Challenge:
To grow the organisation and remain competitive
CAIW Holdings B.V., known as CAIW, is the second largest cable operator in the Netherlands providing households with TV, Internet, and voice services. Founded in 1981, CAIW is based in Naaldwijk, the Netherlands.
Today, the introduction of new technologies, devices and content-delivery platforms provides a constant challenge for cable operators. This is a highly competitive industry as providers endeavour to grow their customer base while keeping pace with rapidly changing business dynamics. Additionally, today’s generations want to consume content differently with the young drawn to the immediacy of the Internet rather than traditional cable packages.
To grow its organisation and remain competitive, CAIW set a strategic course to increase fibre penetration in their existing market, migrate coax customers to fibre, and acquire new customers to grow CAIW’s market share in the Netherlands. This strategy required a higher capex spend and marketing investment in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), and a continuous effort to contain costs and increase CAIW’s growth plans and profitability.
The organisation also wanted to improve their service levels and their ability to deal with potential contingency issues by increasing the resiliency of their systems architecture. Instead of automatically reinvesting in hardware as it had done previously, CAIW decided to explore other options that would address their business challenges and reduce costs.
The business transformation challenge
CAIW identified a number of business transformation challenges. To address these, the organisation’s IT function had to improve its alignment with the business.
The challenges included:
- Increase agility to accelerate business – the ability to match competitor’s offerings quickly and provide a short, time-to-market response to gain new business.
- Increase optimisation and be in control of costs – a need to do more with less to remain competitive in the marketplace.
- Reduce risk – the need to improve the availability, security governance, and the compliance of business support system (BSS) and operational support system (OSS) applications, and standardise the IT infrastructure is vital to achieve efficiency.
- Become more customer focused – enable the business and IT to become more customer focused than a traditional, technology-focused organisation.
- Buy versus build – buy services rather than components that need to be built, which allows IT to focus on the organisation’s core competencies and offerings of TV, the Internet, and communications services.
Additionally, with a focus on cost optimisation to support its future growth plans, CAIW recognised a potential requirement to transform how they deliver and operate BSS and OSS applications.
Having identified these challenges, CAIW needed guidance and technical expertise to help them determine their next steps in achieving their strategic business goals and reduce costs.
Solution:
Existing relationship acts as a catalyst
The existing relationship between CAIW and Dimension Data was the catalyst for a discussion about how Dimension Data could help CAIW achieve its business goals. Dimension Data offers a cost-effective, consulting workshop that performs a complete evaluation of the suitability of applications for placement in the cloud.
Dimension Data had detailed conversations with CAIW’s business, technology, and operations stakeholders, and discussed a number of BSS and OSS applications that could help CAIW better align its future applications, operations, and business strategy.
Application Placement and Cloud Readiness Assessment
Dimension Data recommended their Application Placement and Cloud Readiness Assessment, conducted as a two-day consulting workshop. The Assessment discovers which applications are best suited for the cloud; identifies the best deployment model for each application under consideration, which may not always be the cloud; and helps prioritise the next steps. It also identifies opportunities to maximise application availability and efficiency using managed services, and mitigates transformation risks. Following detailed discussions, ten business support systems (BSS) and operational support systems (OSS) applications were selected for the APCR assessment.
The Assessment utilised business, technology, financial, as well as risk, compliance, and governance factors to assess the production applications. These would help CAIW understand the motivation for its IT operations, and the readiness of its applications for placement in the cloud. The goal was to help CAIW conceptualise a rapid IT transformation strategy that delivers savings and an accelerated time-to-business value proposition.
A two-day consulting workshop was held between CAIW and Dimension Data.
A complete Application Placement and Cloud Readiness Assessment was conducted and a report produced. Suitable applications were prioritised for cloud migration based on the readiness of the application for migration and the business drivers that motivated the decision to leverage cloud technology and managed services.
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