The average age of a company in the S&P 500 has fallen from 60 years old in the 1950s to less than 20 years old now, according to Credit Suisse analysts. The culprit: disruptive technology.

The speed of innovation is harder to keep up with than ever before—and it’s not slowing down. The longevity of a business depends on its operational agility; you must be able to adopt new technologies and processes to adapt to new challenges. And nothing gives you the flexibility to do so like a cloud architecture.

Companies often receive mandates to modernize their operations to cut costs and become more adaptable, but they can’t wait for their technology providers to develop the capabilities they need. They need to act now—the stakes are too high to wait. If you don’t evolve at the right time to keep pace with your competition when things change, you risk becoming a statistic.

It’s critical to partner with the right technology provider from the start—one who provides for the needs of your business today and 10 years down the road, no matter what that looks like. Your technology provider must be able to offer three important qualities.

1. Mobility

A technology provider needs an attractive set of offers that address a comprehensive set of needs. To be ready for the future, you need the tools to achieve any outcome, big or small, now and in the future.

Outgrowing a technology provider is costly. Even after you consider having to sacrifice everything you spent and built so far, there’s still the human cost of having to undergo another big change to your organization. Your provider should not only have a plan ready to carry you forward to your next solution, but they also need to facilitate the transition and make it as pain-free as possible with speed, reliability and a laser-like focus on manifesting your outcomes.

A provider who doesn’t offer the breadth of choices that accommodates your continual growth isn’t worth your initial investment. Failing to provide an evolutionary path to the next level of your business is a characteristic of a technology “vendor,”  and I’ve made no secret of my feelings on that word.

2. Agility

Look for a technology provider with lightweight and flexible offers that give you the ability to meet daily challenges. Harness the power of disruptive technology and make it work for you. A modern operation means relying less on hardware and letting the cloud do the heavy lifting, decreasing the amount of attention paid to maintaining and continuously upgrading physical machines in your data center. You should have the ability to scale up or down in response to fluctuations in demand to maximize every investment. A modern operation means using an architecture that can be expanded with new capabilities as they become available—without having to install and manage a completely new version.

3. Delight

Most importantly, your technology provider should enable you to deliver the types of modern experiences to customers and employees that win praise and inspire loyalty. The ultimate outcome of your operational agility is that you can keep pace with innovations that shape expectations from one trend to the next. You can start conversations and speak the language of today—not of three years ago. This bolsters your credibility and enables you to track the success of your efforts. This data, when consumed intelligently, provides invaluable insights on how to realign your strategy and respond to new behaviors down the road.

Modernize Your Experiences

You need to keep pace with change and that drives you to choose a technology provider. But not every provider can keep pace with you. Choose a technology partner who can modernize your experiences at each phase of your evolution.

Be sure to watch our upcoming webinar, Onwards and cloudwards! Explore your options for moving toward the cloud, to learn how Genesys works to future-proof the purchasing decisions of our customers.