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Bluewave’s Telecom Assessment: Unveiling Hidden Savings and Maximizing ROI

Posted on by Bluewave

In today’s market, clients often face challenges in managing their technology assets, leading to disjointed strategies. Common issues include unexpected costs from shadow IT, under-utilization, erroneous charges, and auto-renewals. Bluewave’s Telecom Assessment, a comprehensive telecom audit and advisory service, tackles these problems by providing a clear view of all assets, enabling a cohesive and efficient technology strategy.

With 20 years of experience, we’ve encountered many clients starting network transformations only to discover that their contracts have automatically renewed, even when using their own telecom expense management platforms. This oversight leads to legal issues and demonstrates that many clients lack a full understanding of their current assets. Without an assessment, they make uninformed decisions that hurt their ROI and TCO.

Unlike a typical telecom audit that merely checks for accuracy, our comprehensive approach builds a detailed inventory and offers complete visibility into a client’s assets. This method enhances our discussions and provides significant benefits to our clients.

Why You Need Bluewave’s Telecom Assessment

The Power of Visibility and Inventory Management

Traditional telecom audits focus on verifying the accuracy of records, but at Bluewave, we go a step further. Our Telecom Assessment involves creating a thorough inventory of all services, contracts, and associated invoices a client holds. This holistic view allows us to identify savings opportunities, streamline operations, and ensure clients are fully aware of their current technological landscape. Over the past 20 years, our clients have enjoyed average savings of about 21%. This figure consistently delivers a measurable return on investment (ROI).

See What You Will Save – Try the Bluewave Savings Calculator

The Cost of Incomplete Information

Inadequate information can significantly impact project implementations. The effectiveness of both the client and the carrier is limited by the quality and completeness of the information provided. A single overlooked service or detail can transform a project into a million-dollar error, causing delays of three to nine months. This uninformed approach inevitably leads to finger-pointing and misallocated blame.

Our Telecom Assessment mitigates these risks by ensuring all stakeholders have a comprehensive and accurate understanding of the existing services and infrastructure. This holistic view streamlines project timelines and enhances the accuracy and reliability of the implementation process.

Regional Hospital System – Identified lack of contract information, renegotiated an unidentified auto-renewal, resulting in a 26% reduction in network costs.

Fixed Costs for Predictable Outcomes

One key differentiator of Bluewave’s Telecom Assessment is the fixed cost structure, eliminating the risk of uncapped fees commonly associated with contingency-based audits. This predictability is appealing to CFOs and senior procurement leaders who prioritize stable and forecastable expenses. Our assessment provides a detailed and complete vision of all telecom service inventories, making it easier for clients to manage their telecom assets and plan for future technology migrations.

Historical average of 12.4% ROI on each assessment, putting tangible savings back into our clients’ pockets.

What to Expect from a Telecom Assessment

Eliminating Assumptions and Reducing Waste

Many clients face challenges when migrating to new technologies due to a lack of clear understanding of their existing assets. This often leads to assumptions and unnecessary services being transferred from one carrier or service to another. Historically, about 12% of services moved in transitions, such as large UCaaS transformations, are redundant and unnecessary. By conducting a thorough inventory and usage analysis, we help clients avoid waste and optimize their technology investments.

Large Credit Union – Identified 23% savings; 46% from the removal of unused circuits and TDM lines.

Global Advertising Research Company – Identified 20% savings from unused 800#s, expired contracts, month-to-month fees, redundant IP backup connectivity, and recommendations for a more modern and less expensive UCaaS service.

Identifying Inefficiencies and Optimizing Contracts

Throughout the assessment, we identify unused services and outdated technologies. We verify contract compliance and benchmark them against industry standards. For instance, if a client wants to transition from MPLS to SD-WAN or SASE, we provide detailed cost projections and benchmarks for various options. This comprehensive analysis ensures clients understand their current contracts and potential savings.

Large Commercial Real Estate Insurance Company – Identified 35% savings in mobile spending across all locations through aggregation and easier management with one provider.

Avoiding Unpleasant Surprises and Cost Overruns

A common scenario involves clients in the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) space. Providers often promise ROIs based on incomplete or inaccurate client-provided information. Consequently, these ROIs are frequently unvalidated, leading to cost overruns and frustrated CFOs questioning financial missteps post-implementation. This discrepancy stems from the clients’ lack of detailed visibility into their current technological landscape.

