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WATCH: What You Missed From Carousel Industries’ Always On Technology Symposium

What does success look like in digital transformation? That was the question posed at Carousel Industries’ fourth annual Always On Technology Symposium, where executives discussed a winning criteria that they say can transform a business.

“Success is very subjective as we all know, but from a business perspective it is critical that we get to a point where it is objective,” said Jason Viera, chief technology officer at Carousel, based in Rhode Island. “You know in the case of AI: At what point does it make sense in my business? At what point does it not make sense?”

Research shows that 89 percent of businesses today have started digital transformation initiatives but only about 30 percent succeed. According to Chief Technologist at Avaya Jean Turgeon, that’s because many companies are not balancing new technologies with the old. He suggests implementing technology that fits into your company’s culture, which should be customer-serving and evolve as needed.

“A lot of people think it’s a choice between this and this—and it’s not. You know people look at cloud today and say, I’m on-prem [a private cloud instance] and I have to move services to the public cloud. Well, not necessarily. You can move some event services into the public cloud while you maintain some services on-prem. So, it’s an evolution of both that have to coexist,” said Turgeon. Avaya is based in Santa Clara, Calif. It specializes in contact center and unified communications solutions.

Meraki General Manager Todd Nightingale says his best tip for success is to focus on solutions—and not the technology. Meraki offers SD-WAN capabilities and unified management of cloud resources, mobile devices, PCs and other networked components from a centralized dashboard.

“We work very hard at Meraki, for example, to never focus on future requests but always to work on customer problems and use cases and try to solve those use cases with the best technology for the solution and not try to add a featured list of different things in a grab bag,” said Nightingale. “My advice is to focus on the problem and the user.”