What my experience in the Nordics has taught me.

Scandinavia as a Lesson

With the vast majority of infrastructures now outsourced, you can see into the future of technology deployment in unique ways. My decade and more in Scandinavia has taught me a lot about speed, change and growth. But even more significantly, being here has allowed me to see into the future of business in a unique way – as an act of value creation underpinned by technology.

This may sound mundane but is in fact revolutionary when one considers the grand narrative of the technology industry to date. Reflected in Steve Jobs’ famous encouragement to “dent the universe”, technology people have seen themselves at the forefront of change for decades. The paradigm behind this self-assertion is that business lags continually behind technology change and must always hurry to catch up and renew itself.

That may be so as a product manufacturer and will certainly serve to promote the manufacturer’s own vision. But as services transform what was once a hardware product agenda, the time is long overdue to revise the foundation myth of the geeks.

The truth, as any business executive will attest, is that business changes far faster than any technology, and that it is technology rather than business that must race to continuously catch up. A product by its nature is a complete object, revised continuously as it may be. A service is never ‘over’ and is always changing dynamically in end-client action. Quo vadis technology makers- where to next?

Technology as a Story

This is what Scandinavia has taught me – how to view technology as a business proposition first and foremost, and how to put business first in the technology sales scenario. And by business, I do not mean the tech maker’s business. When one does this, a stunning realization occurs – it is not the technology that ever matters – it is always the usage pattern and the actual deployment issues that surround that pattern.

If technology were a story, you would now replace tech as the hero with the customer’s own business. Consider service providers. Believe it or not, service providers represent the strategic future of technology utilization as on-premise deployment withers rapidly away and global cloud services assume ever greater commodity market share. If tech providers saw the future more from a service provider’s point of view, their obsession with cost effectiveness – even lifecycle cost effectiveness – would be balanced with an even greater obsession with speed and client risk. Because from a customer’s perspective, cost is merely one type of core value, and by no means the chief one. Speed in technology utilization is a greater kind of value, and indeed bears a deep relationship to end cost. But above and beyond technology cost and time lies the entire arena of risk, and by this I mean risk.

Technology is not only a risk to the customer’s business (think data security, business continuity etc), it is also a key lever to eradicate risk from the client’s business strategy. This is why manufacturers must think like service providers, and why technology providers must help service providers in the existing market evolve into true business partners and .

Service Integration as a Future

As on-premise deployment shrinks and vanishes – and analysts have already shown us that it will fall to meet rising service provision scenarios in the next year or two – service providers themselves can seize a strategic opportunity to redefine their role with end-customers as partners and integrators. It is precisely this vision of technology as a platform for business change – and service provision as an evolving curve towards service integration – that my time in Scandinavia has allowed me. From a Fujitsu point of view that means far more than simply addressing a new sales channel.

For a manufacturer and service partner like Fujitsu it means regarding infrastructure service providers as true business partners and supplying them with viable and actionable strategies of evolution with their own clients. We call this ‘de-risking’ your growth, and it is even better understood as turning technology into an enabler instead of an obstacle. That means everything from storage to applications is dynamically provided to drive the business, and anything that hinders that – such as vendor lock-in – is uprooted and removed. If business comes first – and indeed it always has – technology must follow the dictates of business change.

Fujitsu as a Growth Partner

It also means the actual business growth of the end customer is shared as the ultimate vision of both service provider/integrator and technology supplier. This is a business-driven vision of technology utilization which focuses just as much on commercial chemistry as it does on technical specifications. In this scenario, cost, speed and risk are intricately involved – with the emphasis on technology efficiently reducing and eliminating business risk. As a German professional in a Nordic context, I have been able to complement my business culture’s emphasis on planning and security with this culture’s instinct for adaptive pragmatism. In fact, the on-premise paradigm is facing huge reduction if not extinction, as partnered technology scenarios explode. In this equation it is the service provider that stands to gain – if they can quickly evolve to a partner capable of integrating those services for clients. De-risking growth for the ultimate customer involves straight-through thinking all the way back to the infrastructure manufacturer –  and means no one ‘dents the universe’ on their own. As data drives the world economy and data centers are the factories of the twenty-first century, the revolution in industry thinking is a paradigm shift in partnership.

Technology can never be an end is itself, just as data without insight is useless. As the data infrastructures of the future are increasingly delivered on a serviced basis, business rationale will replace the technology agenda across the board. This is a good thing for end customers, for service providers, for the technology maker.

In my own small way, I’ve been given a glimpse into that future, and it works. In fact, it works better all round for all. Instead of a world of competing agendas between customers, service providers and tech makers, it represents a world where business success for one means shared success for all. By turning technology sales into business strategies for all, tech is shared serves a much greater vision of .

It’s time for infrastructure providers to truly focus on service providers and join up in supporting the businesses of our customers.