Theresa Caragol, CEO of AchieveUnite recently sat down with Liz Anthony, SVP of Marketing at ViON, to share insights on how IT is being reshaped by pressures from the pandemic, and how this movement has driven demand for IT marketplaces.

In March 2020, the world had come to a startling realization – large groups of people congregating in small office spaces posed a significant risk to employee’s health and businesses viability.  Change was inevitable, and a calculated decision to empower workforces to connect remotely was required. But what effect does this have on IT? How could IT departments maintain any reasonable level of governance? What tools were best of breed to not only support collaboration, but encourage it? What new security threats would permeate protected data? The list of questions went on for miles, and IT departments were left with a need to reinvent the entirety of their strategy, seemingly overnight.

Liz Anthony recognized this momentous challenge, hearing it loud and clear from ViON’s customers throughout March and April. “By May, we (ViON) knew where people were and what our customers needed to keep everything running”   Within this short window, most organizations had adopted radically different IT strategies, and were in a position of “reliably keeping the lights on”. CIOs and the entire IT department surely deserved an applause for the accomplishment, but no one stopped there, as businesses must thrive in the new normal. The introspective questions kept coming – how do we innovate? What can we do to stay two steps ahead of our competition? Now that we’ve established stability, what tools exist for us to truly accelerate, push out unnecessary cost, and manage elasticity?  ViON and AchieveUnite were actively discussing these challenges with their customers, collaborating on the design of IT modernization plans that supported not only today, but the unknowns of tomorrow.

Through these countless discussions, it was determined that IT organizations at the forefront of this shift shared one thing in common, the adoption of private marketplaces. The evidence was clear that responding rapidly, supporting remote workforces effortlessly, expediting M&A integrations, and providing a governance model with full lifecycle management was now a baseline requirement. Leaving no IT stone unturned, marketplaces have become a critical asset to any business outpacing their competition.

Beyond the pandemic, the importance of a private marketplace continues to be driven by a confluence of factors, including workforce generational changes, the extinction of a monolithic approach to SaaS applications, and the continuation of digital transformation. Given these pressures, Theresa and Liz reinforced the key benefits of adopting a marketplace – for today and tomorrow.

  • SG&A cost savings – procurement cycles are compressed, saving valuable workforce time.
  • Avoiding overspend, with right sized purchases for todays need, and a frictionless process to add capacity as needs evolve.
  • Better leverage CAPEX budgets by shifting large IT purchases to an OPEX model via marketplace procurement.
  • Control costs and avoid surprises– with large, non-private marketplaces, costs can and do surge, often unpredictably.
  • Governance and accountability

To collaborate on designing a marketplace strategy that fits your needs, contact AchieveUnite at (info@achieveunite.com)

To take a test drive, visit: https://marketplace.vion.com/order/marketplace/VIONMP5/index#linkstestdrive