Large Business Process Outsourcing Company – Identified $1 million in annual savings and turned around two failed cloud projects with new available funds and resources.

Facilitating Informed Decision-Making and Transformation

Our assessment ensures all parties are on the same page, eliminating miscommunication and discrepancies. Clients can confidently answer questions like, “Is this what we have?” and “Is this where we want to go?” With a clear vision and a detailed roadmap, we and the client can make the necessary changes to reach business objectives. This shared understanding streamlines the process and fosters a more educated and collaborative environment.

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Bringing Order to Daily Chaos

Imagine managing your personal finances by addressing bills ad hoc as they arrive. This approach makes it difficult to establish a budget or stay on top of your expenses. Similarly, IT departments often feel overwhelmed, dealing with outages and trying to keep track of disparate services across multiple sites. Without a thorough inventory and assessment, IT management becomes a reactive, day-to-day struggle.

What You Will Get

  • A Comprehensive Statement of Findings: Our detailed blueprint covers every service, document, invoice, contract, port, seat, and license we receive. We identify and eliminate unnecessary spending, and recommend changes for cost optimization, ease of management, and goal alignment.
  • Research, Validation, and Negotiation: We thoroughly research, validate, and determine the optimal solutions for our clients. This includes obtaining competitive quotes and negotiating terms based on our extensive industry knowledge. By leveraging our expertise, we ensure that clients receive the best possible terms and prices for their services.
  • A Detailed Roadmap: A key deliverable from our assessment is a roadmap for optimizing and modernizing for scalable growth. This isn’t just about expanding the network but also about integrating new technologies efficiently. As technology evolves rapidly, clients often struggle to keep up. Our roadmap provides a strategic plan to manage and incorporate these advancements.

Conclusion

Our Telecom Assessment is designed to provide clients with a clear, comprehensive understanding of their IT and telecom environment. By offering detailed visibility and expert recommendations, we help clients optimize their spending, adopt new technologies, and achieve measurable financial savings.

We also offer a complimentary Rapid Assessment.

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Tame Your IT Landscape: Bluewave’s Technology Assessment

Posted on by Bluewave

Today, every organization, from a regional bank to a multinational software company, needs IT to do business. Selecting, deploying, and managing that technology sounds simple in practice: figure out what services you need, find a vendor that meets that need, and sign on the dotted line. If you operate a bank, that may well be the reality; but add the dimensions of complexity and time to the equation and you end up with the situation many, if not most, firms are actually in: uncertainty, cost inefficiency, and chronic, low-level chaos. Let’s explore Telecom Assessments and what they can do for your business.

This situation is typical, and not the fault of the firm. The market for telecom and technology in general is large, global, complex, and evolving nonlinearly. Provisioning, inventory, invoices, and interoperability add a layer of murkiness that often leaves firms unsure of what technology they have, what they really need, and whether they’re getting a good deal. “Managing IT” becomes “just managing”—rather than optimizing.

Technology Assessments vs. the “Stare & Compare” Telecom Audit

Bluewave acquired Telapprise which started as a telecom audit company. With the acquisition, Bluewave benefitted from the Telapprise Telecom Assessment Practice. This team was doing something quite different than the “stare and compare” telecom audit. The “stare and compare” audit is a one-time review designed to identify problems, without the critical element of identifying opportunities. Our original unique approach to the audit has evolved into the Bluewave Technology Assessment practice, which delivers not just visibility across the organization, but also identifies which technologies are supporting business goals and which are not.

The Telecom Assessment is woven in with our Lifecycle Management process but is designed to deliver value regardless of whether clients work with us for procurement and implementation—which is why there is a cost attached to it. The attached cost demonstrates this isn’t just a sales pitch which makes it an easy option for CIOs and CFOs. Our clients see an average 12.4x ROI after our assessment.

