The ongoing pandemic has put unprecedented stress on the global business landscape as more people than ever choose to stay home to work and shop. Many organizations have responded by accelerating their plans for digital transformation, launching new business models and products to remain competitive in today’s unstable climate. Because of the challenges faced when using older software to apply modern business strategies, company leaders must consider plans for application modernization.

This solution improves app development, capability, and downtime by adapting existing software to enable newer computing approaches, frameworks, and platforms. Examples include migrating legacy apps to microservices or physical servers to cloud computing.

This blog will illustrate the impact of modernization on businesses and what it means for organizations envisioning growth in a time of uncertainty.

Evolving alongside a rapidly changing digital landscape

In response to the changing needs of industries and workforces, many companies are turning to remote work operations and the required infrastructure to ensure business continuity and success.

The widespread need for online operations has spurred on existing plans for digital transformations. According to data from Global Surveys, companies are executing their digitization strategies an average of 20 to 25 times faster than thought possible before the pandemic. Additionally, forward-thinking organizations are also migrating to modern networks, allowing them to meet evolving customer needs. System modernization is critical to keep up with these increasingly complex applications.

Download the e-book: Benefits of Application Modernization

Application modernization is the vehicle taking many organizations on this digital journey. Business developments driving enterprises to modernize include:

• Cloud-native applications: Running applications through the Cloud, the standardization of operating systems, and cloud-ready application remediation.
• Containerization: Improves hardware use by enhancing portability, improving computing capabilities, and reducing dependency on the underlying infrastructure.
• Application integration: Lightweight API-first architecture combining upstream and downstream systems.
• DevOps/SecOps: Automated processes across development and operations that accelerate time to market.
• Data insights and AI/ML: Builds more intelligent applications and real-time insights to achieve operational efficiency.

Learn more: Modernizing applications for cloud migration

Key technologies to get you started

As successful business operations become more and more competitive, cutting-edge organizations must be responsive, resilient, and reliable. Application modernization breaks the rigid integration between hardware and software in favor of a more flexible infrastructure.

There are several intersecting technologies fundamental to modernizing your applications:

• Cloud computing: When people discuss the modernization process, they’re usually referring to the migration of traditional applications to cloud environments. These include cloud platforms, private clouds, and hybrid clouds. For example, cloud-based data recovery solutions like Microsoft Azure provide companies with a cost-effective fail-safe for their primary data storage systems.
• Containers: Containers are a cloud-centric method for packaging, deploying, and operating various workloads and applications. This technology revolutionizes how enterprises manage business-critical applications by providing greater scalability, portability, and operational efficiency. These elements are well-suited for cloud infrastructure—especially multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
• Microservices: Instead of building an application as a single codebase, IT can decouple several components into independent web standards. With microservices, there are thousands of disparate components supported in web servers and the Cloud. Each of the pieces can be deployed, updated, and operated independently of one another.
• Orchestration and automation: Software orchestration is the automation of tasks associated with containers, including deployment, scaling, and networking. Meanwhile, automation is needed to ensure that development, operations, and security teams can sustainably manage modern apps at scale.

Read more: Serverless vs. containers: complementary or competing technologies?

Why do organizations need application modernization?

Most organizations have large investments in their existing application portfolio from both a financial and operational standpoint. Although “legacy” has negative connotations in software, these systems are often among the most mission-critical applications. Few businesses are willing to retire these apps because the cost of replacing them, productivity losses, and other issues are simply too great. Therefore, application modernization is the most sensible way for enterprises to employ new software platforms, tools, libraries, and frameworks.

Modernizing legacy apps enables organizations of all sizes to provide customers with a unique digital experience while reducing overall costs and increasing application reliability and resiliency. CBTS Application Services specializes in bringing outdated systems into the modern age with future growth in mind.

Watch Chad Stansel, Director of Application Development, discuss how CBTS can support organizations ready to move their applications to the Cloud.

Task CBTS with your digital transition strategy

The experts at CBTS Application Services build client-centered partnerships that enable best-in-class business solutions.

