Co-creation with customers is an important strategy that many tech firms employ to ensure their software and services align closely with customer requirements — and to strengthen those relationships. In fact, co-creation should be a lynchpin in customer-centric product strategy; that’s the reason we’ve tracked developments in this area so closely.
With that backdrop, the IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl is announcing today a new service, or what it calls an “experience,” to fuel co-creation with customers and partners such that the stakeholders work together to align products and services as closely as possible with the customer’s business. The overriding goal: Raise the quality of outcomes in complex IT projects.
With the new “Vital” service, Kyndryl is formalizing an offering in which designers — think software designers and workflow designers — collaborate with partners, customers, and end users with relevant expertise and involvement to architect solutions to customers’ IT infrastructure or managed services needs.
According to Kyndryl, its designers lead the experience with human-centered design and detailed research so the process unifies data with an understanding of people’s needs and behavior. It will integrate existing systems, methods, and tools used by customers and partners
The process starts with the identification of what needs to be designed, followed by a detailed analysis of interdependencies and more, officials said. In certain cases, the Vital co-creation approach could be an alternative to an RFP process for accurately capturing a sophisticated set of requirements and delivering an architected set of services or technology.
Kyndryl has Vital teams currently located in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, and Spain; the service is available to existing and new customers
In other developments, Kyndryl said last week that it expanded an alliance with Elastic under which the two firms will develop and jointly build solutions, combining Kyndryl’s data framework and toolkits with Elastic’s enterprise search, observability, and security technology.
They plan to collaborate in areas including data modernization, data management, IT analytics, and data migration services.
“We believe this gives clients faster time to value and far smoother implementations.”
Stephen Leonard, President of Global Strategic Alliances at Kyndral, referencing Elastic partnership
The relationship — part of Kyndryl’s ecosystem approach to alliances — aims to provide deep observability across applications, services, and infrastructure.
Additional details on the four core areas of focus follow:
- IT Data Modernization — Kyndryl and Elastic will help organizations manage exploding storage growth and give them the capability to search for data wherever it resides.
- IT Data Management Services — Provide flexibility to Elastic users by letting Kyndryl manage the infrastructure stack and analytics workloads.
- Intelligent IT Analytics — Enable observability through AI/ML capabilities that deliver unified insights for efficient IT operations with technology domain-specific insights.
- Data Migration Services — Deliver the capability to streamline migrations and deploy self-managed Elastic workloads to the customer’s preferred cloud provider.
The companies said their alliance will help customers address observability needs across the hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and edge computing environments.
“These methodologies we’ve found have been very fruitful for clients to deliver services tailored to what they need within their budget,” Leonard said.
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