What a Technology Assessment Isn’t

The Telecom Assessment is designed to deliver actionable information about the IT area that is hardest for internal teams to see: the big picture. In our experience, organizations are better at understanding the micro-level of what’s going on in their network (where the network is, where the services are, and day to day management) than they are at understanding the macro level (what opportunities they’re missing, the gaps, the waste, what their challenges are, and what they’re paying). Telecom Assessments delivers the visibility IT leaders need to make educated decisions and ensure their budget is as clean as possible. It’s a snapshot in time that allows IT leaders to generate an accurate single source of truth for creating a strategic blueprint.

Don’t Go Rogue: Why a Blueprint is Essential

When you build a new house from scratch, it’s good to have a blueprint. When you renovate an old house, it’s absolutely essential to have a blueprint. The IT environments of established organizations are like old houses: complex, riddled with a mix of old and new technologies, and layer upon layer of successive renovations to the extent that you can’t be entirely sure what’s behind all the walls unless you look. Rather than continuing to add to the layers of renovation, causing more complexity and continuing to fix old systems when they break, a thorough blueprint of an old building first determines what should go and be replaced by modern technology that’ll be of better service.

Many organizations are paying top dollar for the IT equivalents of a coal-fired boiler in the basement. That’s not universally bad, but there’s often a better and more cost-effective solution out there, and it would be hard to find if you didn’t know you were still heating with coal, or that that might be less than ideal. The Technology Assessment provides this detailed blueprint.

Nuts and Bolts of the Bluewave Telecom Assessment

What does a Telecom Assessment actually look like? Unlike traditional telecom audits, Technology Assessments are focused on finding opportunities for organizations to better meet their business goals. The first step is to work with you to develop a deep understanding of your business goals, drivers, and outcomes. Everything downstream of this stage will be informed by this. Next, we deliver a technical assessment of your technology infrastructure: what you have that’s working for you, and what’s working against you or is of diminishing returns. Next, we analyze all costs and utilization: are you paying too much or paying for that you don’t actually use? In the final stage, we look for opportunities for improvement with a particular focus on where the most benefit can be gained with technology optimized for how your business operates.

See What You Will Save – Try the Bluewave Savings Calculator

Can I Do a Technology Assessment Myself?

Our clients are savvy and intelligent. Almost without exception, they all have the technical ability to do this kind of assessment themselves. The problem is that day-to-day operations get in the way of stepping back to see the macro level—both on the resourcing side and on the side of perspective. We do Telecom Assessments routinely and maintain a large, global network of vendors. This offers us an understanding of your environment in an industry-wide context, providing the best opportunity to help you meet your business goals competitively. On the resourcing side, big, in-depth assessments will always take a back seat to day-to-day operations—it’s hard to consider a renovation when you’re always busy fixing the boiler. Our macro-level, industry-wide perspective together with your micro-level understanding of your environment and business goals is a proven formula for getting meaningful technology transformation done.

We also offer a complimentary Rapid Assessment. 

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How to Leverage Generative AI to Drive Agent Experience

Posted on by Bluewave

The power of Generative AI and the best ways to leverage it have become a focal point for organizations looking for a competitive edge or to avoid a competitive disadvantage. We reached out to Raghavendra Rao, Senior Director of Product Management and Priyanka Malik, Content Marketer at our strategic partner Sprinklr to provide insights on this powerful tool.

Customer service leaders today grapple with a crucial decision – how to embrace Generative AI without it posing a threat to their existing workforce.

Here’s the twist: AI isn’t here to replace your human agents; it’s here to amplify their capabilities.

Together, agents and Generative AI, form an unstoppable customer experience team. With AI as an ally, your agents won’t feel the weight of mundane tasks. They’ll be free to focus on what truly matters, making a real impact.

The result? Happy agents, happier customers.

Let’s delve into how Generative AI empowers your team to double down on their core skills and revolutionize efficiency.

Role of Generative AI in revolutionizing customer service

  • A global economic game-changer: McKinsey predicts that Generative AI could become a powerhouse, potentially contributing between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy by 2040. Alas, this isn’t just another technological advancement; it’s an AI transformation with enormous customer service implications.
  • The unstoppable rise of ChatGPT: Take ChatGPT, for instance. It skyrocketed to prominence, amassing over 100 million users just two months after its launch. It’s not only a game-changer but also the fastest-growing app ever. It encouraged other players in the market such as Google to develop their own Large Language Models (LLM). This unprecedented adoption highlights a general willingness to embrace AI-powered solutions and indicates the incredible impact this could have on customer experiences.

