innovation at the edge

IT Without Boundaries

Innovation at the Edge

Get competitive advantage from IT Without Boundaries

Don’t let IT fail the business where it counts the most.Whatever product or service your business sells, customer service has never been more important to your success. That requires more and better two-way communication with customers than ever before, in order to understand and exceed their expectations… deliver a delightful experience… innovate in response to customer insights.

2

And customers aren’t your only concern. Business partners and vendors are essential stakeholders in the world of anytime, anywhere business. If your people can’t collaborate with partners as easily as they can with colleagues, your partnerships are leaving money on the table. If you and your vendors can’t create end-to-end supply chain visibility that spans your enterprises, your operations are costing more than they should. If your employees can’t be productive wherever they are, you are losing much of the value they could be contributing to the success of the business.

IT can help the business grow revenue and be competitive.It’s possible, today, to leverage IT to give your customers a personalized experience that builds both loyalty and revenue. It’s possible to work seamlessly with partners and vendors to get business done both faster and better. It’s possible to make your employees productive on any device—even their own—and to enable them to be more innovative in the systems they create to engage with partners, vendors, and customers. It’s possible to capture the feedback that anyone—customer, partner, vendor, employee, or anyone else—has about your business and use it to maximum advantage in growing revenue and increasing competiveness.

Introducing Innovation at the Edge.What all of these possibilities have in common is not who they involve but where they take place: at the edge.

The edge is where the traditional enterprise ends and the rest of the world begins. And for too many companies, the edge has been not a nexus, but a wall, one that shuts out success as much as anything else.

It’s time for your business to tear down that wall. In today’s world of IT Without Boundaries, that’s more possible than ever before. By innovating at the edge, you can apply competitive advantage where it matters most.

To do so, you need new systems of engagement at the edge that encompass digital marketing, analytics, mobility, and more. You need to extend core systems of record so you can leverage their tremendous value in the innovations you create at the edge. You need new processes, accelerators, and tools—and you need them to be fast and easy for stakeholders at the edge to use.

3

What it takes to innovate at the edge.IT can support Innovation at the Edge by extending infrastructure, adapting and creating applications, and ensuring that processes promote innovation while safeguarding assets.

Great user experiences.Innovation at the Edge is about deeper engagement with the audiences beyond your onsite employees. That means that great user experiences are a core requirement. IT organizations implementing Innovation at the Edge need to engage customers, partners, and offsite employees with great, consumer-inspired applications. That means they need strong design and development skills, especially user-centered design capabilities. And, in case it needs to be said, they need to be able to deliver those interfaces and applications with greater speed and agility than ever before.

Fast IT.Traditional IT infrastructure, with hardwired, custom interfaces, lacks the flexibility to support Innovation at the Edge. Instead, enterprises need flexible architectures with components that they can combine as needed to implement virtually any solution they can design, such as solutions that interconnect core data with lightweight applications and third-party services. They need offline workstreams to accommodate mobile users who can’t always connect to the enterprise. And they need the ability to scale up infrastructure quickly to support new solutions—and the ability to decommission unneeded infrastructure just as quickly. Application design and deployment needs to be fast too, including processes for simple, “good enough” applications that can succeed or fail quickly as the business engages in its pursuit of business value.

Hybrid Cloud Governance.Innovation at the Edge requires a degree of openness to outside stakeholders that used to be considered an unacceptable security risk. Today, new security technologies are helping enterprises to maintain appropriate levels of security while also maintaining the openness needed to gain valuable input from customers, vendors, and partners. Technology is only part of the answer, though. Enterprises also need governance policies that are nimble enough to take into account both IP protection and Innovation at the Edge.

4

You have what it takes. You have Avanade.Innovation at the Edge may represent uncharted waters to some, but not to Avanade. For years, we’ve been helping enterprises like yours with engaging applications, powerful yet flexible IT infrastructure, scalable cloud solutions, and cost-effective managed services. We’ve used these resources to help enterprises to build closer relationships with customers, partners, vendors, and others, to build competitive advantage, to build Innovation at the Edge.

