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TietoEVRY and Ayehu Announce Partnership
Finland-headquartered IT services company TietoEVRY has announced a partnership with IT automation vendor Ayehu. This partnership aligns with the strategic priorities of both companies.
In a briefing with Info-Tech Research Group, representatives from TietoEVRY and Ayehu discussed the background to this relationship in more detail
Selection Criteria
Himadri Das, TietoEVRY’s Head of Automation, explained that there were three main criteria for their selection of Ayehu as an automation orchestration platform:
- Modularity
- The tool needed to be able to be deployed in any of three environments:
- in TiteoEVRY’s customers’ on-premises environment.
- in the public cloud.
- in the private cloud that TietoEVRY manages for its customers.
- The modularity allows for deployment to adapt to the particular use case and means that TietoEVRY can avoid locking in its customers.
- The tool needed to be able to be deployed in any of three environments:
- Flexibility to Expand
- “We don’t want to fixate our customers on a rigid and inflexible automation architecture with vendor lock-in. We prefer to keep our automation modular and flexible by using integrators like APIs/SDK/connectors to tools and services applicable to the customer’s environment,” said Das.
- TietoEVRY wanted to be able to build patterns that could be reused for various customers, such as workflows for event management and incident resolution, as well as common service requests.
- “We want low to medium implementation complexity and quick wins through high return on investment,” explained Das.
- Prebuilt APIs
- TietoEVRY wanted to be able to quickly and easily build a minimum viable product (MVP) to show value to customers while also being able to further refine the solution to adapt to each customer’s environment. Ayehu’s prebuilt APIs and SDKs fit the bill here.
- “This design thinking approach has enabled TietoEVRY to use an outside-in customer centric solution for automation, rather than an inside-in, product-centric approach,” said Das.
Cultural Considerations in the Nordics
The partnership with Ayehu aligns with TietoEVRY’s approach to serving their own customers based on cultural considerations in the Nordics.
“The Nordic market is not about the hard push sell. It’s about design thinking, hackathons. Customer engagement is crucial. Getting to know the customer environment is where the main use cases come up. Ayehu understands that,” said Das.
Indeed, this is similar to the approach that Ayehu itself takes in winning new business.
Customer Focus: Cost Savings vs Added Value
Ido Sarig, Ayehu’s Head of Global Marketing, explained that TietoEVRY’s involvement in the Nordic market makes them particularly receptive to the Ayehu’s value proposition:
“We think the state of IT process automation in the Nordic countries is more advanced than in North America. In the Nordics it’s taken for granted. Cost cutting and performance improvements are a given, but people are looking beyond just cost savings in automation. This helps employees enjoy their job more. Nobody comes to work thinking, ‘Great, I look forward to eight hours of resetting passwords.’”
“We’re not doing this to reduce headcount. We’re doing this to provide end-to-end value to our customers. Our customers are asking for innovation. We want to re-allocate resources to other assignments and projects while working on full stack automation for our customers, ranging from business process and support function automation through to the run, build, operate layer of automation” said Das.
In pursuit of this goal, TietoEVRY intends to leverage Ayehu’s capabilities to automate more on the applications side in addition to infrastructure.
Involving Your Staff in Automation
It’s important for front-line staff to buy into automation in order for organizations to realize the most value.
“If your employees are scared that automation will take away their jobs, they will never share the valuable insights and potential efficiency areas with you. It’s important that they take the bigger perspective and are motivated to take part in this journey. You need to get them on your side by clearly and transparently explaining the big picture, keeping the customer in the center,” said Das.
To obtain the engagement necessary to make their efforts successful, organizations pursuing an automation program should prioritize effective communication from executive leadership and practice good organizational change management both from the PMO and at the manager level.
Source: TietoEVRY
Our Take
Although only recently announced, the partnership between TietoEVRY and Ayehu has been over a year in the making.
As technology advances and more software capabilities become commoditized, it will become even more important for software vendors to partner with their customers.
Info-Tech expects that leading vendors will make an effort to be more responsive to their customers and more enterprises will systematically include long-term strategic alignment in their evaluation criteria.
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