But what are the use cases that make customer service leaders consider the power of Generative AI for creating remarkable agent experiences?

Let’s explore them in detail.

1. Elevating customer support:

  • Personalized responses: Generative AI equips customer service agents with the ability to provide tailored, individualized responses to customer inquiries. This personalization raises the bar for customer interactions, enhancing engagement and satisfaction.
  • Efficiency in response time: Rapid, real-time responses are no longer a distant dream. Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, streamlines customer service operations, ensuring customers receive prompt and meaningful assistance.

2. Empowering agent productivity:

  • Automation of repetitive tasks: The burden of repetitive tasks is significantly reduced through automation, allowing human agents to shift their focus towards more intricate and challenging customer issues.
  • Ticket deflection: Generative AI plays a crucial role in enhancing ticket deflection by tackling everyday customer questions automatically. It understands customer language, learns from past interactions, and integrates with chatbots for efficient issue resolution. This results in fewer incoming tickets for your agents and a proactive support system to help your customers.
  • Streamlined knowledge management: Managing knowledge bases has never been easier. Generative AI simplifies knowledge base management by automating content creation, ensuring up-to-date information to keep pace with product updates, and supporting multilingual queries. It maintains a consistent tone, optimizes content, and aids quality assurance. This efficient approach enhances support quality, making information readily accessible for agents and customers.
  • Effective training and onboarding: Generative AI transforms agent training by speeding up knowledge acquisition through quick, personalized learning paths. It provides realistic simulations for practical experience, tailors feedback for improvement, and adapts to changing requirements for continuous learning. AI ensures efficient, engaging, and effective onboarding, making agents confident and proficient in their roles.

3. Ensuring quality and compliance:

  • Mitigating human error: Generative AI’s precision minimizes the risk of human error, ensuring consistent and reliable service. Trust is paramount in customer relationships, and AI helps maintain it.
  • Quality control in responses: Generative AI technologies aid in maintaining the quality and compliance of responses, ensuring they meet established criteria.

4. Product and service enhancement:

  • Generative AI can identify recurring issues and escalations, providing valuable insights companies can leverage to refine their products and services. This insight-driven approach fosters continual improvement and customer satisfaction.

Success Story

Planet Fitness elevates customer experience with Sprinklr AI+
As one of the fastest-growing fitness franchises, Planet Fitness aims for top-notch customer experiences across its 2,400+ locations. Juggling social media, customer service, and reputation management for a massive audience posed a challenge for its team. In 2023, Planet Fitness explored Sprinklr AI+ beta to improve agent productivity and create seamless customer interactions.

The Results:

  • Tailored responses: Streamlined response customization, saving time and elevating customer service.
  • Tone modification: Effortless adjustments in tone ensured consistent messaging across different platforms and audiences.
  • Efficient Social Listening: AI+ empowered proactive insights, allowing timely responses to potential issues.

How to use Generative AI in CX responsibly 

With Generative AI, the possibilities are limitless, and therefore, the key requirement is to innovate responsibly. As you embark on this transformative journey, these critical considerations will ensure not only the ethical but impactful utilization of Generative AI:

  1. Data protection & privacy: With the increasing use of generative AI apps, it’s important to ensure that your ideas and inventions are kept secure. By implementing official and secure connections to LLMs, engineered guardrails, and proper data masking techniques, you can tap into generative models while safeguarding your intellectual property. Make sure to prioritize data protection and privacy to protect your company’s valuable assets.
  2. Ethical use of AI technology: Malicious actors can use Generative AI to launch cyberattacks. They can manipulate Generative AI through prompt injection, producing unintended outputs such as deepfakes and hate speech. The same technology that fuels innovation also carries the risk of exploitation, demanding vigilance against its darker potential.
  3. Combat bias to ensure fairness: Brands require spot-on customer interactions, where chatbot responses align precisely with brand guidelines, and agents are trained for excellence. But there’s a twist – Large Language Models (LLMs) learn from massive human-originated datasets, inheriting their biases. While using generative AI models, it’s critical to exercise control over responses. Therefore, suggestive models allow agents to verify responses before sharing them with customers. For example, in AI-driven hiring, if the training data carries biases, AI may inadvertently perpetuate these biases in candidate selection decisions.
  4. Human-AI synergy: Foster a dynamic partnership between your human agents and Generative AI. The goal is not replacement but augmentation, where humans and AI together craft a harmonious customer experience.
Read More about the Impacts of AI on CX & EX

