Skype for Business Drives Digital Transformation

26 Nov 2016

You know how important digital transformation is - but do you know how to start the journey and get your desired results? To remain competitive, your enterprise is going to have to embrace technology that will deliver better and more relevant customer experiences, enable more productive employee outcomes, and help to realize new and more sophisticated business models.

The low-hanging fruit for digitally transforming the enterprise has always been around communications and collaboration. These two factors, applied to all stakeholders (customers, employees, partners, suppliers, etc.), consistently rank among the top five issues that executives target for improvement. People intuitively understand the value of more timely communications and better collaboration, but because of old and patch-worked technologies, meaningful improvement has been elusive. Until now.

What has changed? The Big Three:

The development of mature solutions that unify and extend communications and collaboration experiences that actually work as advertised;
Rising enterprise demands that the aging PBX cannot meet for a modern, reliable, manageable, and secure communications and collaboration solutions that works in the office and on the road, in and outside the firewall, and allows important insights from data analytics;
The emergence of experienced and proven providers who can effectively guide the enterprise on its journey to digital transformation.

Microsoft is the undisputed champion for business productivity tools, and Skype for Business is the centerpiece of its communications and collaboration solution. More importantly, Skype for Business is the platform behind some of the most audacious and innovative digital transformation projects ever completed by leading companies in the Fortune 500, the FTSE 100, or the Nikkei 225.

Note my use of the word "completed" rather than "undertaken." There is a lot of noise out there about digital transformation projects that are started, but few telling their success stories.

Leading the digital transformations enabled by Skype for Business solutions is Microsoft partner Modality Systems. Modality Systems, recognized by Microsoft in 2016 as Communications Partner of the year, runs one of the world's largest dedicated Skype for Business practices, supporting 300 customers in 110 countries. Modality knows that businesses don't digitally transform by simply installing software. It's important to understand the end-to-end opportunity for digital transformation that Skype for Business provides to your enterprise, and to master the nuances and complexities of these solutions. Going beyond providing cost-effective, resilient, and scalable solutions, Modality also knows that enterprises need to have a deep focus on user acceptance, which means deploying a solution that stakeholders will use because it delivers a great experience that meets standards for performance, manageability, and security.

Microsoft has recognized Modality Systems' excellent work by acknowledging Modality Systems' contributions to the Skype Operations Framework (SOF) at the Microsoft launch. The Skype Operations Framework as described by Microsoft is "A comprehensive guide and toolset for implementing and managing a reliable, cost-effective communications service based on Skype for Business. It covers the entire customer life cycle, including planning, delivery, adoption, operations and migration." SOF gives customers a playbook as a step-by-step guide for success. However, applying the principles of SOF takes a degree of sophistication delivered by the larger Microsoft partner community.

With the Skype Operations Framework, Modality Systems continues its pioneering mandate by joining business' wishes for digital transformation with the Skype journey, to deliver a predictable path towards completion and life cycle management of these initiatives. If you are embarking on a digital transformation project for perhaps the first time ever, utilizing a partner that has built up a wealth of experience through actual trials and deployments will accelerate transformation while keeping the cost of guess work at a minimum. This helps to effectively get the job done right, while enabling operational acceptance, something that is often overlooked. Whether the solution is on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid, Modality Systems has delivered transformative results around Skype for Business. And they've successfully rescued projects that have gone off the rails.

Your business is probably complicated, but imagine building a communications and collaboration platform for cruise ship line Crystal Cruises, where the property itself is constantly on the move. For pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, a patented drug has a ticking clock that means time really is money; Modality Systems streamlined their Skype for Business environment and collaboration process to reduce time to market by up to 10%.

Modality Systems is reaching out to enterprises interested in learning more about the ways in which communications and collaboration can enable tangible results for digital transformation. Whether you already own Skype for Business licenses that have yet to be deployed, whether your initial efforts at deploying Lync or Skype for Business fell short, or if you just want to learn more about how unified communications can really change your business, you owe it to yourself to attend one of Modality Systems' Skype for Business events.

The schedule for the series of Skype for Business city events is here: Digital Transformation Series Registration.

These are high-value discussions that you aren't going to get from other providers. If you cannot make one of these events in person, Modality Systems is also offering a series of webinars that will cover key parts of the transformation journey story you need to know.