Elly Yates-Roberts |
With cloud software becoming increasingly integral to the daily success of organisations worldwide, the responsibility on firms like Orbus Software to help businesses leverage the technology is growing.
Orbus focuses on helping other organisations to digitally transform and, according to chief evangelist Tim Mitchell, there are two major ways that it does this.
“Our customers have two predominant drivers: to survive and thrive as organisations,” he says. “Survival is about meeting disruption, and with the 2020s being referred to as ‘the decade of disruption’, this is more relevant than ever. So far, we’ve had the Covid-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, energy prices, geopolitical war and a looming recession. All of these things have had a profound impact on business.
“The other side of the coin looks at how to thrive. Our customers are typically large corporations, multinationals and government organisations. They’re looking to grow, and in order to do that, they need to be able to adapt.”
But this isn’t simple for large organisations that have complex internal department interactions and processes. Traditionally, these organisations have been very siloed, operating with different subsidiaries and complicated technologies and business landscapes. “To be able to adapt, these businesses first need to fully understand their operations. Then they can make decisions faster and smarter, and digitally transform to hit their key objectives.”
Orbus helps its customers achieve this clarity and agility through its cloud platform iServer365. “This solution helps our customers to manage complexity by providing a central source of truth for a range of information across the enterprise,” says Mitchell. “In and around that, the platform supports multiple teams, including enterprise architects who can use it for business analytics. A range of stakeholders can also collaborate around the platform, helping to build a central source of truth, make sure it’s accurate and give it a wider context across the whole enterprise.”
That central source of truth is essential to helping businesses survive and thrive. But iServer365 goes beyond that, helping users to improve decision-making. “The value of that common source of truth is that you can provide information to different leaders and stakeholders. It helps them to answer questions, giving them the clarity they need to make decisions quickly and more accurately. With that effective decision-making, businesses can then pursue transformation and their goals.”
According to a Forrester report titled The Total Economic Impact (TEI) Of Orbus Software iServer365, the platform enables users to retire up to 20 per cent of their applications.
“There’s a significant cost saving with that, but the benefits go far beyond this,” says Mitchell. “iServer365 allows users to document all applications in an organisation and understand the dependencies of those applications – for example, the processes, teams and business capabilities that they support. This is fundamental in enterprise architecture. You can then provide all this information in digestible visualisations to identify those applications that are duplicated, have low business value or low technology fit. Then you can select the ones that are no longer needed.”
Retiring applications in this way also enables businesses to streamline their application portfolio, which increases productivity and allows firms to invest in better-suited applications. Beyond these cost savings, there are other financial benefits associated with using iServer365, as outlined by the TEI report. According to Mitchell, one of the most important is accelerated resiliency planning.
“The report found that organisations could save up to 50 per cent of their time here,” he says. “Given that this is the decade of disruption, building resiliency is fundamental to preventing business disruption. However, if it does happen, organisations must be able to react quickly. iServer365 enables that.”
Finances aside, the cloud platform also fosters greater collaboration across departments. “While enterprise architects are the core users of the platform, they cannot provide answers on their own,” says Mitchell. “They rely on collaboration with the wider business to understand all this metadata and the relevance and cost of applications.
“People are more likely to collaborate if you make it easy for them to do so. This results in greater engagement from these wider stakeholders, which will add to the enrichment and the value of the enterprise architecture that you're building. It's a critical success factor for true enterprise architectures to be built, maintained and updated in this way.”
For Mitchell, a key differentiator for Orbus is its interoperability with Microsoft. “That's important because most organisations use Microsoft Applications,” he says. “We have native integrations with its key collaboration applications, including Teams, SharePoint and Power BI. We've focused much of our development on integrating with these tools because people will best engage with you if it's through the tools they use every day. Microsoft interoperability has always been our specialism.”
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2022 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.