3 Digital Transformation Examples That Prove Why IT Modernization Matters
It’s no secret that digital transformation is vital to surviving in today’s ever-evolving digital economy.
Through digital transformation, companies can embed new technologies and modern processes across their business to drive the fundamental change needed to stay competitive. The results of these efforts? Increased efficiency, greater business agility and, ultimately, the ability to realize more innovation and business value. It’s no surprise, then, to learn that between 2020 and 2024, it’s estimated that the global investment in digital transformation initiatives will almost double. And today, 91% of businesses have already engaged in some form of digital initiative.
While the benefits of digital transformation are universal, each organization’s journey to realizing them is unique. For example, a company might introduce predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to make better decisions and reduce business risk. Others might modernize their supply chain with machine learning to make data-backed predictions about the products customers will want in the future. And other businesses are turning to cloud DevOps solutions to continuously drive application development and realize innovation, faster.
No matter how a company approaches digital transformation, they’re unified by a common goal: to reimagine their organization—both technologically and culturally. Here are three real-world digital transformation examples that showcase how businesses around the world are reshaping their organization to realize better outcomes, drive innovation and spur growth at the fundamental level.
Example #1: Meeting Growing Business Demand Through Modernization and Automation on AWS
Advanced Cyber Security (ACS), a pioneer in endpoint security, was running its flagship product EndpointLock™ on a Microsoft Windows system that resided in a self-hosted data center. But increased demand for the product, accelerated by a new financial partnership, opened the door to an entirely new market of customers. This prompted ACS to kick off a modernization project that would provide a more advanced, scalable infrastructure on the cloud—and ultimately enable the company to deploy the product to hundreds of thousands of new customers.
ACS turned to Navisite to create a highly scalable environment on AWS, which included:
- Building the AWS architecture that mirrored the company’s current on-premises set up and migrating existing Windows workloads to a Microsoft SQL Server database on Amazon RDS
- Automating DevOps processes with a CI/CD pipeline to enable fast deployment of code on AWS and continual innovation
- Ongoing oversight with AWS Cloud Optimization services to keep cloud costs under control
After running on AWS for several months, ACS later realized a new opportunity for transformation: As the rapid adoption of EndpointLock™ continued, the company needed a more cost-effective way to manage growth. As a result, it opted to move off Windows entirely and refactor to an open-source solution on AWS.
Today, with the core of its business built on a modern AWS environment, ACS can easily meet customer demand and securely deploy new code changes to AWS without having to worry about infrastructure management. And, by moving off of Windows, ACS now has the freedom to scale its business to meet demand—without any constraints.
“This will bring our product to a whole new industry and millions of new users over the next few years,” said Stephen Santise, the Director of Technology at ACS. “Between the AWS environment that Navisite built and their ongoing support, we’re excited and prepared to meet new demand.”
Example #2: Enabling Deeper Insights and Business Growth with SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud
Hallstar is a global chemical supplier and reseller with a focus on the industrial, beauty and personal care industries. As the company started experiencing rapid growth and business evolution, it realized its 18-year-old ERP system could no longer keep up with its expansion. Hallstar also needed the ability to tap into advanced analytics and ultimately remove siloes from its workflows.
Hallstar took a critical first step toward resolving those problems by leveraging Navisite’s expertise to modernize its legacy ERP software and implement SAP S/4HANA. Following this deployment, the company set its sights even higher—Hallstar wanted to find a better solution to connect and analyze reams of disparate business data. To make this happen, Hallstar once again partnered with Navisite to build on its S/4HANA foundation by implementing SAP Analytics Cloud. This would ultimately give the company an intuitive and modern solution to facilitate real-time data and up-to-date dashboard replication, bringing its massive amounts of financial and manufacturing data into alignment.
Today, this digital transformation example proves the myriad of benefits that come with IT modernization, including:
- Real-time monitoring of data to identify problems before they happen and take decisive action
- Greater insight into on-time rates, open customer orders, shipments, freight spending and inventory levels for supply chain teams
- Improved reporting on daily, monthly and yearly production rates, cycle time variances, production pace and equipment utilization
- Real-time sales numbers showing daily business unit performance against budget broken down by finished goods and regional categories
- Clearer visibility into revenue, gross profit performance and trends, SGA reporting, operating cashflow and capital expense spending in all business units
“As our company became more global, we needed a tool that could provide a holistic view of our business,” said Chuck Redpath, the director of IT for Hallstar. “With our fresh deployment of SAP S/4HANA on a global scale and the promise of real-time replication and reporting of data through SAP Analytics Cloud, we felt this would be the perfect way to give our decision-makers the information they needed—quicker than ever before—to run the business.”
Example #3: Achieving Scalability and Cloud-Native Features with AWS Migration
Kallik kicked off 2020 with a business objective to move Veraciti, its proprietary label management platform, and 100% of its customers to AWS. At the time, Veraciti was running on an on-premises Oracle database that was hosted on another managed service provider’s private cloud—but it couldn’t scale with Kallik’s growing business.
No other company in the labeling industry is fully operating on the public cloud, and Kallik saw this as a key competitive advantage that would enable its users to future-proof their operations and benefit from new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. A move to AWS would also enable the company to easily scale based on demand while strengthening its Veraciti platform with cloud-native features. These features include constant uptime, comprehensive redundancy and industry-leading security.
Navisite helped Kallik execute the migration process, which entailed a lift-and-shift of the existing on-premises Oracle databases to the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on AWS. Following the move, Navisite also helped Kallik with ongoing cloud optimization services, which offloaded the burden of billing and gave the company actionable insight to effectively manage cloud costs.
Today, this digital transformation example showcases how Kallik’s customers now benefit from strengthened security and regulatory compliance, improved performance, always-on availability, and the ability to quickly adopt new artwork and labeling technologies. With the addition of these cloud-native features and the highly secure AWS infrastructure, the Veraciti platform has helped customers cut project completion times by 50%.
“From the beginning, it was clear that Navisite brought the cloud expertise and collaborative approach we needed to build a highly secure, robust environment on AWS and successfully migrate our customers to the cloud,” said Rob Woodall, the chief technology officer at Kallik.
Turning Digital Transformation Examples Into Reality
From unexpected changes and resource constraints to innovation bottlenecks and increasing enterprise complexity, it’s never been more important for businesses to be agile, resilient and prepared for whatever’s next.
These digital transformation examples only begin to paint a much larger picture of how businesses can embrace new intelligent technologies to get ahead of today’s rapid pace of change. Whether you need help modernizing your supply chain, embracing cloud technology or tapping into the power of data intelligence and automation, Navisite can help you navigate change and drive business outcomes with comprehensive strategic advisory and transformation services.