Cloud from the ground up – The fine art of cloud-native enterprise platform services

Sumeru Dan

20 Oct 2022

Realize the full potential of your digital adoption with cloud-native enterprise platform services that secure platform availability, DevOps productivity, and business value management

Cloud-native enterprise platforms have become the gateway to digital dexterity and seamlessly engaging with consumers and stakeholders alike. These platforms facilitate this via an information ecosystem of feature-rich workflows that’s delivered with hyper-speed.

Today’s ecommerce, CRM, ERP, and infotainment platforms orchestrate unified user experiences via a cohesive set of best-of-breed SaaS solutions. These are linked with intelligent connectors and APIs – mostly on hybrid cloud – and are designed for high extensibility and scalability while leveraging the benefits of being cloud native. DevOps teams are specifically purposed to incubate, design, codify, and manage operations – and deliver unique, out-of-the-box use cases at unprecedented velocity.

Enterprise platforms delivering the full spectrum of customer value exchange and monetization have become commonplace. However, many of our customers are struggling to realize their full potential and justify the high investments made. We’ve found that the most common limiting factors include:

Platform availability: All too often, platform management is organized via a multitude of service providers who execute their services in scope and in siloes – based on their individual contractual obligations. Inadequate service orchestration between these providers creates gaps in the end-to-end service chain, which leads to platform availability disruptions. Moreover, we find frequent time-to-market delays in platform provision due to a lack of holistic planning between service providers. These two negative outcomes result in frustrated end users and a lack of trust from the consuming business units.
DevOps productivity: Many times, deployed DevOps teams are not performing to their full potentials, due to low maturity of enablers like architecture and estimation models, uncoordinated release planning between dependent systems, end-to-end regression testing, and disparate ways of working between stakeholders.
Business value management: Here, IT often fails to produce tangible business value from enterprise platforms. Enterprise platforms fully digitize business processes in scope and therefore underpin the success of business outcomes. In most platforms, the business value measurement and improvement processes are never executed.

Full-stack, custom enterprise platform services from Capgemini and our ADMnext offering

At Capgemini, with our ADMnext offering, we’ve perfected large-scale and full-stack services for many years now. These services amplify the value potentials of a wide range of enterprise platforms – from custom-built to SaaS – and low-code and hybrid.

While for every new platform, we carefully stitch together a Solution Capability Model (SCM) from our ADMnext solution stack as in the example below. Most importantly, our SCM brings a host of core elements that address the above three limitations.

Platform availability through your entire business that’s automated and always on

Consistent availability is one of the KPIs that we promise with enterprise platform implementation, and we underpin this with our digital automation platforms across five domains – each complete with predictive and preventive “fix-before-fail” automation solutions. These include our:

Cloud Ops Center within the Infrastructure and Networking domain
Intelligent Automation Platform within the Applications domain
Business Command Center within the Business Process domain
Digital SIAM solution within the multi-provider Service Orchestration domain.
Enterprise Control Tower, which assures availability of the overall platform and component domains, along with steering perfective maintenance tasks towards operations. The first four domains all converge within our Enterprise Control Tower.

DevOps productivity that’s truly agile

In order to enable a smooth journey of maximum DevOps productivity, we utilize a systematic approach that blends the right combination of feature teams, techniques, horizontalization of common services, and pervasive automation solutions. Our approach also strives to inculcate a mindset of agility throughout the networked organization.

Our Agile & DevOps Playbook is an open and moderated platform that shares theoretical knowledge. It’s also grounded in our Agile and DevOps experience from projects across Capgemini’s global portfolio. All aspects from Agile contracting and start-up to delivery orchestration and value measurement are covered in depth with proof points from real projects. And in our forthcoming blog, we’ll be focusing on a few key pragmatic elements you can implement to make Agile delivery a success for your enterprise platforms.

Business value management results you can see

Structural measurement and continuous business value improvements are areas in which Capgemini sets itself apart from competitors. For enterprise platforms, we activate our unique Business Command Center (BCC), which provides a real-time view of the performance of your enterprise business processes. We also employ a rigorous, knowledge-centric approach for building and bolstering the business processes and applications that are crucial to your organization, along with a comprehensive data blueprint and the usage of pointed autonomous BOT solutions. These enable us to manage and improve business KPIs and outcomes such as platform cost to income ratio, sales throughput, and supply chain efficiency. Additionally, the real-time status of business KPIs is visible 24×7 via a cloud-based dashboard.

Crafting a unique, custom Solution Capability Model for your business to guarantee enterprise platform adoption success

The SCM that we design for you is unique to your enterprise platform. We work with you to ensure that it’s complete with fit-for-purpose methods, capabilities, and levers that are meticulously chosen from our organizational assets. Additionally, a well-planned, cooperative platform service design workshop via our Accelerated Solutions Environment is often utilized to draw up the SCM for you in a smooth, time-boxed manner. Ultimately, this ensures that all stakeholders for business and IT as well as disparate service providers are unified in the success of the enterprise platform. This means always being available, on time, and within budget for the continuous delivery stream of features, along with measuring and improving the tangible business impacts of these features in the form of business KPIs.

To further explore how you can maximize the business value gained from your enterprise platform adoptions, drop us a line at sumeru.dan@capgemini.com and siemen.mandema@capgemini.com. You can also learn more about Capgemini’s ADMnext offering here.

Cloud Modernization with ADMnext

Taking your business to new heights by ensuring your ADM landscape is geared to support

Authors

Sumeru is a Managing Consultant for Capgemini’s Netherlands ADM Center. With over 25 years of content rich experience in delivering tactical solutions for diverse Enterprise Application setups, Sumeru specializes in architecting Application Outsourcing Solutions, modernizing Application portfolios, optimizing Operating Models, and improving IT efficiencies.

Siemen is a Principal Consultant in the application development, maintenance, and outsourcing domain. He is currently acting as a solution architect in proposal projects and is specialized in combining Capgemini and market solutions with focus on operational excellence, application integration and human interaction.