Workplace, how to choose well your integrator?

The last few years have seen a significant evolution of the workspace (or Workplace), which has also undergone its digital transformation. The workplace is a real competitive advantage for the company’s image. Here are the criteria that will make the difference for the deployment of a scalable and sustainable Workplace.

The success of an organization is built on the basis of committed and loyal human capital, and the attractiveness of the company brand is based on various factors including the ability to offer modern and intelligent work tools. A modern Workplace is a digital workspace that allows employees to give their best, and the company to minimize turn-over by relying on committed staff that takes on its own the company objectives and values. Employees are becoming more demanding as communication and productivity technologies progress. They expect intelligent digital tools that adapt to technological evolutions and uses in their businesses. Though, digital transformation cannot be complete without the deployment of digital, connected and mobile workspaces, all in complete safety.

The concept of  Workplace was born out of the need for the company to unify the working tools of its employees, and to rationalize their day-to-day administration, after an anarchic explosion in the 2000’s. However, even if the interest is obvious, the adoption rate remains slow, because organizations do not always know how to analyze uses and collect needs from managers and employees.

In the face of these challenges, suppliers and integrators prove to be the unavoidable partners. Their mastery of technologies allows them to offer a wide range of products and services, and proven expertise to meet the variety of use cases and needs.

The successful implementation of the digital workspace requires integrators to master different technologies and offer a supply chain ensuring the consistency and sustainability of the tools used. In short, the systems integrator must be a partner, evaluating and recommending integration solutions based on customer preferences. Here are the criteria for choosing a good integrator.

The operation of a digital workspace is based primarily on a hardware base, a computer (desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone). To avoid the need to manage heterogeneous infrastructures, companies prefer to harmonize the systems they deploy over the long term. The supply of equipment must therefore be part of a coherent long-term sourcing strategy. This task is usually assigned to the integrator who must not only offer a comprehensive product catalogue, but also stable references over time. In the best case, it has its own warehouse, which allows it to guarantee the availability of certain references over several years.

Systems integration is a very technical task, which requires integrators with hands-on experience in technology and customer relations. Having its own warehouse also brings on-site technological know-how, thanks to a team of technicians trained in systems and software and experienced in the various requirements of configuration deployments to meet business needs. It also allows the integrator to have its own logistics, capable of delivering hundreds of destinations.

One of the biggest problems facing IT services is employee support. Whether they are on-site or on the move, they must be able to count on integration assistance and post-installation assistance. When the situation requires it, the integrator must be able to dispatch a team of itinerant technicians to the customer for commissioning that requires a special technicality. It may be the need to configure complementary means adapted to the site environment, data migration, or the provision of support to users such as skills transfer and training in new tools.

Thanks to information technology, the company has entered the era of the knowledge economy and mobility. Telework has gained a lot of ground through the lockdown and mobility needs require not only collaborative and communication networks and tools, but also technologies to remote digital workspaces. Actually, controlling mobility-enhancing technologies, such as virtualization (VDI or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and display forwarding must be part of an integrator’s skills.

In a mobility environment, connectivity and speed are crucial factors in productivity. This was made evident during the lockdown where network access and rarefied bandwidth, not to mention excessive latency, were the main barriers to teleworking, mainly in white areas. Thus, the control of network technologies and infrastructures (wire and radio) allows the deployment of network infrastructures that improve bandwidth, but above all low latency, as this is crucial for remote digital workspaces.

With the spread of teleworking and the consideration of employee well-being, the digital workspace has become an inseparable factor in employee productivity in the age of mobility and virtualized environments. Technology offers all the tools to succeed in getting its employees to work on site or remotely and in the best possible conditions. In this value chain, system integrators are partners in the success of digital transformation projects. They design, build and deploy systems that need to be customized to meet the needs of an organization.

At Wixalia, we meet all the conditions listed above to ensure the implementation of the systems (infrastructures, hardware components and software), and link them to work together, as a unit.

Do you need more information or a question to ask? Discover Wixalia’s Workplace services.