Everything is becoming connected and when semiconductors become connected, data becomes readily available... And, internally that affects IT in a profound way.

Technology is helping IT organizations to be faster, more flexible, and create the headroom needed to help focus on improving user experience and doing things faster.

Scale is very important. Speed is very important. And to achieve those, one has to involve partners.

A fast-changing ecosystem demands that organizations adapt faster. And, as organizations realize this, they seek to leverage technology to bring about this transformation at a pace the environment demands.

Take Analog Devices (ADI), for instance. As one of the leading organizations in the semiconductor industry, ADI is working to respond to market needs quickly and efficiently.

When Komal Jain, Vice President, and head of High-Tech Industry vertical at Infosys, spoke to the VP & CIO of ADI, Peter Forte, the changing industry and the resulting change within organizations, and the importance of building a good partnership, were at the center of the discussion.

The one thing that is central to enable all this? Connectivity.

“Everything is becoming connected and when semiconductors become connected, data becomes readily available,” says Forte, adding that because of that the organization is now becoming less of a hardware company, and more of a software company, a data management company, and an algorithm-driven company.

“And, internally that affects IT in a profound way,” he says, talking about how the organization has started hiring more software engineers.

This, in turn, leads to another set of asks, as expectations of software engineers are very different from hardware engineers. Not only does this have a serious impact on the company, but also on the IT organization supporting those broader initiatives as well.

Forte notes that it’s all about speed and flexibility.

“Our employees who join our company, and other companies in technology, expect a choice. They expect flexibility, and they want to be enabled to do their job,” says Forte, adding that these expectations bring along concerns around managing risk, managing security as devices become more connected, and managing what happens inside the enterprise with the IP.

Forte believes that technology is helping organizations like theirs balance the two macro-level trends, especially through the cloud, and the services that are available in the cloud.

“Technology is really helping IT organizations to be faster, more flexible, and create the headroom we need to help focus on improving user experience and doing things faster,” says Forte.

Doing all of this internally is out of the question today, according to Forte, and partners such as Infosys, play a crucial role here. Infosys has been a long-standing partner with Analog Devices along this journey.

“Those days are gone, especially for companies that are growing in an industry that's very acquisitive,” he says, adding: “Scale is very important. Speed is very important. And to achieve those, you have to involve partners.”

Partners help organizations manage services at every layer – for instance - data center and hosting services, or desktop support at multiple levels.

“Every layer has to be scaled and optimized to move faster at the speed of business,” says Forte.