To say the world has changed this year would be an understatement. In every part of life, we have had to learn and adapt, and business is no different. The truth is that your business will never be the same. The world today is digital first more than ever, and your business must adapt to meet the need of your consumers – both internally and externally. Now is the time to adapt, accelerate, and transform, because your business is still about the experiences you provide and the connections you foster.
We are proud to partner with Microsoft to help you do just that. Our Microsoft team is here to help you use the power of digital to move faster, engage smarter, connect deeper, and grow your business with the following solutions.
Agile Development in the Cloud With Azure
Accelerate Your Development Practices
Reduce the dependency on internal infrastructure teams, allow direct application development for cloud deployment, and lower hardware support costs.
What It Is
We work with you to accelerate your development practices in the cloud by combining training and direct hands-on team coaching to rapidly introduce DevOps practices and encourage joint agile
and cloud best practices.
What’s Included
Over an 8-week period, we work with your development teams to deliver a combination of analysis and training to drive development practices in the Microsoft Azure cloud.
This includes:
- Analysis of current development practices (agile, waterfall, mixed)
- Team tutorials on tools and practices (i.e., Chef, Azure utilization, design/deployment, agile methodology in the cloud)
- Mentorship of joint team for development and migration of applications to Azure
Additionally, we can help you explore process improvements as agile practices expand throughout the organization, help implement agile project management practices, and expand DevOps around continuous integration and continuous deployment.
Application Migration Accelerator
Encapsulate and Migrate Applications to the Cloud
Keep your crucial legacy applications secure and reduce costs by migrating them to Microsoft Azure with our Application Migration Accelerator.
What It Is
Most companies accumulate legacy applications over time, leading to issues with compliance, security, increasing support costs, and complex performance management. To mitigate these risks while continuing to utilize these often crucial applications, these large applications must be cordoned off in a secure “enclosure” where access can be controlled and monitored.
We can help you manage and modernize these legacy applications with our Application Migration Accelerator, which helps lower risk, improve security, and reduce support and management costs across your IT environment by migrating your legacy applications to a secure environment on Azure.
What’s Included
As part of the accelerator, we provide:
- Assessment of target application environment needs (OS, network, storage, processing, etc.)
- Analysis of target application dependencies (libraries, external resources, APIs, etc.)
- Development of an application containment strategy (Microsoft Azure cloud, Docker scripting, Chef Cookbooks)
- Migration of applications to Microsoft Azure cloud using native Chef Habitat-Azure integrations
Azure Foundations Assessment
Maximize the Value of Your Cloud Investment
Explore migration to the cloud or to gain visibility into “VM sprawl” with our Azure Foundations Assessment.
What It Is
We work with you to help you understand and successfully maximize the value of your cloud investment by putting in place a data-driven migration strategy.
Our experience and expertise with Microsoft, Azure, and open source technology guides the discovery, analysis, and strategic recommendations throughout the process. Additionally, our partnership with Microsoft provides 60 days free usage of Movere, a discovery solution used to provide insights and data
for your cloud migration.
What’s Included
Deliverables from this 4-5 week part-time assessment include a presentation of findings and a recommended action plan for migration to Azure:
- Environment assessment
- Movere implementation and scans
- Manual review of key solutions
- Access to analysis tenant
- Findings presentation and action plan
Azure Migration Strategy and Roadmap
Develop a Strategy For Your Future Business Needs
Lay the foundation for virtual machine migration and app modernization by assessing your environment and presenting a forward-looking strategy.
What It Is
We partner with Movere, a leading digital discovery solution, to assess your on-premises server environment and provide an accurate view of your current state to inform your Azure migration approach.
What’s Included
We will perform a customized set of assessments and strategic workshops to understand your current environment and future business needs. We will work with your technical leadership, operations teams, app developers and business SMEs to understand your company’s unique culture, ecosystem, and vision to better align your strategy with your business model.
The engagement generally includes the following:
- Movere environment discovery assessment
- Strategic vision and environmental constraint sessions
- Identity, networking and storage overviews
- HA/DR and backup strategy review
- Security and compliance considerations
- Application assessments and workload review (as requested)
Azure Self-Service Bot With Backend Integration Pilot
Unlock Existing Investments and Processes
Automate common user interactions and answer questions from existing knowledge bases using natural language processing.
What It Is
Our Azure Self-Service Bot with Backend Integration Pilot is a perfect on-ramp into the world of intelligent bots, coupled with real-world enterprise integration. Our team will tailor an engagement to quickly demonstrate results that make a significant impact on users’ internal support experiences.
What’s Included
We will execute a short elaboration to ensure alignment on the overall solution and clarify existing dependencies to finalize the project plan, timeline, and estimated cost before moving on to solution development and implementation. The engagement typically consists of the following stages.
Discovery:
- Review current ecosystem
- Define user scenarios
- Confirm vision and project plan
Design:
- Design system architecture
- Ingest and curate knowledge bases
Construction:
- Develop and configure Azure Bot services plus required APIs and repositories
- Integrate with back-end systems
- Configure Bot Framework and client endpoints
- Deploy to target environments
Non-functional:
- Train intelligent data models
- Implement CI/CD process using Azure DevOps
- Support quality assurance with client SMEs
- Provide solution design documentation, deployment guidance, user scripts
- Perform live demonstrations and knowledge transitions
Open Source App Modernization With OpenShift on Azure
Build Your Foundational Hybrid Approach to App Modernization
Combine Microsoft Azure’s ability to make impactful modernizations with OpenShift to embrace open and extensible solutions.
