Crayon: Accelerating Clients' Digital Transformation Journey

Florent Bellahsene, Vice President, Crayon APAC

In South East Asia, the biggest challenge for organizations is to understand the role of an enterprise asset management (EAM) team. For instance, what should be the key focus area for an EAM team—IT operations or procurement? While there are no ‘silver bullets’ for EAM, many companies employ software asset management (SAM) tools to solve their business problems and fail to recognize the significance of EAM. However, a company that considers EAM to be imperative and has worked with many customers to design EAM strategies is Crayon. “After developing EAM strategies, we define and build the right tools, processes and skills required to implement an EAM practice successfully,” begins Florent Bellahsene, VP, Crayon APAC.

With a structured approach to EAM, Crayon offers a wide range of digital transformation services. These include digital asset planning, software and cloud economics, and GDPR assessments through its global SAM iQ portal, publisher optimizations, audit reviews, mentoring and managed services. The firm has the largest independent cloud economics practice with a managed services portfolio—Cloud Easy—that helps organizations understand the benefits of cloud migration. For these businesses, Cloud Easy provides the necessary architecture, security, and technical assessments to determine the workloads to be moved to the cloud.

Crayon helps clients to optimize their technology offerings through its IP on Intelligent Cloud and an integrated suite of customer support and engagement platforms linked to the company’s technical services such as Cloud iQ, Cloud Desk, and SAM iQ.

After developing EAM strategies, we define and build the right tools, processes, and skills required to implement an EAM practice successfully

The Crayon team brings extensive experience in SAM, volume software licensing optimization, cloud adoption, digital engineering, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and predictive analytics. Such in-depth knowledge and understanding validate the firm’s expertise in supporting its customers to accelerate their digital transformation journey. “Our strategy is to ensure our customers in South East Asia have full access to Crayon services andthe necessary support to optimize their cloud technology and digital transformation. To facilitate this, we are implementing a coherent co-investment plan with Microsoft and other hyperscale cloud partners to enhance technical and customer support capabilities within the region,” says Bellahsene.

With Microsoft Azure platform, Crayon has assisted a multitude of organizations in their digital transformation strategies including Trusted Source, a business and technology services provider in Singapore. When Trusted Source discovered an urgent need to raise the level of its busi¬ness agility, it engaged with Crayon to become more agile and meet its evolving business needs. As a software partner, Crayon offered Microsoft Azure that helped Trusted Source to access vast compute and storage resources and value-added tools through the power of the cloud. The leading cloud platform, coupled with Crayon’s assistance, allowed Trusted Source to migrate most of its workloads to Azure and thereby improve business agility.

Through the years, Crayon has expanded across South East Asia in countries such as the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore. The company recently has acquired Tribal Knowledge, a Singapore-based strategic software and cloud economics consulting firm that will enable Crayon to provide expert software licensing and cloud analytics support to customers in the region. Currently, Crayon is working towards building an AI Center of Excellence (CoE) in Singapore with a focus on serving clients in the South East Asia region. With this mission, the company is forming a cross-functional team of data scientists, data engineers, and AI advisors. This team will collaborate with leading customers and institutions in South East Asia to create tangible value for clients by developing and deploying AI solutions, as well as supporting their AI transformation programs. The CoE will work with its counterpart in Europe along with government agencies, research centers and academia, commercial partners, start-ups, and other AI ecosystem players to drive the overall advancement of AI in the region.