Conclusion

With AI at your side, it’s not just about improving customer satisfaction anymore — it’s about leveraging contact centers to attain long-term business goals such as higher revenue. Gone are the days of being merely reactionary customer complaint departments; contact centers now need to take charge with proactive models that open the doors to extraordinary digital experiences for brands. It’s time to adapt, evolve, and thrive or risk losing the spotlight to those who are embracing AI transformation.

If you would like to have a trusted advisor with you on this journey to assess, advise and advocate, please contact Bluewave to leverage our expertise and experience for a Generative AI assessment on how technology can improve your CX and EX.

Original source of this blog was from our strategic partner Sprinklr.

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The Impacts of Artificial Intelligence on CX & EX

Posted on by Bluewave

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing how businesses interact with customers and employees. AI is being increasingly integrated into various aspects of business operations to attract, convert and retain more customers by providing a more personalized and frictionless experience. It can also improve employee efficiency, productivity, and overall experience while reducing attrition. So, what is artificial intelligence? And how will AI shape both customer and employee experiences in modern organizations?

Artificial Intelligence Impacts on Customer Experience (CX)

Chatbots providing responses to customer queries 24/7 may be the first thing that comes to mind when most people consider AI in CX. And while chatbots are a powerful tool, they are only the tip of the iceberg.

There are three primary factors in how AI will impact CX:

  1. Bots are revolutionizing customer engagement. Bots can handle most common interactions more quickly than people can and do it in the channels each customer prefers. They also increase engagement in places like social media which has been historically underserved due to perceived low value interactions. Additionally, bots can quickly analyze customer intents and offer personalized recommendations by integrating with systems of record. The result? Comparisons show in many cases, effective self-service implementations result in a more satisfying customer experience than their human counterparts.
  2. AI in Analytics drives successful customer engagement. Successful self-service (or human service for that matter!) do not just happen. Historically, understanding customer intents and optimizing journeys has been challenging, expensive and slow for businesses. AI-powered algorithms that swiftly and effectively analyze customer behavior and preferences, while spotting inefficiencies and trends make bots more effective and faster to deploy further catering to increasing consumer demand.
  3. Predictive Analytics address issues before they happen. By analyzing all interactions and outcomes, customer reaction to issues can be flagged and proactively addressed before they impact many more customers. Predictive CSAT provides a broader and less biased measure of the voice of the customer (VOC) looking at all conversations to illustrate satisfaction based on content, context, and sentiment. This raises awareness and accelerates issue resolution by increasing agility and decision certainty. Ultimately, these insights tailor experiences to meet individual needs and enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Analytics and bots amplify each other’s effectiveness by understanding customer intents, being where they are when they are needed, and creating frictionless interactions. Does your technology allow you to give your customers what they’re looking for?

Artificial Intelligence Impacts on Employee Experience (EX)

The impact of artificial intelligence on Employee Experience (EX) is more profound on an individual basis by solving challenges and improving experiences for employees for the better part of each day with five primary factors reshaping the landscape.

There are five primary factors in how AI will impact EX:

#1

Real-time guidance is facilitated in many ways. Transcribing calls in real-time allows AI to provide script suggestions and relevant information, next best action, customer sentiment, soft skills coaching, assisting in order creation or form completion, and even language translation and more in the moment when they can help that customer. A “magic box” search field can also be embedded where bots scour information in a knowledge base, articles, SOPs, and training materials, accessing other applications within seconds to provide accurate answers consistently. This ability can be extended to all employees through applications like Teams or Slack to answer common inquiries like procedures and PTO.

#2

AI-powered immersive learning & simulation empowers employees by personalizing training programs to individual learning styles and preferences, enhancing skills leading to increased job satisfaction and productivity, and reducing training time while speeding up proficiency and increasing first contact resolution.