Niche skills sets are needed to keep up with the complex, rapidly changing tech landscape. CBTS engineers have the experience and the knowledge to help future-proof your business. Because we understand your architecture and tooling needs, CBTS provides transformational solutions for scalability, automation, and cloud-readiness.

CBTS fully managed solutions enable clients to offload the burdens of risk, monitoring, maintenance, and more. By setting your apps up for future success, your company is free to focus on critical business goals.

Contact CBTS today to learn more about how application modernization can transform your business operations.

Read more about application modernization from CBTS:

Next step in application infrastructure modernization

Leverage the application modernization process to stay competitive

CBTS Expands Microsoft services portfolio to drive digital modernization to the cloud

The IT talent gap is one of the biggest challenges facing enterprises today. As companies adopt new tech more rapidly than ever, the demand for experienced IT professionals is greater than the talent pool itself. While this issue is nothing new, organizations continue to have trouble filling critical roles with qualified individuals. For this reason, it’s worth seeking the help of an IT staffing partner to deliver the resources you need.

IT staffing partners can be an invaluable resource as your organization strives to keep up with advancing systems and tech. Depending on your needs, the right consultant can augment your existing staff with highly skilled talent, and some can even provide a full delivery team to manage and staff the project for you. CBTS IT Staffing and Consulting aims to take on the burden of closing the talent gap for your organization by offering all of these benefits and more.

This blog will outline five key questions to consider when choosing an IT staffing partner for your business.

Read more: Companies turn to IT staffing services for digital transformation

Do you have experience as a partner in IT staffing in my industry?

No two industries are alike. Each has individual considerations, requirements, and regulations. It is crucial that your partner in IT staffing thoroughly understands your sector when placing candidates.

CBTS has a proven track record partnering with clients in industries ranging from healthcare to education to large scale retailers. As a result, CBTS has successfully placed candidates in numerous verticals, even when filling niche positions.

Do your IT professionals have experience with this type of project?

Understanding your IT staffing consultant’s previous experience is essential to your success. Whether you’re migrating to the cloud, implementing new technologies, or recovering from a cyber breach, partnering with proven staffing consultants will help you save time and mitigate risks for your business.

CBTS engineers and developers have experience working on a wide range of operations, including cloud, communications, infrastructure, and security services. You can feel confident that you are bringing in an experienced partner for your IT staffing needs when you work with CBTS.

Also read: Identifying your IT skills gap and finding solutions for your organization

Does your team have the proper certifications?

Make sure any potential partners in IT staffing have highly certified professionals on their team. Your unique project may require IT experts with specific backgrounds and certification levels. Whether you need to augment your staff or hire a full delivery team to get the job done, confirm with your IT staffing consultants that their professionals have the proper certifications to work effectively with your organization.

Drawing on years of successful technical recruiting experience, CBTS understands that companies have varying staffing requirements. CBTS employs over 1,200 consultants with extensive experience and certifications.

Do you offer project management services?

As you bring in outside resources for important IT projects, internal and external professionals must work as a single unit. Employing a project manager will keep all initiatives on track to consistently meet your company’s goals. You can achieve cohesion among departments and produce well-executed projects by choosing an IT staffing partner with project management candidates.

Calling on a partner that provides a holistic staffing solution will help you achieve your unique project goals. CBTS works with all manner of IT staff—from project managers and other leadership roles to engineers and architects—to ensure each client’s staffing needs are met.

Also read: Rise to the challenge of managing short-term IT staffing needs

Does your team utilize nearshore or offshore support?

Nearshoring and offshoring IT talent are widely used by IT staffing consultants because they provide the best ROI, large talent pools, and improved scalability for clients.

CBTS offers a unique outsourcing model for clients. It employs a combination of offshoring from India and nearshoring from Canada, bringing you 24x7x365 support with significant cost savings compared with onshore IT talent.

