Arto Kuusinen, CGI’s Vice president of Global Business Engineering sat down with Nokia Head of Enterprise and Services Cloud Yilmaz Karayilan to compare notes and share their opinions on how they view the role of strategic partnerships in IT for businesses.

“If you want to invest in the future, you need to invest in AI, cloud and data”, says Yilmaz, and Arto agrees. Leading businesses are integrating IT with core business functions, leveraging new technologies, and transforming their partnership models.

 

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Creating strategic partnerships in the era of new technologies

Nokia is currently able to offer one-stop-shop service for their customers, including cloud services. But with the help of strategic partnerships, expanding business opportunities is made easier: customers can continue using their existing Google or AWS platforms and integrate them to other services with Nokia, for example.

“Technology partners such as Google or AWS saw us years ago as a competitor, but today we work together, and we offer their solutions proudly, but they also see why we need to have our private systems”, Yilmaz Karayilan explains.

Working together in a strategic partnership allows each company to focus on their core business. Bringing a piece of the puzzle from elsewhere requires trust - both building it, but also maintaining it, as Yilmaz says: “A strategic partnership is a must. We need to know our limitations and admit those, and rather than trying to copy or develop what’s already in place, figure out a business model where we can leverage those partnerships”.

Building trust allows to find solutions faster

Both Arto and Yilmaz agree that problems don’t necessarily lead to the breakdown of this trust, but not communicating about them openly can. Especially in innovation, failure is inevitable, and failing fast to eventually get to the solution requires speaking openly about those shortcomings.

On how to get there, Yilmaz explained his working model:

“I listen to the strategic partner and our internal employees, and they all have the same voting right. That enables these innovations – where we maybe fail five times, but fail quickly – and so far it’s working.”

Yilmaz also touched on the recent discussion around the working environment, and emphasized that trust doesn’t require a shared physical location: “Wherever people are located, if you can build this safe environment and give them opportunities to grow and their voice is heard – it doesn’t matter where they are. Most of the time they’re doing more than what they’re meant to be doing, because they know they’re accountable and they have that mandate to do it.”

Choose the right partner for the right project to succeed

Sometimes goals and timelines don’t align, and then it’s better to look at alternatives. You need to accept that sometimes a strategic partnership just doesn’t happen, and look into it at another time in the future. This is especially important, as a failure on the part of a strategic partner is also viewed as your own failure, in that you failed to evaluate your partner correctly for that project.

Watch the new episode now to hear the rest of the discussion – including which new technology Yilmaz suggests as especially fruitful to build strategic partnerships instead of trying to develop your own service. Join the discussion on our social media, and tell us what you think about the role of partnerships and new technologies to the future of IT business.

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