COVID-19 Update from WatServ

By WatServ

March 18, 2020

As we all continue to monitor the ongoing events of coronavirus (COVID-19) in Canada, WatServ has taken additional precautions, based on recommendations by the Government of Canada, to ensure the safety of our employees and clients:

We’ve cancelled all non-essential travel.
Anyone on our team who has recently traveled internationally will be self isolating.
Our team is now working remotely from their home offices and our Toronto office has been temporarily closed.

WatServ has always had a geographically distributed workforce, remote work capabilities and an agile workplace culture, so you can continue to expect the highest levels of service from our team. Furthermore, WatServ has a strong degree of experience and cloud infrastructure is resilient, so your services continue to be stable and available – wherever you are in the world.

In the days ahead, as we continue to limit in-person interactions, we’ll ensure effective operations by:

Fostering open and honest communication: Now, more than ever, is a time to over-communicate rather than under-communicate and to openly share feedback, ideas, concerns and updates.
Practicing “video on”: We will encourage the use of video conferencing for key meetings with our clients, where possible.
Treating business not as usual: We understand that no business will be spared some degree of impact from this situation and we encourage you to reach out and share your business concerns with us openly and transparently. We will do our part to support your business through this difficult time.

Finally, many companies are currently implementing business continuity measures. If you require resources or information regarding technology preparedness, please reach out to us at [email protected].

WatServ demonstrates best-in-class capability and market leadership through proven technology and customer commitment.

About

WatServ is an IT solutions provider that helps organizations digitally transform through cloud technologies and managed services.

Serving clients as a trusted advisor since 2006, WatServ provides experience-tested, strategic solutions across all stages of the digital transformation journey. Clients choose WatServ to migrate infrastructure and applications to the cloud, secure critical data, implement disaster recovery, deploy virtual desktop, enable data-readiness for productivity solutions and manage IT environments.

Our clients span a broad range of industries, and we’re a global supplier of IT services for many Brookfield Portfolio Companies. To help our mid-size clients, we provide scalable offerings that simplify cloud adoption and drive business optimization. For enterprise clients, we co-create cloud solutions that enable stability and efficiency for complex IT tools and processes.

With more than 15 years of experience, WatServ has a track record of delivering quantifiable business results and a superior client experience. Ranked as one of Canada’s Top 100 Solution Providers for the last three years in a row, WatServ is always on.

Insights from DX3 Canada 2020

By Aleks Hara, Director, Cloud Service Sales

March 16, 2020

On March 10, 2020, WatServ was pleased to attend DX3 2020, Canada’s largest retail, marketing and technology conference. Although day two of the conference was cancelled due to COVID-19 precautions, our team came away from the event with several insights.

In particular, DX3 painted a picture of the retail industry’s new landscape. Gone are the days when retailers simply had to open up shop and customers would come. Nowadays, customers expect retailers to come to them via personalized advertising and shopping experiences, unique and differentiated touchpoints and customer engagement in the places they’re already frequenting. Every retailer needs to be a technology company in order to survive and thrive in this fast, on-demand marketplace. Failing to connect meaningfully with customers usually ends poorly, as we saw with Forever 21.

So, how can a retailer create personalized experiences? How can they understand and connect with their customers authentically? The answer is data. Lots of data. And, lots of meaningful insights derived from the data.

Many of the exhibitors and sponsors at DX3 2020 were technology SaaS providers that offer solutions to ingest, digest and make sense of retailer data using things like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), proprietary algorithms and other software-based innovations. They provide big companies, like Canadian Tire, with tools to make better business decisions, specifically by leveraging data and transforming it into meaningful insights. These insights can be used to drive new ideas for products and services, as well as spark ideas for unique ways of connecting with audiences.

However, for data analysis to work, a retailer must first collect and provide accurate and relevant data. Before it’s ever analyzed and put into algorithms, it’s got to be the right data. The trouble is many retailers aren’t using the latest ERP or CRM tools and either simply don’t capture enough data or don’t capture relevant data points.

To combat this, many of the technology vendors we spoke with at DX3 discussed the idea that, when leveraging new technology, companies should take a “crawl, walk, run” approach:

Crawl– Implement foundational IT systems that capture, store and segment relevant data.
Walk– Add AI, ML and other software to make sense of the data and provide strategy going forward.
Run– Rely almost exclusively on software results to make quick and agile decisions.

How can WatServ help? At WatServ, we play an integral role in the early (“crawl”) stages of transforming and updating database capabilities. By offering cloud technology services – such as putting SQL and Dynamics in Azure – we empower retailers to embrace the latest technology tools, which they can then leverage to process and refine their data. The lessons we learned at DX3 reminded us that a strong foundation, like the ones we provide to our clients, is critical to data-driven business success.

Thank you to everyone we met at DX3.

WatServ demonstrates best-in-class capability and market leadership through proven technology and customer commitment.

About

WatServ is an IT solutions provider that helps organizations digitally transform through cloud technologies and managed services.

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Month: March 2020