Kovair Helps Enterprise IT Transform from a Cost Center to a Value Center

Question from Michael: Welcome Akshay! As CTO for Kovair, having completed over 2 and a half years there as a tech advisor and CTO, Akshay, what are the key benefits of using Kovair’s VSMP/VSDP: Value Stream Management and Delivery Platform for helping Transition Enterprise IT from a Cost Center to a Value Center?

Response from Akshay:Thanks for the question…Michael!

Kovair’s uniquely positioned PPM: Project and Portfolio Management solution within it’s VSMP/VSDP solution set can provide stakeholders a unified platform to manage budgets, schedules, resources, and field data through a single interface, along with Revenue Management, and the Logistics of Payment/Invoice Management.

The Revenue portion is often missing from the competitors in the VSMP/VSDP space as they primarily focus on Cost savings and neglect the Revenue side of the equation. Kovair uniquely does both!

So, Kovair allows IT to develop it’s software as a product using Kovair DevOps and ALM solutions, manage the delivery of it using Kovair’s CI/CD functions in the Cloud, manage the lifecycle for the product, “ideate” it’s API’s and process workflows to the product with Kovair’s Gartner Cool Vendor Awarded Omnibus, as an Enterprise Service Bus to the product, with Role-based and Policy-controls, and now provide Revenue Management functions too within Kovair’s VSMP/VSDP solutions.

Question from Michael: Akshay, When it comes to S/W teams, how do they embark on this journey transitioning from a Cost Center to a Value Center?

Response from Akshay: Good Question, Michael, as Enterprises move their silo’ed IT with internally facing product solutions towards the cloud, and open their platforms to make it as a Service, IT Teams should first form an API Team, and develop Best Practices which include the creation of an API Product Manager & the API Architect, to be a centralized function with goals of turning IT from a Cost Center to a Value Center.

An example is Cisco Systems turning their Unified Communications and VoIP products like PBXs, and Session Border Controllers to become virtualized as a service in Webex. While these team functions can be decentralized, it would then make sense to have cross-functional matrix reporting within distributed teams to ensure common APIs, tools, Enterprise Service Bus solutions, and common analytics and dashboards are leveraged. Otherwise, we end up with disparate silo’ed solutions again.

Once, the API Team is formed, and the internal s/w solutions are made into “Cloud-based” products provided as a Service, an External API should be developed whether it’s B2B, Business to Business, or B2C: Business to Consumer, and this API must be made secure, process-compliant with the correct dashboards, with role-based policy controls to ensure the correct usage is occurring, with ideally DRaaS: disaster recover as a service built-in… All of which Kovair provides…

An API is an application program interface (API) that allows for easier integration to tools and applications. Here, an application can “invoke” the 3rd-party application, allowing for better, more holistic, integrated solutions to occur. This can extend the life of existing applications, can allow for increased productivity in re-using existing modules, allow for newer “mash-ups” of hyper-converged solutions and services to occur, perhaps with better workflow decisions being automated, perhaps better metrics in dashboards, while Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) solutions from vendors like Kovair with it’s Omnibus allow for pre-built, pre-tested integrations to 3rd-party systems without having the need for knowing individual tool APIs and having a vendor like Kovair manage any API updates. This leads to more seamless integrations, increased productivity and better operational efficiencies to occur.

Kovair Omnibus allows for pre-built integrations to 120+ applications like SAP, Salesforce, MSFT Dynamics, Cisco Appdynamics, as well as internally built applications at major organizations including leading Government agencies, Fortune 1000 firms, as well as smaller enterprises, with additional benefits including:

• Process Controls, with dashboards and metrics including Revenue Management.
• Security with Resiliency: inter-application delivery of services and information is often required to be secure, with role-based policy controls and DRaaS: disaster recovery as a service, built-in.

All this should enable a better collaborative environment for better quality, better productivity, better security, and support for better operational resiliency.

Question from Michael: Akshay, API monetization is often key to digital transformation. So, how can firms increase revenue with their API program? What are some of the different API Business Models?

Response from Akshay: Michael, Enterprises are transforming with Digital Transformation moving to the Cloud, looking at Industrial IoT, looking at newer solutions like AI/ML, eKiosks, Mobile Applications, eCommerce, but this will fall flat if Monetization and Revenue Management is neglected. This Key Critical Capability needs to be addressed, as they look to transition their IT from a Cost Center to a Value Center, with newer business models. Enterprises can charge their customers using their APIs in different ways, charge per transaction, charge by a subscription model, charge API access to their platform as an upsell as what Salesforce does, charge based on revenues generated in rev-share approaches, or perhaps not charge at all but collect analytics proving increased sales of other products have occurred from the seamless integration, or decreased costs from operational efficiencies gained.

Kovair can provide the dashboards to help manage the Revenue Management and Payment Processing in this journey.

Kovair’s PPM solution delivers greater value to the organization by connecting the entire lifecycle from planning to execution. It enables IT leaders to optimize their project portfolios, manage the capacity of resources against the demands raised from different projects, and connects plans and resources to the actual project execution.

Using the Kovair PPM solution, organizations can define strategic initiatives for portfolio to projects to their business outcomes. It allows leaders to define strategic initiatives, choose the relevant projects for execution, provide deeper insights into development phases, projects and programs by generating EVMs (Earned Value Management — EVM metrics), at all levels, providing valuable inputs to the management, enabling them in making data-oriented decisions, for better Time and Cost Management of a project, to Revenues generated.

The Kovair PPM solution within VSMP toolchains not only provide  complete visibility across the entire value stream but also provides  complete visibility of the delivery lifecycle from quadruple perspectives (Revenues, Resource, Time & Cost) to the C-Level executives as well as to the stakeholders of projects through role-based real-time reports & dashboards.

Question from Michael: Akshay, to wrap-up, what are the implications to business leaders for Kovair’s VSMP/VSDP announcement recently?

Response from Akshay: There are many competing siloed VSMP/VSDP solutions: some with software busses, some with data lakes and data migration solutions, some with API middleware pre-packaged with Low Code / Node Code configuration capabilities, some with siloed ALM (applications lifecycle management) tools support, some with DevOps tools support to migrate to Cloud applications, some with dashboard and analytics data lakes and repositories, but only Kovair packages all of the above within one framework, with workflow automation functions, as well as project lifecycle management functions, for not only Technical Leaders, but Business Leaders as well, with Kovair’s unique offering of Revenue Management and Payment Invoice Management.

Question from Michael: Thanks, Akshay, Any final thoughts ? Where can our audience get more information on Improving Business Models with Kovair VSMP/VSDP?

Response from Akshay: Thanks Michael, www.kovair.com has a wealth of information there.

• One final thought, I would highlight from this recent solution announcement is the notion of WFH: Work From Home… where Kovair can support remote management via dashboards showing all the process metrics and statuses to be visualized in real-time, and provides remote control of workflow pipelines via email, with role-based policy controls, it supports multiple databases from SQL Server, Oracle, and MariaDB, across hybrid multi-clouds, and Kovair’s Workflow Process Engine is unique with Task-based models which supports concurrency, which is more representative of real-world teams as teams are likely working on multiple tasks concurrently and remotely.
• These are challenging times now but with newer solutions, and newer thinking, hopefully this will all be alleviated with better solutions from platform providers like Kovair as we discussed. Hopefully the result is better harmony within IT teams, and better business outcomes… from innovations by Kovair…
• So hopefully this is a Game-changer !

Comment from Michael: Indeed it is! Thank you Akshay!

Source: Outlook Series – Kovair Helps Enterprise IT Transform from a Cost Center to a Value Center