#3

AI enhanced performance management enables effective contextualization and ranking of employee performance (in and out of the contact center) by looking at quality, interaction data, and outcomes. It aids through, creation of top performer profiles, individualized training actions, process transparency, consistency, accountability, competition, and understanding of supervisor efficacy leading to performance gains, reduction in churn, and increased profit margin.

#4

Analysis of employee feedback to drive improvements by fostering a positive work environment through analytics tools like those used to improve customer experience (CX). This involves analyzing employee feedback and sentiment to identify areas of improvement promptly, thus improving morale via proactive engagement.

#5

Streamlining human resources processes is achieved by automating repetitive tasks like recruitment, onboarding, and performance evaluations, which frees up HR professionals to focus on more strategic initiatives, enhancing the overall employee experience.

Regardless of your industry, from healthcare to retail to financial services, happy and effective employees result in delighted customers. The reverse is also true as satisfied customers increase employee satisfaction and the cycle continues to reinforce itself.

Conclusion

Embrace AI as an essential tool, not merely a trend, to remain competitive in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. The competition is exploring artificial intelligence solutions right now, which makes today the perfect time to assess your AI readiness and strategy to unlock the full potential of technology to drive success. Start today to shape a brighter tomorrow for your business and its stakeholders. Consider inviting Bluewave to help you accelerate that journey by leveraging our expertise and experience for an AI assessment to improve your CX and EX.

Aaron Portz, Senior Consultant | CX / EX
Bluewave

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Artificial Intelligence for Business Scale

Posted on by Bluewave

Artificial Intelligence, migration to the cloud, cloud rationalization, and cloud optimization are on the top of minds for IT decision-makers. We asked Robby Gulri, what will be the top solutions IT leaders need to consider for propelling revenue growth and scale in 2024?

AI for Business Scale

In 2024, IT leaders will increasingly integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into their IT strategies. AI will empower IT departments to use data to optimize operations, enhance efficiency, and boost overall performance.

AI will play a critical role in enhancing customer experience. Businesses will be able to leverage chatbots, virtual assistants, and other AI tools to provide personalized and efficient customer support, boosting customer satisfaction, loyalty, and improving brand reputation.

One of the primary advantages of AI in IT transformation is its ability to automate routine tasks. By doing so, IT staff can divert their attention to more strategic activities, such as proactively identifying and resolving potential issues before they escalate into significant problems.

Moreover, AI provides real-time data, analytics, and predictive insights, enabling IT teams to make more informed decisions that can shape future planning and strategies. AI and machine learning (ML) are a good fit when you have significant amounts of data, the patterns are too complex for humans utilizing Excel, and you are seeking to scale.

Here is an actual example demonstrating the phases of an AI/ML engagement, RapidScale’s AI/ML team worked with a transportation company to determine the business goals. Next, they framed the challenge as a machine learning problem and tested the proof of concept to demonstrate feasibility. Then, they built the infrastructure to capture data and the AI models, which resulted in the deep learning algorithm’s ability to predict more accurate ship arrival times saving the company $500K in demurrage fees.

This result was made possible through RapidScale’s specialized engineers and data scientists who manage the AI/ML path from the initial strategy to the optimization phase, but this is one of many examples where our AI/ML team thrives in diverse industries. In finance, we have built models to predict market trends with accuracy, optimize portfolios, and automate fraud detection. In the automotive industry, RapidScale has built models to increase driving experiences and optimize logistics and supply chains. For oil and gas, the team has analyzed seismic data, predicted equipment failures, and optimized production processes. And within the financial services landscape, the team has used their AI expertise to help combat money laundering, personalize customer experiences, and streamline risk management. With each industry, AI solutions become more nuanced, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and driving data-driven innovation across the board.

Unleashing the Power of the Cloud

Regardless of size, cloud computing has emerged as an indispensable tool for businesses and a vehicle to enable growth. It offers a versatile and scalable data storage, management, application operation, and team collaboration solution. Harnessing the power of cloud computing, IT leaders will be able to drive their organizations towards enhanced efficiency, innovation, and business achievement in 2024.

