Cloud Service Broker – Design, Develop and Manage

A market leader across the Middle East, Africa and the CIS region in IT hardware, software and telecom products redistribution. It has presence across the globe with strategic tie-ups with all major IT vendors & service providers, wherein Cloud services have been incorporated as part of their product portfolio. The customer is paving the way in the region for the adoption and evangelism of digital transformation through enabling and empowering partners and creating a broader route to market for principal vendors.

Citrus Consulting helps the largest regional IT distributor design, develop and manage a one of a kind B2B service brokerage platform.

As a part of the transforming vision and adoption of emerging technologies in their day to day operations, the customer intended to create a one of a kind platform to re-engineer the traditional distribution business. Traditionally, partners interacting with end customers, would request quotes from their respective distributors, who would therein request the same from the principal vendors. This manual process would result in delays of days as compared to what could be achieved in hours resulting in a substantial drop of end customer experience.

This business model akin to IT hardware, software was being leveraged for Cloud Service reselling as well, which in its intrinsic nature is a more services based business rather than a product reselling based. A platform that can support this developing business model was the need of the hour, as small players with niche solutions were turning into competition for this global distributor.

As a part of the vision, the customer intended to minimize the downtime and expedite the otherwise manual process by implementing a single point cloud based marketplace which would enable partners to get quotes of their desired products at a way faster rate than currently. Success of the business model was dependent on widening the footprint internally across various BU’s starting with cloud first

With a business first approach, Citrus Consulting undertook multiple requirement gathering sessions with the customers. Citrus undertook deep dive sessions through its team of business analysts with respective business unit, category and product heads to understand the workflows, the dynamics of business and the true problems that the traditional model was bringing to them at different levels in different geographies. This exercise was imperative to have a single point vision of the true utility of the platform being built so as to maximize the business value delivered to end users and management alike.

Resulting from these deep dive sessions, the business requirements were therein translated to technology tools and the technical requirements for the platform were highlighted. The platform was designed in terms tools and technologies required. At this point, as a consulting firm, the customer and Citrus had to engage in deep discussion to decide on one of the two possible approaches, – either leverage and existing application and customize the same based on requirements, or build the infrastructure and application from scratch – both having their own sets of challenges and accelerators.

The entire end to end implementation was owned and empowered by Citrus Consulting. Strategy through design through development and eventual execution, multiple teams of Citrus Consulting were engaged in the entire value chain of the project scope./p>

A complex implementation as thus, was implemented leveraging agile methodology, with multiple concurrent sprints tackling different work-streams were executed. Quick wins were integrated into each channel of work stream in order to avoid long outcome cycles.

• An intelligent platform build that can support cloud services to start with and other IT hardware, software & telecom products going forward.
• Deeply integrated with ERP systems to support business process and policy adoption favoring new business models.
• Adoption of cloud services accelerated through new platform (100 basis point improvement).