Improving Customer Value with Collaborative Design
One challenge all business leaders have in common is the expectation to customize products and services for their largest customers. Reflecting on several collaborative designs with my most demanding customers, I recognized a benefit in the process that was not obvious from the beginning — mutually beneficial relationships have gone beyond good support and competitive pricing. Providing extensibility of solutions allowing customers to differentiate services has become necessary as framework consolidation and service velocity increases.
Going further to meet the demands of our largest customers in a highly competitive market, we leverage the collaborative movement of open source technology. A progression in solution design, Open Source is removing physical boundaries of traditional appliance-based deliveries and allowing architects to leverage the strengths within a distributed system to deliver services. Moving control functions to centralized applications, empowering the network to overcome constraints in historical designs, and optimizing data plane functions with the ability to elastically harness commoditized resources. The result is extensible frameworks open to innovation and customization without the expense of service quality. Open Source offerings such as Defense4All are perfect examples of foundational services extensible to collaborative design.
While the operational models defined to support complex distributed systems will always guide the principles of operational excellence, the advancements in orchestration and computing infrastructure is allowing the consolidation of assets, operating systems and service components simplifying high availability and scalable architectures once difficult to sustain. The result, more engineers doing more meaningful work and delivering better solutions at lower costs.
Few times in history has there be so many opportunities to influence change. I find it inspirational that when approaching my desk each day there exists an opportunity to improve life for others simply by remaining thoughtful throughout a productive day. This evolution is empowering businesses throughout the world, to consume technology previously cost prohibitive, improving their effectiveness in the market. Encourage more innovation, approach customers with a “change the world” attitude, lead growth and make the world a better place.