A partner in IT staffing: your solution to the IT talent gap

When your business’s projects require skilled IT professionals, having a trusted partner in IT staffing can accelerate your organization’s success. CBTS IT Staffing and Consulting solutions include project-based resources, staff augmentation services, and full delivery teams.

With our help, you can wave goodbye to your staffing worries and sleep soundly, knowing you have the talent you need for your business to thrive. Partnering with CBTS guarantees you access to highly-skilled, dynamic professionals who are ready and waiting to support your business.

Download our free e-book for more advice on selecting a partner in IT staffing, and read more about our staffing services on our IT Staffing and Consulting page.

The gap between IT job openings and the trained professionals qualified to fill them is widening. Businesses around the globe are particularly challenged by a pandemic which is further exacerbating demand for talented technicians in mission-critical areas, such as cybersecurity.

According to the 2020 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey, around 35% of entities are seeking cybersecurity experts as their top priority. Other in-demand technology skills are organizational change management (27%), enterprise architecture (23%), and technical architecture and advanced analytics (22%).

As demand for skilled technical professionals grows and the IT skills gap widens, CBTS is helping clients enhance and augment their IT teams, whether for a specific project or as an ongoing staff augmentation contract. CBTS can be part of your digital transformation by supplying highly-vetted, well-trained, certified IT specialists backed by an experienced team of technology pros. Clients value our advanced technical skill set as well as a meticulous management style brought to every project.

The CBTS suite of services begins with an assessment of your business and technology needs. As a top technology provider, CBTS offers a century of technical recruiting know-how, powered by a base of over 40,000 consultants. Additionally, it has access to more than 1,000 consultants available for deployment across all areas of IT to better serve the range of your organization’s IT skills gap.

CBTS recruiters prescreen would-be consultants on all necessary training and certifications. Over the course of a project, our consultants receive assistance from project leads, providing an additional support layer to streamline your enterprise’s path to success.

Each consultant is supported by a consultant care manager, or CCM, who handles administrative requirements such as timesheets, expenses, and scheduling. Flexible contracts allow for hourly hiring as well as contract-to-hire engagements typically lasting six months. CBTS also provides consultants as a direct placement resource where we will assist your internal HR efforts.

Regarding resource options, CBTS offers:

• Project-based consultants across multiple technologies for short- and long-term work. Our professionals are engaged on design, engineering, and installation where clients are billed hourly or on a fixed-price basis.

• Staffing that matches client requirements via proprietary and subscribed databases. CBTS utilizes the same diligence to pre-screen all resources before they are presented to clients for review.

• Permanent hire resources placed full-time at a customer site.

Download the e-book: Blended IT Organizations: A flexible strategy to address today’s biggest IT challenges

Vacant positions within an enterprise’s IT infrastructure can make reaching productivity goals difficult, and pandemic-related cutbacks pose a cost issue when hiring and maintaining an IT team. Therefore, it’s crucial for organizations to seek out top talent when considering the impact of the IT skills gap.

COVID-19 has people relying on technology—perhaps more than ever—meaning businesses require IT experts to efficiently manage new customer touchpoints. By partnering with CBTS, you will receive best-in-industry implementation of these new innovations. What’s more, our consultants bring thought leadership on strategic projects at a cost lower than pricey OEM consulting services.

The global IT skills shortage does not have to stop business momentum, thanks to our focus on business-critical technology initiatives. Let the long-standing staffing expertise from CBTS help your company create a competitive advantage in the marketplace.  

Contact us for more information on how CBTS can help your organization address the global IT skills gap.

In today’s digital economy, companies disrupt entire industries through the development of applications that convert legacy business models into lean, agile, digitized processes. Uber and Lyft, for example, have transformed the transportation industry without owning a single car, forcing auto manufacturers, rental car companies, and taxi services to rethink how they serve their customers. Undertaking this type of digital transformation, however, is complicated and requires companies to evolve in three key areas: 

• Applications: Requiring new methods for development, continuous updates, delivery, and integration.
• Platforms: Modernizing existing infrastructure and transitioning advantageous systems and services to the cloud.
• Processes: Building agility into operations for IT and all business units.

