
Once the roadmap was set, HCLTech took responsibility for managing the client’s SaaS operations and supporting their SaaS transformation. The responsibility for capacity management and governance risk and compliance is shared with the client.
HCLTech took over full responsibility for the context elements of the client’s cloud operations: the 24x7 customer command center, the helpdesk, and service management, including security incident and event management processes, multi-track infrastructure operations and project management. The HCLTech team triages all issues and sends them to the client’s product support group or infrastructure support groups (managed by HCLTech) as relevant.
The client’s success relies on scaling up at a moment’s notice, so we executed the engagement with an automation-first mindset. Because the client had struggled to manage software currency and OS compliance, we replaced the incumbent server automation solution with HCL BigFix. This move automates discovery, management and remediation of all on-premise, mobile, virtual and cloud endpoints, regardless of operating system, location or connectivity.
This engagement materialized at the peak of the pandemic requiring HCLTech to remotely manage the transition and transformation, with 210 client employees joining HCLTech in the US, Mexico and India.
The Impact
Accelerated journey to true north
HCLTech now provides enterprise SaaS cloud operations services for more than 120 products. 45% of customer projects have been migrated to Azure, and all new customers are onboarded to Azure. In the two years since the partnership began, the client and its customers have seen many benefits from the asset-light, cloud-based, automated and optimized run environment.
Saved in licenses with HCL BigFix and rationalizing client tools. This move also increased client compliance to almost 99%, a significant leap forward.
Patching compliance
Reduced customer onboarding time from 100+ hours
This engagement, in which a service provider executes and maintains the back end of customer-facing infrastructure operations in a SaaS environment, is unique in the supply chain industry. It is also one of the largest Azure deployments: By 2024, the client expects to grow from 10,000 VMs to 35,000.
