Achieving a digital business advantage

UPDATED 11/9/18

In our previous posts on the digital business imperative, we discussed why digital is at the top of business agendas and what digital business transformation entails. This included how IT can deliver the infrastructure that enables a digital business model. Let’s examine how organizations can leverage this IT infrastructure to achieve all the advantages by digital business.

However, instead of discussing this conceptually, we’ll delve into specific examples of organizations achieving a competitive advantage through their implementation of the digital business model.

Here at Axway, we work with organizations that span a wide range of industries. This includes financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and automotive. While organizations in each industry face a unique set of business challenges, one element that’s consistent across them is that companies either gain a competitive advantage by deploying a digital business model or lose to competitors who do.

For example, a well-established European auto manufacturer had a large variety of file transfer solutions in place used for exchanging files with external partners, and many of the solutions were home-grown and script-based. The replacement of the insecure protocols with secure protocols became necessary in order to comply with the company’s security policies. In addition, there was a need to offer a single solution for establishing connections with business partners worldwide, and one that offered both ad hoc and automated processes.

This manufacturer turned to our Axway SecureTransport enterprise solution, which is a multi-protocol MFT gateway for securing, managing, and tracking file flows among people and applications inside the enterprise, and beyond the firewall to user communities, the cloud and mobile devices.

Better communicate

With Axway SecureTransport, the company was able to establish a centralized, standardized managed file transfer service in order to better communicate with its extensive supplier network. Remember, we noted in earlier blog posts that organizations are facing the digital business challenge of catering to an ever-increasing ecosystem of customers and partners, and this was an example of our customer overcoming this challenge to move one step closer to becoming a truly digital business.

Another example of this is an organization that’s one of the largest energy companies in the Netherlands and the nation’s leading producer of sustainable energy. This company had an ongoing business challenge to simplify and industrialize the process of providing Web services to its users, especially to enable mobile access.

Back in 2009, the company started looking for a solution to enable web services for its four categories of users: the general public, customers, partners and employees. Contrary to organizations that leverage their existing IT infrastructure to enable digital business technologies, this organization decided to completely re-engineer its architecture and implemented Axway API Gateway as a foundational technology, which communicates with customer-facing, build-to-change applications, acting as a bridge to the outside world.

Today, Axway API Gateway secures a broad array of this energy company’s Web services and mobile applications. This includes new uses constantly coming down the pipeline. As a result, the organization is able to enable online business services and mobile applications, and provide new offerings for multiple platforms.

Jog your memory

We’re going to jog your memory again! We noted in previous blog posts that in order to become a digital business, an organization has to be able to deliver innovative new services to its customers on their customers’ terms. This organization was able to do exactly that.

These are just a few examples of how organizations can leverage technology designed to govern the flow of data in order to enable the digital business. One thing is evident: the organizations that will succeed in the modern business era are the ones that don’t approach digital business as a new mobile application, but rather the ones that secure, manage and control all aspects of new data flows and business processes.

Here at Axway we don’t simply champion the advantages of a truly digital business but are in the field with our customers to help make the promise a reality.