“Process First. Technology Second®”: Partner with Rackspace for Application Modernization

The average organization manages more than 300 applications, while application management consumes, according to Gartner, more than a third of most organizations’ IT budget.

If you’re reading this, you know applications can be the determining factor in your company’s ability to drive innovation and growth. You also know that too often, your budget gets sucked up by antiquated IT, siloed proprietary applications, outdated processes and resource-intensive operations.

Yet without resources and expertise, you’re prevented from innovating and staying competitive. You need a way to effectively manage your applications’ environment to free up those resources for the strategic projects that will drive top line growth.

Today’s buzz-phrase solution is “application modernization,” or the process of updating and optimizing applications to support new technologies and digital initiatives. But many companies still take a traditional IT-centric approach to application modernization, seeing it as function of devops or traditional IT architecture where the goal is to refactor, re-purpose or consolidate legacy software.

True modernization

Smart companies understand the real promise of application modernization: delivering differentiated business value to your organization and your customers by transforming the application environment for greater efficiency, agility, scalability and interoperability. They also understand that application modernization is continuous journey, not a one-and-done project.

Most organizations simply don’t have the in-house resources to properly create and execute a full application modernization initiative. The approach usually ends up being a mishmash of high-priced strategy consultants, assigning current resources a second “transformational” function, and neglecting upkeep and maintenance of current systems to push through digital initiatives.

A trusted partner

You need an unbiased partner focused on your outcomes, with unrivaled cloud experience to deliver application modernization through a full spectrum of professional and managed services. You should no longer have to have to worry about where you find the right experts, how you identify and integrate the latest technologies, or manage your IT environment because you have a partner dedicated to your organization’s success.

For almost two decades, companies have sought out Rackspace for our infrastructure expertise. However, more and more often, companies are seeking an application-first approach, with infrastructure decisions based on application modernization, rather than the other way around.

Rackspace has responded to this important shift by doubling down on our application services portfolio, expanding our offerings and through key acquisitions like TriCore Solutions for enterprise resource planning and RelationEdge for customer relationship management expertise.

Rackspace Application Services now delivers a comprehensive application modernization solution. Our “Process First. Technology Second®” approach allows Rackspace experts to dig deep and understand your company’s goals. Only then do we figure out the best technologies to get you there. By partnering with Rackspace to build digital-ready application environments backed by managed and professional services, your business will benefit from unbiased, outcome-focused application services built on unrivaled cloud expertise.

Process First

Before we ever start talking about technology, we begin with you, and your customers: what are their needs? How can we improve their experience, and the value you offer them? By keeping customers front and center, organizations can then successfully articulate very specific end goals.

To meet those goals, we’ll make sure your application modernization efforts are part of a larger digital transformation, one that updates your operational model to gain efficiencies and greater effectiveness. Together we’ll identify which applications aren’t delivering on your business objectives and design a plan to eliminate technical debt.

We’ll also help you embrace cloud-native design, so applications can be deployed on any cloud, public or private, with the ability to move between them as needed.

Technology Second

Once a foundation has been laid, and applications defined and optimized, our focus switches to the technology that will best enable your organization’s transformation: which infrastructure platforms make the most sense for which application? Which applications can be consumed as a service for better integration and insight?

We’ll leverage APIs and integration as a service to quickly connect applications and data, and serverless architecture to focus on the individual functions of code rather than physical hardware concerns.

It was this approach that drew the interest of Ron McIntyre, CTO of Delmar International, a customs and logistics service provider with 1,500 employees across 35 offices in a dozen countries.

“How can you help us?”

Delmar’s legacy infrastructure began hindering the company’s ability to keep growing. McIntyre wanted a partner that would guide its transformation based on the company’s needs rather than focusing in on specific solutions.

“Rackspace has this omni-platform footprint that allowed us to go to them with every single one of our projects and say, ‘How can you help us?’ The Rackspace applications team ultimately designed a technology stack that is usable and sustainable no matter where we need to deploy it.”

Rackspace Application Services experts have continued working with McIntyre’s team to implement a range of new global solutions: enterprise resource planning for finances, a customer success platform, an enterprise content management solution and a data analytics backbone.

“My personal belief is that the heads of IT can no longer be the biggest geeks in a company,” McIntyre said. “IT leaders have to be business leaders — they have to be focused on product and service enablement.”

Today, Delmar’s transformation continues, and we can help your team too. With applications and application architectures evolving faster and faster, it’s critical to recognize the ongoing nature of this effort; Rackspace expertise and leadership around emerging technologies means we help prepare our customers for success today, and tomorrow.