As one of the world’s leading providers of accountancy and business management solutions, Sage supports organisations by allowing them to focus on their core services, rather than worrying about critical but non-revenue generating activities. Acquisitions have helped fuel its growth, with eleven in Spain alone. This meant that Sage needed to integrate and unify its communications into a single infrastructure.

An undertaking on such a scale meant significant challenges – Sage needed to adapt to the needs of the business and be able to scale in line with business growth, without disruptive change and in a cost-effective manner.

As Fernando Galvache, CIO at Sage says, “We live the digital transformation as a real revolution. The business is changing, the customer needs are changing and how we buy things is also changing. All this is driving us to transform and help our 300,000 customers in Spain with their transformation.”

To deliver this, Sage needed an infrastructure that could provide scalability, speed and the ability to adapt to its needs. In short, all the benefits of cloud. Searching for a partner that could meet its requirements led it to Telefónica.

Telefónica provided a virtual datacentre solution based on VMware technology. As well as the core benefits, it also meant that, in the words of Enrique Gonzalez Lezana, head of marketing for cloud services at Telefónica, “it was not changing the way [Sage was] working, because they were already working with the technology.”

For Sage, the outcomes of the project can be summarised into two key areas, according to Galvache – cost efficiency and speed. “[We have saved] 60 per cent of the IT budget dedicated to IT infrastructures and communications. Secondly, the flexibility in the response and implementation time. We have managed to reduce, in some cases, the implementation time by 90 per cent, making the project not just an internal success but an international reference.”

He feels that embracing innovation and digital transformation have been key to this success. “We were the first company to implement 100 per cent virtualisation in a very short time. My advice to any company that is now considering a digital transformation is to do it immediately. In the end things will change and those that haven’t adapted will no longer exist.”

Watch the video to hear more about how Telefónica and VMware helped Sage on its digital transformation journey:

Take a look at other stories of innovation here.

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