Three Digital Transformation Questions Every Partner Should Be Asking Their Customers

Digital transformation is one of the most pervasive changes affecting business today. By changing operating models, becoming more agile, and thinking differently about how to deliver customer experiences and business outcomes, enterprises are looking for any edge they can find to compete in today’s digital world. Transformation is not an easy undertaking. Here are three questions that every NetApp partner should ask their customers to help discover new business opportunities that can deliver real customer business value.

1. What is your hybrid cloud or multicloud strategy?

Why does this matter to your enterprise customers? There is no multicloud roadmap or master textbook that enterprises can follow to reach the end of their transformation rainbow and deploy the absolutely perfect cloud strategy. Data, workloads, and applications come in all forms, and there is no one platform that can solve all of an enterprise’s transformation challenges.

Many organizations struggle to build and follow a cohesive strategy or set of transformation plans, but instead they use inertia or in some cases momentum to just keep moving forward aimlessly. By asking specific questions about their hybrid cloud strategy, you can uncover nuggets of information that identify symptoms of transformation challenges and, like a physician, diagnose issues that are important to your customers. By working together to focus on the best multicloud strategy, you can outline strategic resolutions that drive real business outcomes that benefit both you and your customer. By understanding how the hybrid multicloud capabilities of the NetApp®  portfolio can enable the conversations created by this question, you will be able to drive more customer value and loyalty. Learn more about the hybrid multicloud conversation.

2. How can we help simplify your transformation journey?

Why does this matter to your enterprise customers? Transformation efforts are complicated, and there is no one right or wrong way for enterprises to implement their technology transformation initiatives to meet their goals. However, I would bet that every single one of your customers would like to make those efforts easier and less complex.

Digital transformation efforts can be broad and complex, requiring applications and their data to be located in multiple locations, including colocation, on the premises, in a public cloud, or even in a managed hosting provider environment. These hybrid multicloud deployments require complex cloud deployment strategies that make even mainstream IT activities like backup and disaster recovery plans more complicated. By understanding how the NetApp portfolio of interconnected public and private cloud solutions simplifies digital transformation challenges, you can help your customers focus on their business outcomes and make their lives simpler. Learn more about how NetApp hybrid multicloud connectivity simplifies business transformation.

3. How is your data making your organization more efficient?

Why does this matter to your enterprise customers? It’s no secret that a better understanding of how collecting and analyzing data can provide insights, use that knowledge to drive action, and increase the pace of digital transformation. It’s a critical agenda item for every enterprise. Data, its proximity to applications, and its unique relevance to your customers’ customers is rapidly becoming one of the biggest concerns of CIOs today.

While data scientists work hard to make sense of huge data lakes, the underlying infrastructure complexities of collecting, moving, managing, and processing the massive amounts of data is a tedious and inefficient process. Enterprise data scientists want modern application and data experiences that abstract out the operational aspects of managing data away from the functions of mining the nuggets of data that drive business transformation. By understanding the deep data management capabilities delivered by the NetApp portfolio of solutions, you can help your customers simplify the underlying operational aspects of data operations and help them focus on being more efficient in delivering data-driven business transformation intelligence.

Successful partners are changing the conversation away from speeds and feeds to focus instead on their customers’ transformational goals. They are changing the services that they deliver to their customers and are focusing on how data can drive simplified and more efficient operational value.

Whether your customers are using a private cloud for infrastructure or AI for intelligent analysis, understanding the business outcomes they want to achieve is critical to delivering  stronger and more impactful value to enterprises as part of their transformation efforts.

NetApp, with its partner-led focus, enables you to build and deliver optimal solutions to those business challenges while maximizing your own profitability. To give your business the best opportunity to win in this rapidly transforming market, reach out to your NetApp partner manager and ask to learn more about the delivering the hybrid multicloud experience to your customers.