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“Over 70% of IT budgets are spent just keeping the lights on.” How will you get there? P3 is curious to know. off to help others going through the same issues. This organization was in the middle of multiyear acquisition strategy that was great for top line revenue and expanding the business, but costs, complexities, and compliance burdens prevented the full realization of the merger values. This company needed to “Transform” its business, pay off its IT debt, and simplify operations. So the founders created an application decommissioning “factory” that would take legacy and duplicate systems and retire them from production in a compliant fashion. This saved the company millions (many millions), simplified their operations, and allowed investment back into innovations. We are headquartered in Minnetonka, Minnesota, as we found Minnesota to be a state that has many desirable qualities for a small startup: a large diverse and educated workforce, a strong work ethic, a focus on family, good cost of living, and many colleges and universities to keep fresh ideas and talent available and a unique quality of life. Since our founding, we have grown to over 100 people worldwide. The company’s focus is built on a set of service offerings to help companies set up their own “factory” to rationalize existing systems (applications) focusing on cleaning up old legacy systems. Once they’re set up, we teach them “how to fish”—to run the program for themselves—or we run it for them as a service. Over time, through the experiences of archiving and retiring so many applications, we noticed a pattern. One of the longest and costliest parts of the application retirement process is understanding and collecting the source data and understanding the relationships within the data and the context of the data so once it is archived, the business logic and “referential integrity” is maintained.
“Digital Transformation” is the buzzword bingo answer of the day. The marketing terms keep changing over time, but the question remains, “HOW WILL I GET THERE?” Platform 3 Solutions’ heritage stems from a team of people that solved challenges that face all companies. How does a company continue to grow, expand, and innovate with the mandate to cut costs, simplify business, and meet compliance needs?
This was a key component in our journey as the data we are working with is under heavy compliance and governance. As a result, we invested into encapsulating all these laborious best practices into building an end-to-end proprietary platform that grows —we call it ARCHON. We use Automation and Machine Learning (ML) skills to resolve complex data discovery and relationship identification problems and we use Micro services architecture to provide scalable solutions to handle high volumes of data processing as part of the ARCHON Platform.
Let’s break this down. Transforming your business “digitally” generally refers to innovation, automation, and the proverbial “better, faster, cheaper” through embracing newer technologies. Today cloud, mobile, artificial intelligence. and IoT are driving transformational change in many organizations. You might be in an acquisition mode, maybe moving to a cloud platform to simplify your IT operations and reduce costs, or maybe your old tired legacy systems are not able to support innovations. There are many reasons you are “transforming” your business and it all revolves around technology.
Besides the practical reasons in retiring older systems to save money and strive for better data governance, there is also the privacy and security concerns. Base platform technologies have gone end-of-life.
Platform 3 started with a group of people in 2014 who created and lead the “IT cleanup” efforts for a Fortune 10 company and decided to break 125