Cloud solutions remove the demand for in-house IT personnel to oversee and maintain hardware and software, liberating valuable resources for more strategic projects. Transitioning to the cloud enables businesses to bypass the significant initial costs associated with on-site hardware and software. Cloud solutions typically propose pay-as-you-go pricing models, permitting companies to scale as required without accruing unnecessary expenses.

Plus, cloud providers typically employ dedicated security teams and utilize cutting-edge security technologies and protocols to safeguard their clients’ data. Furthermore, cloud solutions offer swift and straightforward data backup options, simplifying recovery from potential data breaches or security incidents.

Overall, the cloud computing model enables businesses to drive growth and reduce risk through infrastructure flexibility, lowering capital investment, simplifying compliance, or delivering reliable disaster recovery. Also, server virtualization sets a foundation for migrating to virtual desktops – yet another time- and money-saving technology that increases productivity across your business.

Public Cloud: Taking Scale to the Next Level

Public cloud fabrics like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud are also potential growth drivers by offering several benefits that can help businesses scale, increase agility, and become more efficient. These public clouds provide virtually unlimited, on-demand resources. Companies can quickly scale their infrastructure up or down to meet changing demands without upfront investment in hardware or worrying about capacity constraints. This flexibility allows businesses to respond to market needs and quickly handle peak loads. Accelerating time to market on public cloud platforms is a critical advantage, as it allows businesses to quickly deploy their applications, reducing time and effort compared to traditional infrastructure setups.

There is also risk avoidance using highly reliable and resilient infrastructure. Robust data centers with redundant power, networking, storage systems, backup, and disaster recovery mechanisms ensure high availability and minimize the risk of downtime, helping businesses maintain continuity and provide a seamless experience to their users.

By leveraging cloud-native technologies and services, organizations can streamline their processes, automate tasks, and improve efficiency.

A recent example is RapidScale’s strategic partnership with a leading global healthcare software provider. Our public cloud team tackled a critical challenge: transitioning their existing customer application to a SaaS platform. They began with a meticulous assessment of their current cloud footprint, uncovering opportunities for optimization and cost reduction. Leveraging this data, they built a robust, future-proof foundational environment on the public cloud, ensuring scalability and agility for their SaaS offering. RapidScale executed a seamless migration of the customer platform, minimizing downtime and disruption.

Another example was for a global master data management platform, the RapidScale public cloud experts shaved 80% off their customer deployment time and boosted security. They built a streamlined Azure deployment process, slashing onboarding from two weeks to two days, while simultaneously reinforcing their security posture – a win-win for both efficiency and trust.

Read More about the Impacts of AI on CX & EX

Conclusion

Whether you desire to harness the evolving power of artificial intelligence to automate routine tasks, utilize the cloud to avoid high initial costs, or use public clouds to drive scale, Bluewave Technology Group, working together with RapidScale, can help you determine your requirements, build the technology roadmap and manage the execution to enable your 2024 goals.

At Bluewave Technology Group, we help your IT teams deliver successful outcomes for critical initiatives. We have expert teams in network, cloud, CX, and cybersecurity who partner with you to help navigate the constantly evolving technology landscape. Then we help you select the optimal solution to your specific requirements.

RapidScale is one of our key strategic partners, providing an advanced managed cloud platform. This enables customers to unleash innovation through their premier management of mission-critical workloads with seamlessly integrated security, scalability, and efficiency.

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Navigating the Tech Landscape: A CMO’s Tale

Posted on by Lisa Guillaume

As I reread the Telarus 2023 Tech Trends Report over the weekend, one insight resonated profoundly, emphasizing the indispensable role of Bluewave: “Customers wrestle with increasing complexity in assembling interoperable IT solutions. A technology-agnostic advisory is not a luxury but a necessity. Navigating the marketplace without a trusted advisor is like a Herculean task.”

We see it daily. Decision makers are strapped for the time, expertise, and resources required to evaluate, procure, and manage advanced IT solutions to meet productivity, customer experience, and growth demands. If you’re seeing it too, you may need a technology advisor.

