February 2023: Hiroshi Kubota, EVP
Vision For 2023 – How our legacy is powering our future
After graduating from university in Japan in 1995, I entered the IT industry at a time of incredible change. I spent three years as a system sales representative at a Japanese IT company, and was on the ground and in the game when Windows 95 was released. It, along with the personal computer revolution, completely changed what it meant to be an IT worker. Gone were the days of one massive solitary computer in an office that could do little more than run a word processor. The days of office applications and digital collaboration were ushered in with a computer on every desk and a keyboard in every worker’s hands.
These moments of industry-wide change don’t happen often, but when they do, it is integral to evolve with them. We are at another such moment now.
When I started with SYSCOM GLOBAL SOLUTIONS, we connected companies with the hardware solutions they needed. We filled orders for wiring work, telephone switchboard, PC, server, office network and more. We turned offices into platforms that our clients could effectively and efficiently do their business in.
But that model is changing, both for us and the entire industry. The trend toward distributed workforces and moving to the cloud was already well underway before 2020, and the pandemic put it into overdrive. The expectation today is that workers can access their work from anywhere via the cloud, necessitating new approaches to consulting, partnerships, and above all, how we do business. What’s more, the supply chain issues created by the pandemic and still not yet resolved have made fulfilling orders for infrastructure and hardware even harder to do. Orders that used to take a few weeks to complete can now take as long as 180 to 200 days.
How our business is changing
Clients today aren’t looking to us for laptops, telephone systems, or office networks. Differentiating ourselves as a hardware provider among a sea of hardware providers isn’t just ineffective today—it completely misses the point. Companies and organizations don’t need servers when they’ve pushed everything to the cloud. They need solutions like collaboration apps, data analysis tools, and custom low- and no-code apps to fit their specific business needs.
With the proliferation of cloud systems, customers no longer need to spend time building systems and can instead focus on leveraging what they have. Enterprises have realized the staggering amount of value in their data, and are eager to make use of it. However, legacy tools aren’t capable of collecting, analyzing, and prognosticating with this data to nearly the degree that modern ERP tools are.
So when it comes to maintaining our current client relationships and winning new ones, a pivot is needed. They don’t need someone to build the environment in which they do their business, they need someone who understands their business and can provide them with the tools they individually need. We are increasingly being asked to provide solutions for operational development and transformation relevant to clients’ businesses.
What it means for us
Taking all this in mind—the shift away from hardware procurement, the turn toward cloud systems, and the need for operational solutions and transformation—we can see a clear path forward for SYSCOM. Our business strategy going forward will be to create, develop, and produce innovative solutions and services more relevant to customers’ specific business needs.
In this spirit, SYSCOM is transforming itself from business units organized by region to organizing them by customer industry. Servicing clients by region is irrelevant when everything is pushed to the cloud, but focusing our business units on specific industries can help us produce far more value with the talent, tools, and teams we have.
The Microsoft ecosystem is how we’re providing this for customers. It’s the best way to bring the various office and business functions of a company together onto the same data platform, infrastructure, and digital environment. Microsoft 365 office applications are already powerful collaboration tools, but adding on Dynamics 365 business applications and the Azure platform opens up exciting new possibilities for delivering focused solutions that can be scaled up for larger industries.
The Dynamics 365 market is already growing steadily, with new implementations increasing in America and especially in Japan. We’re currently making plans to build out our capabilities in Japan to support more global projects originating from Japan in the future. And where our business was once roughly 70% focused on infrastructure hardware and the rest on applications, we’re expecting that ratio to change drastically in the next three years, with over 50% of our business being focused on business solutions.
However, while we want to constantly evolve to better serve our customers’ needs, we still need to ensure our growth is sustainable, and that means scaling individual solutions that have proven their value. Doing this will require innovative, ground-breaking thinking—something we’ve already begun doing.
Our release of Business Central: Standard Pack for Dynamics 365 in 2022 is an excellent example of the direction we’re taking going forward. In our experience as a partner to dozens of small- and medium-sized businesses over three decades, we’ve seen a number of common concerns crop up. They need powerful ERP tools, but can’t afford the downtime or resource cost it takes to implement them.
We examined the issues we’ve seen the most and built out a customized selection of options and settings for Dynamics 365 that handles the majority of small- and medium-sized businesses’ needs and sets up in less than a third of the cost of typical ERPs and in as little as three months.
This is a great model for what we aim to do: examine a specific business set’s needs, create an individual solution for those needs, then scale it for mass adoption. It’s a shortcut to creating powerful, individual solutions ready for industry adoption.
Think local, act global
Our goal, as always, is to provide the most value possible to our customers. Our challenge now is to do that while providing services as close to the customer’s business as possible.
Following the example set by Business Central: Standard Pack for small- and medium-sized businesses, we can look for ways to deliver extra value in other industries. Think of a Standard Pack for manufacturing, telecoms, or finance, or a solution based on common needs of a set of clients, then scaled up to meet the needs of an entire industry.
The days of differentiating ourselves as an IT leader by providing infrastructure at a lower cost or with speedier implementation are over. The successes of the next decade will be built on delivering more targeted value to customers on an individual basis, then scaling those solutions up to meet larger, industry-wide demand. It won’t necessarily be easy, but it will be worth it. Providing industry-targeted solutions based on real-world needs rooted in experience is the way forward.
This goes back to our guiding principle as a company: to not just be a vendor, but a partner. To be friendly and approachable to our customers, simple in how we explain our solutions to them, and innovative in how we come up with those solutions in the first place.
With this partnership approach, paired with deep investment in our clients’ businesses and a company-wide restructuring to empower our workers to better achieve these goals, we have a clear and bright future ahead of us.
Our goal, as always, is to provide the most value possible to our customers. Our challenge now is to do that while providing services as close to the customer’s business as possible.
Following the example set by Business Central: Standard Pack for small- and medium-sized businesses, we can look for ways to deliver extra value in other industries. Think of a Standard Pack for manufacturing, telecoms, or finance, or a solution based on common needs of a set of clients, then scaled up to meet the needs of an entire industry.
The days of differentiating ourselves as an IT leader by providing infrastructure at a lower cost or with speedier implementation are over. The successes of the next decade will be built on delivering more targeted value to customers on an individual basis, then scaling those solutions up to meet larger, industry-wide demand. It won’t necessarily be easy, but it will be worth it. Providing industry-targeted solutions based on real-world needs rooted in experience is the way forward.
This goes back to our guiding principle as a company: to not just be a vendor, but a partner. To be friendly and approachable to our customers, simple in how we explain our solutions to them, and innovative in how we come up with those solutions in the first place.
With this partnership approach, paired with deep investment in our clients’ businesses and a company-wide restructuring to empower our workers to better achieve these goals, we have a clear and bright future ahead of us.
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