This transformation can be difficult because of the intricacies unique to each organization and the resistance to change when goals have not been clearly defined. Moreover, evolution is not merely a change in the organization’s approach to technology but a reimagining of its role in the emerging digital economy. Technology is the tool organizations use to support these changes in processes, products, services, markets, and even business models. 

In this digital economy, we expect the continued rise of digital disruptors like Airbnb and Netflix, along with unforeseen modernization supporting societal changes and demands from healthcare to green energy. Furthermore, responsive strategies to trends in the external world will spawn opportunities and whole new industries. Fortunately, today’s enterprise companies have an abundance of digital tools at relatively low costs to respond to these trends. 

Migrating IT environments to the cloud, or multiple clouds, ensures these diverse resources are available at scale. But the migration and support process can be complicated, both during the migration and afterward, once the environment is fully operational. During day-to-day operations, IT staff must manage applications within a container orchestration platform, isolating them from the underlying operating environment for easy portability between different cloud domains.

Additionally, although the emerging DevOps model for managing applications and infrastructure is ideal for creating a lean, services-driven strategy, it can be problematic if not encompassing multiple clouds like Azure and AWS. Many organizations turn to open APIs or design interfaces to provide access to services for partners and customers, no matter what infrastructure each uses. Along with primary tools required for digital transformation, today’s enterprises also need to acquire several secondary tools to ensure a smooth working environment, like security and data protection, analytics, automation, and disaster recovery.

Support for artificial intelligence (AI) and a vast array of microservices to drive applications for the Internet of Things (IoT) will also permeate this cloud ecosystem.

How can enterprise companies ensure they have the right digital transformation toolkit for today while anticipating their future needs? Digital technology expertise is difficult to come by, and even more challenging, finding the skills to integrate different tools quickly and smoothly into a cohesive working environment.

The most effective way to navigate your digital transformation path is to align your company with a knowledgeable partner to identify and implement the right tools and ensure they are utilized to produce optimal results. As a digital transformation leader, CBTS provides the expertise to avoid the pitfalls experienced by early adopters and tailors a transition strategy for the unique requirements of the business model and legacy infrastructure.

Most businesses have extensive knowledge of their legacy tools and applications but lack the expertise for managing a full digital ecosystem. By partnering with CBTS, your enterprise gains insight into the emerging digital toolkit and the vision to build a transformational environment to compete in the new digital economy.

Download our e-book to discover how CBTS can help you modernize your infrastructure and applications to take advantage of today’s emerging digital transformation tools.

Unprecedented levels of unemployment, combined with a widespread viral epidemic, have created a turbulent atmosphere in the North American information technology labor market. A recent presidential executive order may complicate the situation further.

The executive order has suspended the issuance of H1 visas to foreign workers through the end of 2020, heavily impacting many U.S. businesses that employ IT specialists from around the globe. These affected companies are scrambling to digitalize their operations and find other means, such as “nearshoring,” around this sudden labor gap. Nearshoring is done when a
company offloads a project or projects to external human resources in a nearby country that is located within a nearby or identical time zone.

First, some background. The recent executive order comes on the heels of several months of economic turmoil, during which the unemployment rate in the United States has nearly quadrupled and various public health measures have been deployed in an attempt to curb the spread of COVID-19.

Citing concern around “excess labor supply,” the executive order is partially intended to protect American workers from potential displacement during this period of record-breaking unemployment. However, lawful permanent residents who had previously been subject to immigrant visas will be granted “open market” employment authorization documents under
this order.

It will remain to be seen whether the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic will impact the effectiveness of this measure or deter the country’s return to pre-outbreak economic output.

In the meantime, however, Canada may benefit as a close neighbor and trade partner to the United States during this period of shifting labor resources. With the H1 visa suspension in place, many experts are predicting that skilled migrant workers that otherwise would have brought their talents to the United States may end up working in Canada instead. Additionally, Canadian citizens previously working abroad in the U.S. may be funneled back to their home nation, creating a net labor gain in Canada’s favor.

