A customer journey: SIAM is not always named SIAM
We finished an assignment with a customer.
Earlier this year we finished an assignment with our client Alpega. The perfect time to sum up, reflect and let Alpega tell the story. Alpega Group is a leading global logistics software company offering modular solutions that cover all complex transportation and logistics needs. By bringing together the best solutions and market expertise, the Alpega Group has created the transportation industry’s only scalable end-to-end software suite.
In 2019 Alpega decided to approach a huge challenge: Alpega’s products were already fully SaaS and supporting hundreds of customers across the world, but they were running in a private data center of their prior owners. Alpega’s mission was to take them to the public cloud world – Azure and Oracle.
Co-Founder of Blueponte joined the challenge as advisor.
Ronald Kränzl, Co-Founder of Blueponte, joined the challenge in late 2019 as advisor and consultant to support the process of selecting and negotiating the future partner. His add-on challenge was to detect blind spots and enrich the team with his experience from other projects of this category.
In the course of the initial project phase business cases were improved constantly with more current data as the negotiations went on. In order to fully exploit expected advantages that result from the migration project, a governance for the future service delivery had to be put in place.
Governance always starts with roles and responsibilities and is closely followed by selecting the right people to take on these roles. Luckily the right person to fill the very crucial role of the Service Manager could be found within the existing management team.
In spring 2020 the contracting client, the CIO, decided to leave and Ronald was appointed to expand his duties and to run the department on an interim basis until a new CIO was found. In summer 2020 the negotiations were finalized and the contracts with Alpega’s Cloud Partner and the Partner for the migration project and managed service was signed. The first lock-down in Europe was eased, but the teams still weren’t allowed to come together physically, which was an additional burden for everyone involved.
Many SIAM practices have been applied.
The migration project was kicked-off and the preparation of a series of systems shifts from hosting partners to the cloud started and were tested intensively. The transition work started. The new CIO was chosen and onboarded in October. In parallel to his leadership role Ronald conveyed all the information he collected by then to bring the new CIO up to speed quickly. After the budgeting phase the onboarding was finalized in January 2021. The project was running on a tough but steady course and so it was the right time to step out.
Todd DeLaugther, Alpega Group CEO adds “I had the pleasure of working with the Blueponte Team and Ronald Kränzl, during a complex transition period. We lost our CIO right in the middle of a complex data center carve out, while moving a full stack SaaS application from a private data center to public cloud. Ronald stepped in and took on the management of the team as well as the Data Center carve-out, working with our vendor sourcing manager to get all contracts in place, take the existing plan and evolve it to the success plan we have today. Blueponte and Ronald have been an invaluable member of our team for the past 12 months.”
Ronald: “I am very glad that I had the opportunity to work with Alpega. I’ve met wonderful people and working together was an honor for me. Reflecting back, I know that the goal was not to implement SIAM, but really it was all about Service Integration and Management. We have applied many SIAM practices and maybe, when the time is right, the SIAM story will be continued.”
