Crawford Del Prete: [Senior VP, IDC]
Now as individuals are starting to get out and look around it’s not about cost cutting any longer. It’s really now about – how do I start to grow? How do I manage that growth? How do I make sure that I’m matching my IT infrastructure and more importantly my IT business strategy to my overall corporate strategy?
Arthur Amos: [Nationwide Building Society]
We’ve got about 800 to 900 retail sites, which are all over the UK right from the north of Scotland to the southwest of England. All the work we do in IT now is increasingly partnerships between us and key suppliers. And that was what happened when we did this project with Cisco and HP. A good partnership is when you’ve got complementary skills that everybody brings to the party. We’ve all got our parts to play. We know what they are. We work together as a team. We overcome all the problems and we deliver. And that’s what we did.
Crawford Del Prete:
From a partnering standpoint customers need to work with suppliers that are not selling them a product, not necessarily selling them simply a broad solution, but selling them something that’s helping me get my specific job done.
Shannon Ramsey: [Valero]
We have a couple of stores – it’s closer to 1100 stores. And we have equipment in all those stores. They stretch from California to Louisiana, from Wyoming to the deep end of south Texas. The world of IT and the world of convenience selling is married together and will be so forever. You look for products and services that you can deploy very fast, very quickly. You look for partners like HP and Cisco that you can depend on to assist you in those efforts. Agility means being able to react to the market quickly. Very quickly. If you can’t react to changes in the market then you’ve lost the day. Your competition has passed you by.
Crawford Del Prete:
What you’re going for is a condition where you have done an excellent job of matching your IT investment with potential changes in your business conditions. That will allow a level of flexibility within your organization to be able to take on new tasks – to start to grow.
Matthew Lang: [Sony Europe]
For Sony the key tool is the customer experience – providing world class, best-in-class, excellent customer experience. Today we have Contact Centers in Holland. Tomorrow we may well need to set up Contact Centers in some of the East European countries. The HP technology enables us to adapt continuously to those changing demands. Cisco has been very forthcoming to Sony in general to enable us to really optimize the benefit that we get from this technology.
Crawford Del Prete:
The reality is you’ve got to prepare for the unknown. Risk is unavoidable. And that’s why risk is something you have to manage for. Is my environment secure? Is my logical environment secure? Is my IT environment secure? Is my physical environment secure? What you need to be able to do is work with a series of technologies, a series of solutions and a series of partners that can allow you to rise above that fray.
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