Some estimates place the figure of Canadians relocating internationally for their careers at roughly 100,000 each year—with the majority entering the U.S. It’s possible that this figure could be affected significantly by this new change in the H1 Visa policy.

In recent years, many large technology companies, including several American firms, have established offices in Canada due to the northern country’s relatively easy access to skilled tech specialists from North America and beyond.

This situation creates new opportunities for U.S.-based firms to continue accessing the skilled IT employees they’ve come to rely on with a practice known as “nearshoring.”

Nearshoring has several benefits over traditional offshoring practices. These include easier communication due to a decreased difference in local time, fewer cultural differences, more convenient travel due to shorter distances, and more.

Enterprises looking to augment their labor pool with nearshoring can ensure better outcomes by working with the right nearshoring partner to suit their operations. CBTS offers several value-added nearshoring services, such as flexible pricing options, flexible hiring practices, a diverse and highly skilled talent pool, project leadership assistance, visa facilitation services, and more.

Contact CBTS today for more information on how a managed nearshoring solution can grant your organization the skilled labor it needs to reach its goals.

Contingency planning during the Coronavirus outbreak

As the Novel Coronavirus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19) continues to spread globally, it’s crucial for enterprises to have plans in place to both safeguard employees and continue serving shareholders. From travel restrictions, to remote work policies, to employee wellness, businesses need to create a contingency plan, provide guidelines, and communicate the plans and policies to employees and clients in a timely and transparent manner.

A robust contingency plan must address both the needs of the company and the needs of its employees and customers in a way that protects people and maintains stability and productivity.

Components of an Effective Contingency Plan

1. A robust contingency plan must address both the needs of the company and the needs of its employees in a way that allows business to continue without putting employees, partners, and clients at risk of infection. Define the standard line of communication for executive leadership.
2. Communicate this plan to employees in a timely and transparent manner.
3. Build an explicitly stated travel policy that can be circulated throughout the organization, including any bans or freezes on non-essential travel.
4. Develop operational contingency plans to support customers by shifting internal workloads to meet client needs.
5. Fine-tune company policies on remote working standards and set aside the necessary resources for remote employees to perform their duties from home.
6. Encourage proper hygiene practices to reduce risk of infection, including regularly washing hands for at least 20 seconds. It may also be prudent to review employee healthcare benefits to verify what treatments are covered.
7. Share accurate information from credible resources (Centers for Disease Control, state and federal public health agencies) with employees to keep them informed.
8. Keep open lines of communication with local, state, and federal agencies. Ask for updates and pass this information off to the rest of your organization.

Enabling Remote Communications

The right tools and programs can make the key difference in coordinating departments and teams across multiple remote locations. You can start by reaching out to your service provider to talk through available remote meeting solutions based on your current technology. Partnering with external providers and leveraging their expertise to find the ideal solution is the best way to enable an effective remote work system for your organization.

Helpful Tools for Remote Work

• Video and audio conferencing: Available to many modern organizations, video and audio conferencing technology allows teams to meet remotely and from any device, including laptops and smart phones.
• Simultaneous ring: This feature allows a single phone number to ring up to ten devices simultaneously. Answer confirmation is also available, which indicates to the receiving party or parties that the call is for work purposes.
• Remote worker call centers.
• VoIP-based softphones.
• Collaboration applications: Bring together messaging, file sharing, video meetings, white boarding, calling and other tools.

With careful planning and preparation, as well as close cooperation with the expert providers of your telecommunications technology, your enterprise can weather the storm of the Coronavirus outbreak without compromising employee health or client satisfaction.

Finding the right executive talent to manage a rapidly evolving technology environment is proving to be one of the most significant challenges facing the enterprise in this age of digital transformation.

