Bridge the Gap Between IT and the Business with WAVES

At ConvergeOne, every collaboration engagement follows the WAVES Methodology. The first step is a Workshop that helps our customers take an “outside-in” view of their environment. In other words, the Workshop allows our customers to first view the expectations from the end user’s point of view (the “outside”) and subsequently consider the technology’s capabilities (the “in”) being provided to meet the end user’s expectations. This outside-in approach works equally well for all user-facing services like customer experience (CX) and unified communications (UC).

In a previous blog post, we shared how organizations must move toward a customer-centric approach, with a focus on the customer journey as a strategic capability. How, specifically, can you do that? Here are five steps to follow to ensure you find and keep the right customers.

This stat always hooks me: 91% of cyberattacks begin with spear phishing emails.

Recently, I read an article that an organization gets hit by ransomware every 14 seconds. In 2021, it is expected that it will be every 11 seconds. That is a very sobering statistic. Consequently, there is not one day in the life of an IT person that the subject of ransomware goes unmentioned or undiscussed. Today alone, I had two meetings with customers who wanted to talk about Cyber Recovery. In both meetings, I could hear the worried tone in the customers’ voices as they asked questions about Cyber Recovery solutions.

Digital transformation is a requirement for businesses that wish to remain competitive, and the constant state of innovation is fundamentally transforming today’s enterprise network and data center infrastructures at a rapid pace. Consequently, IT today is very different from what it used to be a few years ago. IT must balance the following considerations on a daily basis:

In a previous post, we shared that organizations today need to live and breathe customer-centric values, where Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and IT collaborate to give customers the best, most seamless experience. Today’s customers have endless options, which means they will not hesitate to move on to a competitor after suffering through a bad experience with a company. Creating a seamless and exceptional experience is the only way to build truly loyal customers who can grow into brand advocates.

At ConvergeOne, WAVES is our proprietary Methodology that guides each and every one of our collaboration engagements. WAVES is an acronym, with each letter representing a specific phase of the methodology. Each phase provides a specific contribution to the final outcome, which is a recommended solution that is tailored to the customer’s business and technology needs. The WAVES phases, which must be executed in order, are:

Just recently, one of my customers—a large K-12 School District—was hit by a major ransomware breach. Just how major was it? The breach was so major that the whole (and I really mean the WHOLE) data center was inoperable. Primary data and backup data was encrypted beyond usability.  Management systems of production devices and the backup application systems were compromised beyond recoverability. Active Directory and authentication capabilities were locked out. The result was that the data center became a bunch of bare-metal hardware with blinking lights.

I’ll start by answering a question that immediately comes to mind: What, exactly, does multi-cloud mean? When we reference a multi-cloud environment, we’re talking about an organization that utilizes some combination of one or more public and/or private clouds to power their critical applications and workloads. For example, an organization may utilize Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its mainstream applications, Google Cloud for machine learning (ML)-centric workloads, and a private on-premises cloud for compliance-governed applications. Sound complicated? It is. 

What is a Connector? By definition, it is “a thing that links two or more things together.” In the telecommunications sector, that can mean a multitude of things. For the purposes of this blog post, I will be talking about ConvergeOne Advanced Services (C1AS) and the benefits of integrating Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms with Telephony platforms.