Bob Kruger, Vice President, StreamOne at TD SYNNEX, explains why being agile and adaptable, and willing to make use of the very latest technology, is so important to ensuring the StreamOne platform continues to meet the changing needs of customers and their end users.
A top cloud platform has to be accessible, highly available, and offer a good selection of solutions. It must also be extensible, so that new vendors and solutions can be integrated quickly.
We’re very happy with the advances we’ve made with StreamOne. We’ve been able to satisfy our customers and bring forward improvements on a frequent basis. In fact, we deploy new features or enhancements every two weeks – some of which benefit our customers directly and some of which are slated for the people behind the scenes in our back-room operations.
We can to do this because we created an infrastructure that allows us to be agile and flexible. That means we can be much more responsive and engaging with customers and the business in general.
The changes we make could be in response to customer suggestions or requests, a change in the processes or programs of our vendors or service providerscustomer, or trends in the marketplace. At times we need to modify the platform very quickly; when a vendor modifies configuration or provisioning logic, for example. In such cases, our ability to quickly react is crucial.
Let’s say that the Acme Software Company alters the way it handles subscription licenses. We will be connected to their back-end ERP system and need to make corresponding workflow changes to ensure their product continues to be fully-available in a slick, efficient and accurate way. Our agility allows us to do that and ensure complete continuity for our customers and their end-user customers.
We make use of the very latest and most appropriate technologies. When we needed to implement an update like the one described above, we relied on our containerized code to isolate and quickly deploy required changes. We utilize automation and orchestration solutions to manage and deploy these modifications across our global systems.
By using the best technologies, we are able to make enhancements quickly and consistently. Our team is currently supporting StreamOne availability in 67 countries with a single, universal code base. We can often implement and verify updates within 30 minutes – and almost always without taking the platform down for maintenance. (Interestingly, we went from requiring 3 days of downtime for such maintenance to hours of downtime, to zero downtime based on containerization.) We also have built-in resilience capabilities, so can roll-back just as quickly if something unforeseen were to occur during deployment.
The speed at which we can integrate and implement these changes is one of the factors that differentiates StreamOne, along with the ability of TD SYNNEX to deliver a rich breadth of solutions and services. Updating the platform on such a frequent basis means we can keep pace with the changing needs of our vendorss and customers. It also affords us the ability to look ahead proactively for improvements that anticipate customer needs.
We see many areas of potential for further development. We want to continue expanding our reach and capability with APIs, so that more of our customers will integrate directly with StreamOne. We want to develop more self-service capabilities and provide solutions further up the stack, giving customersthe opportunity to convey greater value throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
We will also continue to improve the StreamOne environment and experience – reducing clicks, optimising performance, enhancing security and privacy, and ensuring everyone can use our platform with total confidence.
Working on the StreamOne platform is an endlessly fascinating job. Our team must meet the needs of many constituents – customers, vendors and service providers, different groups of end-customers and our own business units, country and regional operations. We are a globally distributed team that makes use of the latest and best technologies, in agile fashion, to ensure we can do that and keep turning the crank faster … improving and enhancing the vitality and effectiveness of StreamOne.
Personally, I enjoy the variety of challenges we face. We have a very motivated, collaborative and creative team which is constantly looking at the customer experience, the technical and process elements, and bringing them all together. It’s a dynamic environment in which innovation thrives. StreamOne is vitally important to TD SYNNEX because it’s at the centre of digital transformation – that being a continuous and evolving process for us, just as it is for our customers and their end users.
There is a lot of technology now emerging, such as intelligent analytics, which we will be using to make StreamOne even better, helping our customers to deliver more value and manage the customer lifecycle even more effectively. There is much more to come and the future promises to be very exciting indeed.