What It Is
OpenShift on Azure is a fully managed implementation of Red Hat OpenShift within Microsoft Azure. The service brings Docker and Kubernetes to your enterprise cloud, and is ideal for organizations that have a Red Hat presence and are interested in a Kubernetes-based infrastructure.
We can help lay the groundwork for your cloud migration and app modernization platform by assessing your environment and presenting best practices, current-state findings, and a customized, forward-looking cloud approach. Our Microsoft Azure and Red Hat experts will assess and inform your unique Microsoft and open source on Azure strategy.
What’s Included
We will perform a customized set of assessments and strategic workshops to understand your current environment and future business needs. We will work with your technical leadership, operations teams, app developers, and business SMEs to understand your company’s unique culture, ecosystem, and vision to better align your strategy with your business model.
The engagement typically lasts 4-6 weeks and includes:
- Strategic cloud vision and environmental constraint session
- Azure architectural review session
- Solution and workload assessments
- Open source solutions
- Traditional .NET/SQL applications
- Legacy monoliths
- Application modernization strategy workshop
- Technical overviews (Azure, OpenShift, Ansible)
- Security, compliance, governance, IAM, monitoring, and cost considerations
Power Platform COE
Drive the Value of Your Investments
Maximize your investment while simplifying governance and compliance with a Power Platform Center of Excellence (COE).
What It Is
Our Power Platform COE workshop is designed to help you continuously drive the value of your investments in the entire Microsoft 365 platform. By implementing a COE, you will be able to drive successful adoption and usage of Power Platform and the Microsoft 365 suite throughout your organization.
What’s Included
Our Power Platform COE is made up of six distinct phases:
- Envision
- Legacy application assessment
- Program definition
- Governance
- Scheduling and backlog population
- Application support
Power Platform Workshop
Quickly Build Custom Data-Driven Business Apps Without Compromises
Low-code technologies offer the promise of effective “citizen development,” where business users can produce their own applications with little to no support from developers. Microsoft’s Power Platform combines the strengths of key products – Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents – to serve this need.
What It Is
Our Power Platform Workshop provides hands-on experience building end-to-end app solutions on the Power Platform, covering these products:
- Power Apps: Enable low code/no code application development
- Power Automate: Boost business productivity by automating organizational processes
- Power Virtual Agents: Easily build chat bots with no coding required
- Power BI: Make informed business decisions
What’s Included
Our Power Platform Workshop lasts three days, giving you insight into Power Platform and what it can do for your organization.
Day 1: Power Platform Overview:
- Understand the different Power Platform products and value of each. Gain hands-on experience with tools in a lab environment. Review opportunities to extend the Power Platform with custom development in Azure.
Day 2: AI Feature Review and Proof of Concept Creation:
- Review AI Builder features such as Entity Extraction, RPA, and Object Detection. Learn how Power BI complements other Power Platform solutions. Work with SMEs to create a proof of concept application that fulfills your unique requirements.
Day 3: POC Stakeholder Presentation and Roadmap:
- Discuss how your organization can support Citizen Development and how Power Platform can scale in your organization. Create a draft roadmap for deploying the Power Platform.
Return to Work With Safety and Innovation
Maximize Your Microsoft 365 Investments
The global pandemic has impacted companies of all sizes, across all industries. While remote work and Microsoft Teams use are at historic levels, many organizations reactively deployed tools to support remote work under duress and may not be leveraging the full potential of these tools. We’re here to help.
What It Is
We partner with you to maximize your tools and establish your new normal.
- Proactively implement identified return to work capabilities
- Maximize your current investments in the Microsoft 365 platform
- Evaluate business disruption response capabilities and future preparedness
- Transform your operations to support current processes and create a disruption strategy for the future
What’s Included
This engagement contains three phases to help you maximize your existing investments.
Prepare and assess:
- Facilitate a series of return-to-work discussions to identify, prioritize, and implement critical initiatives in the following areas:
- Security
- Communications
- Automation
- Monitoring
- Training
- Develop a plan to manage anticipated changes
- Prioritize additional opportunities to optimize return-to-work preparedness
Optimize:
- Facilitate a series of capability and preparedness workshops and identify current and desired maturity in the following areas:
- Response strategy, processes, and governance
- Stakeholder assessment
- Communication and training
- Systems, data, network, security, and device management
- Develop and prioritize opportunities to optimize return-to-work preparedness
Transform:
- Develop sprint plans to rapidly implement selected improvement initiatives, including:
- Response strategy and team establishment/refinement
- Security
- Data governance
- Device management
- Communication execution
- Automation opportunities
- Command center and corresponding measurements
- Employee training (management, new roles, changing roles, etc.)
- Innovation channel
- Manage, communicate, and adjust improvement initiatives
- Identify additional improvement areas for return-to-work preparedness
Microsoft Teams Quick Start and Pilot
Improve Collaboration With Teams
Microsoft Teams is changing workplace collaboration by bringing together chat, meetings, apps, bots, personal storage, and calls into one interface. But with so many features available, it’s easy to take on too much, too quickly. The right enablement strategy is crucial to avoiding common pitfalls and maximizing user engagement.
What It Is
Whether your organization is new to Teams or you’re looking for greater user adoption, our Microsoft Teams Quick Start & Pilot will assess your current environment and recommend configurations, along with best practices and strategies for organizational adoption and success.
What’s Included
- Current state alignment workshops
- Workload education workshops
- Future-state workshops
- Preliminary tenant configuration
- Teams pilot
- Teams roadmap