The Struggle of Choice Overload

In the ever-expanding tech landscape, the paradox of Choice Overload Bias, or the more relatable “Netflix conundrum,” induces delays and stress. As a CMO, I intimately understand CXOs’ challenges in making pivotal technology decisions, particularly CIOs. One example, considering options for an ABM strategy, involved many demos, price comparisons, resource assessments, and success metric evaluations, and, still it was hard to determine which solution was the best for my specific situation. Multiply these activities across CRM, Marketing Automation, Sales Automation, SEO, Creative, and CMS platforms, and the complexity for a CMO becomes staggering—juggling demos, pricing negotiations, integrations, and attribution models is no small feat and quite stressful.

Key Insight from 2023 Telarus Tech Trends Report: IT leaders are seeing the most interest in Generative AI (ChatGPT, OpenAi, chatbots), non-generative AI (predictive modeling, analytics, automated ML), improved digital experiences, modern cybersecurity (zero trust, passwordless), and cloud modernization (building and managing apps and infrastructure in the cloud).

A Trusted Navigator in the Tech Wilderness

Imagine how a MarTech advisor—a conduit to best practices, hands-on integration wisdom, and solid vendor relationships in marketing—could be a staunch advocate for me and our fast-growing startup. Similarly for CIOs, the imperative for a guiding force is evident. Technology advisors, exemplified by Bluewave, bring expertise and a pragmatic approach to tackle intricate business challenges.

Bluewave isn’t merely a technology consultant; we are a strategic ally for the entire roadmap, ensuring optimal IT projects yield sustained results. Past encounters for me, such as a HubSpot implementation, underscore the critical need for continuity and reliability in the ever-evolving tech landscape. Our HubSpot implementation, note paid implementation, was a great experience with a firm that HubSpot outsourced the engagement to. Still, at the end of our tight three-month engagement, our partner was gone and ever since we have been on our own to navigate integrating new systems or features. A technology advisory firm, like Bluewave, is there for the life of the roadmap and works across the organization for optimal solutions and results.

Key Insight from 2023 Telarus Tech Trends Report: Nearly half of respondents plan to shift all legacy technologies to the cloud within 2-5 years to maximize the full benefits of cloud-native environments.

Navigating Tech Amidst Turmoil and Growth

Recent months witnessed unfortunate layoffs in UCaaS providers and Telecom Carriers, propelled by profit goals and a changing technology landscape.

Simultaneously, the tech ecosystem is a sprawl, with over 14,000 AI companies in the United States alone—an overwhelming scenario reminiscent of the height of the MarTech landscape’s 7,000+ companies.

Yet, amidst this complexity, the Telarus 2023 Tech Trends Report ushers in hope. Only 6% of IT leaders reported cost-cutting as a top concern, signaling a shift towards prioritizing IT modernization. But regardless of the CXO role—be it CIO, CISO, COO or CMO—universal challenges persist:

  • Talent and Expertise: The perpetual quest for skilled professionals.
  • Vendor Turnover: High turnover among partners, introducing an unsettling dynamic.
  • Stakeholder Appeal: The ongoing need to resonate with diverse stakeholders.
  • Organizational Changes: Mergers, acquisitions, and leadership shifts ushering in new systems and complexities.

    Key Insight from 2023 Telarus Tech Trends Report: The Telarus study revealed that digital innovation–the creation of new digital products, solutions, or business models that did not previously exist–is a primary driver behind large IT purchasing decisions. Investing in digital innovation is no longer just an exploratory endeavor; it aims to establish a robust foundation to support growth both now and in the future.

Why Bluewave Exists: Redefining Tech Partnership

Amid a tech landscape brimming with choices and evolving challenges, the traditional model of acquiring end-point solutions across numerous technology pillars and vendors has proven ineffective. Faced with indecision, broken projects, and outcomes falling short, a new paradigm has emerged. Standing at the crossroads of Cloud, Network, Security, CX, and AI solutions, Bluewave boasts a team of technical experts dedicated to harmonizing diverse solutions for varied business requirements.

Addressing universal struggles encountered by CXOs, this comprehensive advisory model navigates the intricate tech maze alongside you. It stands ready to break the cycle by overseeing the entire arc of an IT project collaborating closely with CIOs and IT teams.

This is not just about finding solutions; it’s about forging a holistic tech partnership, ensuring your technology decisions seamlessly align with strategic goals, and ushering in a future where success is a shared journey. When you’re ready to start the conversation, please reach out.

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