The fact of the matter is, those who are qualified for senior-level IT jobs have spent the bulk of their careers overseeing the static, silo-laden infrastructure of the on-premises data center and have only recently come to grips with the scalability and availability of the cloud. In short order, however, both of these environments will become steeped in artificial intelligence, system autonomy, and a host of other technologies that will not only remake data infrastructure itself but also business processes, services, and perhaps the entire business model.

This puts the enterprise in an unstable position when it suddenly finds itself without a key player since it can leave a major gap in day-to-day operations or even bring key processes to a standstill. With the business at risk, then, the faster you can fill that job with a qualified candidate and then transfer the necessary knowledge, the faster you reduce the severity and duration of the situation.

Attributes technically-inclined executive talent should have

The problem that most organizations encounter is that the pool of candidates possessing the right experience and leadership skills is limited. Ideally, you need to find not just a good manager but a technology visionary with the following skillsets:

• Communications. When working with non-technical executive leadership or front-line employees, the candidate must be able to translate complex technology solutions in ways that are both relatable and compelling. Likewise, they must be able to understand the needs and concerns of others as they relate to the mission of the organization.
• Foresight. The ability to seek out mission leaders and champion new initiatives, even in the face of internal blowback, is essential. This skill must apply not only to new deployments but in supporting ongoing programs as well.
• Deep knowledge. Tech leaders should have a broad knowledge of technologies and technology initiatives and should be fully versed in the impact they will have on legacy operations and future goals. The ability to determine risk and evaluate risk ownership is also a key attribute.
• Leadership. Mentoring, monitoring, and managing both individuals and teams is a crucial aspect of the job. Successful project management is also required, as is longer-term strategic thinking.

Laying out the requirements for top technical talent is one thing, actually finding qualified candidates is quite another. A typical mistake is to rely on internal HR and other sources to locate and vet candidates when there are specialized consultants and staffing services that can tap a far wider range of resources to acquire senior-level candidates.

CBTS provides access to top executive talent

At CBTS, we provide quick access to top executive talent with all of the skills needed to take control of demanding technical environments. Since we are at heart a technology company, we understand the technical needs of our clients and what it takes to achieve success in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Our subject matter professionals prescreen all potential candidates to ensure they are experts in their respective fields and maintain all the necessary training and certifications. We also provide a range of staffing solutions, from temporary placements to maintain operations while permanent hires are being vetted, to the transition of the temp executive to full-time status should they turn out to be the right person for the job. Either way, the enterprise saves time and money during the appointment process and lessens the risk of a bad hire or termination.

Conclusion

Despite all of the advanced technology that has come to bear on the modern business model, the most valuable enterprise asset remains its human talent, particularly those at the top of the organizational structure. Vacancies at this level must be filled quickly but not carelessly. By turning to outside help like CBTS, organizations will find that they can satisfy both demands with a temporary hire in conjunction with a thorough, professional candidate search.

For information on how CBTS can help with your staffing needs, please visit: https://www.cbts.com/consulting-services/it-staffing-and-consulting/.

Read more: Companies turn to IT staffing services for digital transformation

Customer satisfaction is everything in the fast-paced, competitive world of eCommerce. With options galore at the click of a mouse, today’s consumer has little patience for downtime, delays, poor service, and, perhaps worst of all, data breaches.

This is why successful retailers invest heavily in infrastructure, platforms, connectivity, and automation to attract clients and maintain high levels of satisfaction – not just in a broad sense, but on a deeply personal level.

Few organizations can do this on their own, however. Many are turning to specialists like CBTS to craft tailored solutions for their individual markets, business objectives, and legacy data environments.

Performance and security

One leading specialty clothing and accessories retailer with more than 1,000 stores in North America, China, and the U.K., and with clients in more than 80 countries around the world, turned to CBTS for an optimized eCommerce solution that delivers maximum performance and top-flight security.

The challenges were considerable. First, the company could not afford any downtime on its website. While its brick-and-mortar stores are the backbone of business operations, its web presence serves as the public face. Even a few minutes of downtime is enough to erode the trust of clients across the globe, especially during the holidays when the bulk of annual revenue is generated.

