From touchless payments to overhauled supply chains to omnichannel everywhere to the boom in telemedicine, companies in every industry and across the world are racing to find new and better ways to move at the speed of their customers.
Here in 2020, the world has not just hit a tipping point—it has blasted through a total transformation of how we live, work, shop, learn, communicate, engage and even care for ourselves and our families.
In turn, businesses of every type and size have themselves had to undergo extraordinary changes to adapt to both the new realities in our world and the new and increasingly demanding expectations of their customers and prospects.
Reimagine Your Business Model
The most successful businesses have not simply tried to adjust a few things out at the margins and then sit back and hope that will work. No, the winning companies have aggressively reimagined who they are and what they do to create new revenue models, new engagement models, and new types of value to deliver to customers.
And in this year unlike any other, we’ve learned that the high-performance engine best equipped to power those transformations is the cloud because it enables business leaders to devote more focus and resources on keeping pace with and dazzling their customers, and less on running a wildly complex IT factory.
Migrate and Automate
In particular, two fundamental elements of the cloud have come front and center in 2020 as part of those remarkable reimaginings that many businesses have achieved: the high-value requirements to migrate and automate. Because unless those essential processes are fully in place, none of the more-visible business benefits can ever be achieved.
Those cloud essentials of migration and automation are central themes in the Citrix Cloud Summit, which features strategic overviews of digital transformation and the vital role of the cloud in the global digital economy. You can check out all the Citrix Cloud Summit content and select the presentations and discussions most relevant for you.
One of the customers presenting at the virtual Citrix Cloud Summit was Mass General Brigham, a huge healthcare system based in Boston. CIO Jim Noga discussed the profound transformation that’s taken place in the past 7 months at Mass General Brigham.
Before the pandemic, Mass General Brigham was handling about 9,000 “virtual visits” per month via telemedicine, Noga said. But today, that daily average has soared from 300 virtual visits to about 8,000 as Mass General Brigham is now handling 250,000 telemedicine “vists” every single month.
That astonishing transformation was possible because Noga and his IT team were able to deploy Citrix’s migration and automation solutions across their sprawling digital environment to optimize the interaction of on-premises systems, cloud, and hybrid operations.
On top of that, Noga said, Mass General Brigham used Citrix to modernize its operations and improve its quality of care by delivering electronic health records (EHRs) and integrating Zoom.
And those huge advances didn’t require multiyear projects. In fact, Noga said, the opposite was true: “We initially thought all of that would take 3 years, but we were able to do it in 5 months.”
As a result, it’s not only the hospital that’s benefitting.
“Many of our patients really like the virtual visits,” Noga said. You can see what other customers were talking about at the Citrix Cloud Summit here.
Enabling Remote Workers
Just as Mass General Brigham had to create new ways to enable its medical experts to engage with and treat patients, SAP had to rapidly help its huge corporate customers across the globe enable millions of employees to work remotely.
Leaning into the 20-year strategic partnership Citrix has had with the world’s largest provider of enterprise applications, SAP was able to offer a “quicker time to value for customers” because of Citrix’s expertise in cloud migration and automation, said SAP executive vice-president and COO of customer success Steve Shute.
“Citrix Workspace is the foundation to provide secure cloud-based access” for the new generation of remote workers,” Shute said during his presentation at last week’s Citrix Cloud Summit. To gain deeper insight into Citrix’s product strategy and roadmap, you can join a live Q&A on Twitter on October 15th with Citrix executive vice president and chief product officer PJ Hough answering questions about cloud migration, enablement of new ways of working, and app and data security. You can submit questions beforehand at https://twitter.com/i/events/1311622614595457024.
The Need for Speed
At one of the world’s other top cloud-computing providers, Google Cloud, a top executive said Citrix has been essential in helping customers rapidly shift workloads into the cloud and take advantage of new technologies to automate many tasks that free up IT specialists to do higher-value work.
Calling Google Cloud’s partnership with Citrix a matchup of “two best-of-breed companies,” president of North America Kirsten Kliphouse said many companies are now extremely eager to “migrate, manage and optimize” their on-premise workloads over to Google Cloud.
“And they’re finding it’s very consistent in working with Citrix and Google Cloud, and that leads to shorter time-cycles for those essential moves.”
For businesses, the need for speed has never been more essential because the game has switched from one of efficiency to one of relevance: and those companies that cannot rapidly reconfigure what they do and how they do it to meet the demands of digitally driven consumers will soon become irrelevant.
For more on this need-for-speed imperative, please check out the video interview I did with theCUBE’s Jeff Frick.
This article is brought to you by Citrix.
