Before one understands WaaS360, Wipro’s Device as a Service solution, one would need to know the insights that led us to build this device-focused service from the ground up. In our experience, we have observed that while our clients’ endpoints landscape is growing or changing fast, the traditional services around that landscape have not kept up to speed and in fact, have not seen much change in a long time. The number of endpoint options to be managed in a highly complex global ecosystem is increasing rapidly, but there is little to no accountability to ensure good customer experience on these devices.

This gets further complicated by the fact that the market is rapidly evolving, bringing with it a whole lot of challenges that are getting more pronounced by the day. This is making an already-uphill task of maintaining good employee experience using legacy services  a perpendicular climb. Let us highlight some of the major concerns that plague this arena to understand the gravity of the situation we are dealing with:

• Highly dynamic tech world: It’s difficult to find what’s not smart these days. Discussions on the street have moved on to comparing what’s smarter - one person’s phone, another’s watch or yet another’s washing machine? AI, Blockchain, IoT - there are more tech trends today than could have been imagined possible just a few years ago. It’s not easy to keep up with such fast-paced developments when even a day in the tech world can give rise to so many changes.
   
• Global level disruptions: The implications of disruptions like COVID-19 are far-reaching. We live in a highly interlinked world with very strong inter-dependencies, and the examples of this are everywhere.  Because groups of people and institutions are allegedly buying up graphics card to mine bitcoins, even some of the world’s largest corporations are struggling to procure processors on time, and not without extra costs.
   
• The COVID impact has sent out such strong ripples across whole supply chains that even the most hardened Black Belt Lean Six Sigma certified professionals seem inadequate in the face of these new challenges. Organizations are now preparing for event X (where everything that can go wrong will go wrong, simultaneously). Doomsday conjectures aside, there are multiple high-plausibility scenarios that can impact organizations negatively, and serious answers are definitely the need of the hour.
   
• Increasing complexities and costs: Here are some terms from a simple laptop spec sheet - NVMe PCIe, DDR4 RDIMM ECC, mDP to DP and CPU? I don’t know about you, but I was happy to see CPU in this list as it would be the only recognizable term (as long as they are not further probed about the differences between i7-11700K & i7-11375H in CPUs).
  
  Here’s another fun fact: did you know that there are currently 17 different variants of Intel’s 11^th generation i7 processors that were launched recently? Complexity is not only in technical specifications but it is practically present in every inch and corner of the endpoints service arena – multiple OEMs of myriad types of devices and even more services to boot, and hundreds of countries with their own nuances to be carefully considered. In addition to this, there are  complex legal and financial constructs and contracts that no one understands until one is sued. CIOs & CTOs hire expensive consultants to tell them what they already (don’t) know about their own estate -  they are flooded with so much information that if they were to genuinely go through all the data in detail and make some sense of it all: they would have to hire another set of consultants to talk to the first set. 

The state of employee experience

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. But concerns have been going on for so long now that the second part of that popular phrase now seems to read differently. We have been observing that companies are faced with very difficult choices nowadays.

Decision-makers are not debating which option is better but rather which option is the lesser of two evils. For example, whether to make upfront capital expenditure and do a big-bang hardware refresh every few years, leaving little cheese for core business activities or to bleed due to a thousand cuts, incurring cost of finance, leasing out hardware, and managing it all (and trying to look happy while at it).

Somewhere in all of these concerns and sub-optimal elements, the employee experience went out of focus. Clients earnestly do try various glasses on every now and then to make that picture less blurry, but they are often left wanting for more. 

Reimagining choice and experience with WaaS360

Wipro’s WaaS360 is a genuine attempt to address precisely this fundamental disconnect – how to provide the best choices of the time to our clients while elevating employee experience in a way that makes good business sense. We manage the whole arena under WaaS360 for our clients, providing maximum benefits at an optimized TCO (and succeeding while at it). Customer experience need not necessarily be lost in translation anymore.

WaaS360 is not just a bunch of hardware packaged together with some services and it’s not just financial re-engineering. With WaaS360, Wipro has built a proposition from the ground up that is greater than the sum of its parts. We understand that the devil usually lies in the details and we are tackling the details head-on when building this custom (which, thankfully, is easy given its modular and flexible nature) solution for our clients. If you were to ask me why Wipro WaaS360, I would answer the following:

• We’ll manage the whole spectrum of devices and services end-to-end.
• It comes with in-built risk mitigation provisions (even if it’s related to the shaken supply chain).
• You consume it in the truly evergreen “as-a-Service” model.
• It is ready for the future (digital is so old).
• Employees would notice the tangible and considerable uplift in experience.
• Decision-makers would notice a decrease in endpoints estate issues (not that we would hide them somewhere).

I’m not claiming that we’ve solved the ‘event X’ problem but I can assure you that your company will have more resources for its core business activities while you have a great experience on the devices and services we provide.

If you are interested in learning how Wipro is helping our clients achieve their vision of transformation through DaaS, we should talk. Connect with us at ask.cis@wipro.com.

Vikram Singh
Product Manager – WaaS360 (Worldwide), iCORE–CIS, Wipro

Vikram has 8 years’ experience in software & Android app development, consulting, business development & product management. Currently, he manages WaaS360 offering globally while helping customers across industries address challenges of workplace & enhance their employee experience. He’s an alumnus of IIM Kozhikode and has strong interest in gadgets and latest tech trends.