The company also had volumes of untouched IT operational data that it wanted to leverage for real-time decision making. As with many organizations, however, much of this data was housed in a silo-based infrastructure, which provided limited visibility to analytics or back-office operations systems.

And, to make matters worse, the high profile of the company’s brand made it a target for those seeking to exploit security vulnerabilities. Not only was it imperative to secure this data, the client needed a way to quickly respond to breaches and minimize potential damage.

Splunk to the rescue

CBTS began by deploying a Splunk-based operational intelligence and enterprise-grade security solution. The immediate goal was to quickly resolve system issues while also strengthening the company’s security posture.

Splunk is a multi-faceted platform that can perform a wide range of tasks; however, it requires high-level fine-tuning to provide optimal performance within an existing business model. CBTS Consulting Services provided on-site assistance with Splunk-certified consultants who have extensive experience integrating the platform into legacy environments in extremely tight timeframes.

Through this partnership, CBTS created a multi-point plan to improve business operations and overall business performance.

• Simplify business operations: It was clear that business functions had to be simplified. This involved coordinating and correlating data from multiple IT operations in order to identify inefficiencies, streamline processes, and improve profitability.
• Improve client experience: Equally important was the need to improve the client experience. A first-class eCommerce solution should be optimized to run 24x7x365 with minimal risk of downtime.
• Minimize security risks: In addition, the effort to minimize security risks centered on ensuring that client data was secure and that the new system would quickly detect potential vulnerabilities to cyberattack.

CBTS engagement drives business outcomes

Today, the retailer has a robust operational intelligence solution that supports its IT staff by continuously monitoring network traffic and correlating data from the entire IT stack to quickly identify and neutralize intruders. This implementation not only finds security problems that other systems tend to overlook, it can also be used to diagnose a wide range of non-security issues that impair performance.

CBTS ultimately helped the retailer address a persistent performance problem that resulted in a 40 percent reduction in server load, which freed up bandwidth to allow Spunk to expand its capabilities.

This is a common experience: The more data sources Splunk is able to track, the more powerful it becomes. This project translated into an immediate ROI for the retailer, since it eliminated the need to purchase additional hardware, while improving eCommerce performance, boosting client satisfaction, protecting the company’s brand, and bringing greater functionality and accuracy when projecting revenue and cash flow.

Read about this optimized eCommerce solution from CBTS.

Cisco recently honored CBTS, a leading technology provider that delivers communications, cloud, infrastructure, and consulting solutions to clients across North America, with two awards at the Cisco Partner Summit annual conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

• CBTS received the Execution Excellence Regional Partner of the Year award for its innovation, leadership and best practice as a Cisco business partner across the Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio region.
• CBTS received the SLED Breakaway Partner of the Year award in the U.S. Public Sector.

Joe Putnick, Vice President and Principal for the CBTS Communications Practice, accepted the awards on behalf of the company.

“These awards reflect our commitment to strategic partnerships with Cisco. We pride ourselves in delivering best-in-class solutions, built on Cisco technologies, that deliver positive business outcomes to our clients,” said Putnick.

“We have seen tremendous success with our Hosted Unified Communications as a Service solutions, especially in the SLED space, as more and more clients wish to consume technologies in a hosted model.”

Cisco Partner Summit Theatre awards reflect the top-performing partners within specific technology markets across the country. All award recipients are selected by a group of Cisco Global Partner Organization and regional and theatre executives.

Cisco Partner Summit is attended by more than 2,100 global attendees from Cisco’s ecosystem of partners representing more than 1,000 companies worldwide from more than 75 countries.

Related News:

CBTS awarded Cisco Master of Security Certification

Cisco Certifies CBTS as Unified Contact Center Enterprise Partner

CIO Review names CBTS to Top 20 UC List

The technology challenges come at you from all angles.