To support your Innovation at the Edge, Avanade draws upon solutions including the following:

Experience Design.The Avanade Experience Design team solves the challenges to user and customer interaction with new solutions of both beauty and utility. Our global team of experience design consultants and studio-based designers provides creative design, user interface design, interaction design, information architecture, user experience design, and user interface development & integration. Our experts specialize in delivering a quality user experience regardless of device type or form factor.

Mobile Studio.The convergence of powerful handheld devices and increasingly flexible environments is creating both opportunities and challenges to connect with customers, partners, vendors and employees at the edge. Avanade specializes in developing compelling mobile applications with rich user experiences, intuitive interfaces, and the connections they need to backend systems. We’re Microsoft’s Mobility Partner of the Year for 2012 and 2013, and can help you make the most of mobility technologies on both Microsoft and non-Microsoft devices and platforms (e.g. iOS, Android).

Data and Analytics.Stakeholders at the edge need information and insights to drive collaboration and decisionmaking. Avanade helps you to give them this capability. Our data and analytics expertise includes Analytics as a Service, Analytics Managed Services, Analytics on SAP, Big Data Analytics, Data Warehousing, Reporting and Analytics, Predictive Analytics, and Healthcare Analytics.

5

Touch Analytics.Avanade provides a cross-platform mobile and analytics solution called “Avanade Touch Analytics (ATA).” We offer this as an on-premises, hybrid, or cloud solution. It includes a touch-based dashboard and BI experience that’s ideal for users on phones or tablets. With this go-to analytics solution, you can deliver clear, actionable data visualizations to your stakeholders at the edge, or let them build their own with Avanade self-search features.

Digital Marketing.Avanade’s Digital Marketing offerings include a spectrum of services across digital marketing strategy, creative, and technology services. Avanade’s digital marketing projects include solutions for multi-channel experiences, campaign, information, ecommerce, customer self-service, loyalty sites, and more. Additionally, Avanade can consolidate and build on modern technology platforms and manage them through its managed services offerings.

Managed services.Building an environment that supports Innovation at the Edge is one challenge. Managing it is another. Many enterprises don’t want to acquire the deep expertise needed for private, public or hybrid cloud management. Others don’t want the expense of hosting their private clouds in their own data centers. They don’t have to. Instead, they can take advantage of Avanade’s managed services offerings, and devote internal resources to adding the greatest strategic value to their organizations.

Cloud Services Manager.How can you give customers, partners, vendors, and employees the right level of access to the services that are right for them? With Avanade’s Cloud Services Manager. This web-based, self-service portal provides an integrated and easy way to research, request, manage, and retire IT services and computing assets in a custom catalog, created to your requirements, that provides authorized access to workloads that can be sourced from any platform in the environment.

Enterprise Application Store.Employees need a single place to find and deploy the corporate and third-party apps that bring Innovation at the Edge to live. Avanade provides this solution through its Solution Factory: a complete Enterprise Application Store that works in an intuitive way that’s familiar to anyone who’s downloaded an app to a phone.

Identity Services. Governance and security are important considerations for Innovation at the Edge. Avanade has years of experience creating large-scale federated identity services and role-based access control systems for customers worldwide. Avanade’s best practices and processes that drive these solutions can help you federate and integrate identities seamlessly across applications in your organization while maintaining the right level of governance.

6

The time to innovate at the edge is now.You can begin, or expand, your Innovation at the Edge today. To help you, exploit Avanade’s skills across the range of relevant technologies and best practices.

IT can help the business collaborate more productively and profitably with partners. IT can help vendors service your business more efficiently and at lower cost. IT can help sales and marketing build closer ties with customers that deliver greater insights and more revenue. IT can do it. Avanade can help.

7

About Avanade

Avanade helps customers realize results in a digital world through business technology solutions and managed services that combine insight, innovation and expertise focused on Microsoft® technologies. Additional information can be found at www.avanade.com.

©2014 Avanade Inc. All rights reserved. The Avanade name and logo are registered trademarks in the U.S. and other countries. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.

North America

Seattle Phone +1 206 239 5600 [email protected]

South America

Sao Paulo Phone +55 (11) 5188 3000 [email protected]

Africa Pretoria Phone +27 12 6224400 [email protected]

Asia-Pacific

Singapore Phone +65 6592 2133 [email protected]

Europe

London Phone +44 (0) 20 7025 1000 [email protected]

IT Without Boundaries

IT as a Services Broker