By: Sriram K, EVP and CBO, LTIMindtree NxT

The only “new normal” that’s come out of the past few years is that change is constant. In this continuously evolving global business environment, the ability to adapt to change has moved from a reactive necessity to the essence of business differentiation. The most successful businesses in every sector stand out because they seem to evolve ahead of change — or even lead that change.

At LTIMindtree, we’ve honed a simple strategy for accelerating digital transformation: cloud at core, cloud at scale. What do we mean by that? Cloud has shifted from being an enabler of technological transformation to the core of business transformation.

Businesses must switch from enhancing their operations with cloud tools to entirely redefining, reimagining, and redesigning their operations.

Answering the Question “Why Cloud?”

Throughout most of the last decade, businesses looked at what cloud can deliver. They built siloed use cases and deployed point solutions. They let the tools define the use case.

But while many companies are still stuck on thinking “what,” we’re pushing our clients to ask, “Why cloud?” Cloud transformation should start by defining the business-centric goals for digital transformation — and cloud solutions should be engineered to deliver those outcomes.

Of course, the specifics are unique to each business. But we can break those outcomes down into three main imperatives:

Redefine

The why: Driving top-line growth

Top-line growth is an obvious goal for every business. But organizations increasingly recognize that their growth opportunities are limited by their “old” business models.

The significant and continuous changes in the global business landscape demand that companies do more than react — they need to think in terms of redefining their business to grow in this dynamic landscape. This business transformation typically involves diversifying, moving into new markets, creating new revenue streams, and developing new products.

For example, LTIMindtree is helping one of our large insurance customers with a traditional focus on retirement insurance to diversify their product and revenue portfolio. But we’re not just adding products. We’re helping them redefine their business — from basic risk indemnification to continuous customer engagement that helps mitigate and manage risk across all aspects of health and wealth. And we’re helping them build a cloud-powered strategy that will give them the future-ready technology and operations needed to deliver deep customer engagement that unlocks these powerful growth opportunities.

Re-imagine

The why: Customer engagement & retention

Every business today faces disruptions that threaten customer loyalty and market share — whether it is innovators stealing customers, broader changes in consumer behaviors, or ongoing supply chain disruptions. So, many organizations are making customer retention their top priority. But as mentioned above, businesses recognize that they can’t achieve more of anything by continuing “business as usual.”

The forces threatening customer loyalty demand that they re-imagine their business to create new ways to connect with consumers and build loyal relationships. More and more businesses are leveraging cloud transformation to create these new customer engagement strategies — using cloud technologies to deliver the personalized, predictive, and assistive experiences that consumers expect.

One great example is an LTIMindtree customer that is a major brand in the cosmetics and personal care products sector. The company recognized that sales and customer loyalty were fading through its traditional retail channels. Consumers’ shopping behaviors had changed through the pandemic — and digital-first shopping experiences remain the norm.

We helped this brand to re-imagine its relationship with customers — from selling products to a continuous service relationship of providing the health and beauty products they need. We then set about building out the cloud solutions needed to support a direct-to-consumer subscription model, continuously engaging customers with hyper-personalized product recommendations and predictive product suggestions. This business re-imagination has not only driven sales but created more predictable revenue streams — and deepened brand engagement and loyalty among its customer bases.

Redesign

The why: Optimizing profitability

The dramatic changes of the last few years pushed companies to rapidly deploy new technologies to adapt to the changing landscape. Speed and experience were paramount: companies needed to adapt to protect the customer experience — and they needed to do it as quickly as possible.

But now, as they move from a reactive to a more strategic stance, they’re applying a cost or value lens to their newly evolved tech stacks — and seeing a major need for change. They’re bringing back the familiar question of, “How do you do more with less?” and looking for opportunities to redesign their cloud-powered operations to run more efficiently — without impacting service levels.

Here’s a good example: one of the largest umbrella brands in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) sector had, like most companies, significantly increased cloud adoption during the first year of the pandemic. As they placed the value lens on this new cloud infrastructure, they saw major opportunities for improvement. With a pure focus on speed and experience, the huge CPG company has created multiple islands of cloud across all its sub-brands — with much redundancy and very little connectivity or synergy across the wider business operation.

LTIMindtree helped this CPG company connect and consolidate its cloud infrastructure to create powerful synergies that both enhanced efficiency and reduced overall costs. But perhaps most notably, these synergies enabled the CPG company to deliver measurable improvements in customer experience that powered retention and revenue — truly a “doing more with less” outcome.

By, for, and on cloud: LTIMindtree’s seamless cloud solutions

Here’s another way to think about the shift in cloud transformation: traditional approaches to cloud enablement divide into services enabled for cloud (legacy tech adapted to fit cloud-based deployment model), services enabled by cloud (new use cases defined by cloud tools), and services enabled on cloud (fully cloud-native development). To enable cloud at core and cloud at scale, LTIMindtree merges these divisions into one seamless solution. Starting with the “why” for business transformation, we build out holistic cloud solutions that seamlessly blend legacy tech, best-in-class cloud tools, and custom-built cloud applications that empower our customers to achieve their transformational outcomes.

What’s Your Proactive Cloud Transformation Strategy?

The pace of change in the global business landscape is only accelerating. It’s increasingly clear that there will soon be just two kinds of businesses: those built on cloud — and those that don’t survive.

Wherever your organization is on its cloud transformation roadmap, now is the time to step back and re-evaluate: are you following old paradigms? Are you making some of the mistakes mentioned above? Are you using cloud at the core and cloud at scale across your enterprise? When you’re ready, we’d love to talk about how LTIMindtree can help you redefine, re-imagine, and redesign your business for future-ready success.

To know about our cloud services, click here or email us at info@ltimindtree.com.