In today's fast-paced and competitive business environment, companies are constantly seeking ways to differentiate themselves and stay ahead of the curve, and this is where Softcat can play a crucial role, helping organisations to mature and innovate.

Read on to find out how Softcat Cloud Managed Services can help alleviate the daily people, technology, and commercial challenges that organisations face, allowing more time to focus on core business strategies and delivering better customer experiences.

People Challenges

One of the biggest challenges organisations face today is managing and retaining top talent. In an age of rapid technological advancement, organisations require a highly skilled and motivated workforce, to keep up with evolving customer needs and expectations. However, the affordability of recruiting highly skilled individuals is equally a key challenge for many organisations, as such Tech Starter or Apprentice programs are cornerstones for sustainable talent management.

Softcat can help alleviate such pressures by overseeing daily management of IT systems, allowing organisations to free up resource to focus on high-value tasks, that can drive innovation and differentiation. Softcat’s approach blends highly skilled with emerging talent (e.g. apprenticeships and/or those returning to work). This approach is cost effective and doesn’t impact our customers with high pricing for our services, instead it guarantees them access to some of the industry’s best cloud talent.

Technology Challenges

In the fast-paced world of IT, organisations often struggle to keep up with the latest technologies and trends. For example, during its annual technology event (re:Invent) in 2022, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched 119 new services, in addition to all the services released from them throughout that year, along with additions from Microsoft and Google. This fast pace of release can cause the opposite effect, stifling growth and innovation, as organisations struggle to keep up to date with numerous changes and choices available.

Softcat can help alleviate tech challenges in two ways, firstly through our people (as covered in people challenges), who work within dedicated practices (AWS, Microsoft, Google) as well as across them all, to ensure a continuous focus on the pace of change, helping cut through all the choices to provide recommendations. Secondly, in many cases, Softcat itself has already selected technologies and ways of working within our business, services, and customer solutions. This experience and knowledge can be translated into real world recommendations (e.g. the tools and processes we use to deliver FinOps and GreenOps).

Commercial Challenges

The last few years have been turbulent for businesses with the pandemic, followed by the cost of living and energy crisis, many businesses have been left with significant pressures to reduce cost.

In Gartner’s 2022 “10 Ways to Quickly Reduce IT Costs” report, 39% of CFOs in May 2022 said they would cut costs in Q422 if high inflation persisted, with the ongoing threat of a recession only adding pressure to reduce spending. Interestingly, in this report, Gartner flagged the targeting of immediate impact areas and reducing not freezing costs, as the top two focus items.

Softcat Cloud Services can help support such goals in many areas; some are very clear and some are based on our real-world experience of architecting, building and maintaining cloud solutions at scale.

You might be thinking, how can Softcat support through external challenges? Well, using a Softcat Cloud Managed or Support Service can free up valuable time employees spend on BAU tasks, enabling them to invest their time in other priority areas that support business growth initiatives. This in turn enables revenue generation for organisations, in times of economic pressure. The latter is that Softcat services can also help directly drive down spend on Cloud (public and SaaS).

In a world of constant change, great customer experience is a must…

The current macroeconomic climate has made it more critical than ever, for organisations to prioritise delivering outstanding customer experiences. This is true for all organisations, including Softcat. With increasing competition and rising customer expectations, organisations must consistently go above and beyond to provide a seamless, personalised and convenient customer experience.

Organisations can differentiate themselves and drive customer loyalty by deeply understanding their customers, personalising their offerings, and creating a consistent and seamless customer journey across all touchpoints. And with Softcat's help in alleviating people, technology, and commercial challenges, organisations can focus more on delivering outstanding customer experiences, knowing that their IT infrastructure is in safe hands.

For more information on our Softcat Cloud Managed Services – visit here or contact us.

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