You need the right talent to keep the executive suite happy. There’s never enough time or money to do everything with full-timers. You need a blend of excellent full- and part-time experts to wrangle legacy technologies and stay competitive.

A blended IT organization deploys full-timers, part-timers, and contractors to drive the most benefit in the shortest time frame at the optimum budget. Here’s a look at four core challenges you can address with a blended IT organization:

1. Experienced experts are hard to find (and costly to hire)

Recruiting, hiring, and onboarding full-time technology experts can be exasperating for employers and employees alike. For instance, CIO.com reported on a recent survey which found that companies take an average of more than four weeks to hire a full-time technology employee. The same study found that about two-thirds of non-management technology workers said they’d start losing interest in a company if they had no follow-up within two weeks of an interview.

Employing the most in-demand IT professionals can put a dent in your payroll budget. Consider these sample annual salaries from U.S. News & World Report:

• IT manager: $135,800
• Computer network architect: $101,210
• Software developer: $102,280
• Information security analyst: $92,600

Note: These are median salaries, so half of these jobs pay even more.

A blended IT solution, by contrast, can put experienced IT professionals to work within days. Often, they have the precise training and certifications for your business needs. And they can do IT work at every level, from beginning coder to veteran system architect.

Related: CBTS helps CIOs address IT gap.

2. Your IT team has limited resources—but your organization has high expectations

It’s the nature of IT processes to deliver efficiency gains that help an entire organization get more production from fewer people. IT leadership cannot escape the pressure to squeeze greater performance from finite resources.

A blended IT team can help you improve technology performance without hiring more IT people. Your staffing partner can mix and match talent with part-timers, project-based workers, and highly skilled specialists who can fill in when you need them.

You pay only for the labor you need—and at a predictable rate. If your project requires four people for exactly 17 days, your IT staffing partner can find them and put them to work much faster than you ever could on your own. When the 17 days are up, your costs end.

3. Your legacy systems pose more challenges as they age

Enterprises often stick with legacy technologies because the tools may still suit their needs and implementing a new system can be expensive.

But these legacy systems become more expensive to maintain with every passing year. The experts in legacy tech are hitting retirement age, and colleges aren’t training people to master old-school systems.

However, legacy-system experts have not vanished. It’s just difficult to find them and put them to work on your projects. Moreover, technologies like APIs and service layers can help you pull more performance from your legacy systems.

A consultant who specializes in placing IT experts in blended environments will help you find the savviest solution to your legacy technology challenges. Some old technologies will have to be replaced eventually, but you can mold that replacement to your unique business needs if you have a strong staffing partner.

4. Your organization needs to evolve and innovate ASAP

Venture capitalists are pouring billions into startups angling to push incumbents to the sidelines. Cloud technologies, the Internet of Things, AI, and big data present beguiling opportunities to build a moat around your organization and fend off disruptive threats.

It takes best-in-class talent to tap these opportunities. And that talent could be distributed across a half-dozen disciplines and a few dozen technology certifications. Most likely, you don’t need full-time staffers to handle this work. You’re more apt to need a project team that can design a solution, implement it, and train your staff to use it within a tight time frame.

Rapid-fire digital transformation requires talent targeted with laser precision. You might have some of the expertise you need on staff, but you’re far more likely to require highly trained specialists for short-term projects. Typically, your only chance to cover all your bases is to work with a veteran IT staffing consultant.

Staffing up with CBTS Consulting Services

Over the past three decades, CBTS has solved sophisticated IT challenges for companies in every industry. Delivering these solutions required us to contract with highly trained IT professionals across all the most common technology disciplines (and many of the uncommon ones).

Everything we’ve learned about matching IT experts with difficult challenges has gone into our Consulting Services. We have a database with more than 40,000 IT professionals who can do pretty much everything.  Our staffing solutions can place IT experts in your organization while we handle all the payroll details.

To find out how a blended IT structure can help your organization address IT challenges and unleash innovation, please download our free guide.

Related Articles:

CBTS helps CIOs address IT gap

Security starts with enterprise IT knowledge