Verizon Business is among the growing number of service providers that are becoming part of enterprise digital transformation efforts as they can often take advantage of their own internal efforts to advise clients.

Debika Bhattacharya, Chief Product Officer at Verizon Business Group, explained during an interview at the recent MEF Member Summit that the carrier has a history of acquisitions that have required it to be very active in transforming legacy systems onto new, digital platforms. This has provided it with intimate knowledge in how enterprises can approach such projects.

“Companies like Verizon have decades of systems and technology, and it comes from acquiring companies,” Bhattacharya said. “There is no way to just switch a light bulb and change it all, that that would never happen. But some of the ways to do it is to migrate customers off older systems to newer systems.”

This migration is also complicated by legacy equipment that continues to do its job, is in most cases already paid for, and is a known commodity by an organization’s IT team.

“We have a lot of customers who are on legacy technology, and in many cases it works just fine, so there really is no compelling need to change,” she said. “However, from Verizon’s perspective, it’s older technology and there is a compelling need to change. Usually we work with customers with the migration path, not just from a technology standpoint, but also from a commercial and business outcomes standpoint so that they are migrating over to new technology.”

Bhattacharya explained that Verizon Business tackles this challenge by using a “digital enablement layer” that uses APIs to act as a “translator or an intermediate buffer layer.” This removes the need to immediately forklift in a new platform and reduces near-term integration challenges.

“There’s always a little bit of reluctance to change something that’s not broken,” Bhattacharya said. “However, everybody that I know of is in agreement that that process needs to evolve. I think what we need to do … is helping articulate the benefits associated with moving away from some of these older technologies in terms of the ROIs. There’s fewer errors with API’s, you don’t have as much manual work needed, so there’s cost savings associated with that.”

This digital transformation can also open future-looking business opportunities that can help an organization boost growth opportunities.

“It’s just building the business case associated with it, knowing that it’s not going to be an overnight change,” Bhattacharya said. “We have to pick the areas where we would see the first green chutes, and then once you get started it gets easier.”

Getting to that point is a vital part of the digital transformation journey. It then becomes paramount for an organization to lay out a clear and defined technological journey, taking into account where it’s at today, where it wants to go, and what resources it will need to get there.

“It’s funny, because we might be talking to the same customer, they’re talking about advanced microservices and everything they’re going to do and then the next minute they’re talking about not being able to find parts in their factory floor,” Bhattacharya said of past Verizon Business efforts. “They deal with complex solutions and problems as well that seem very mundane. As a service provider we have to help support both and they have both new and old problems. It’s really finding the right point.”

Check out the latest SDxCentral 7 Layers Podcast to hear more from Bhattacharya.