How to grow the top line with innovation

Frank Zappa was an eclectic, innovative musician with unique point of view. He once said, "All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff."

I like Frank Zappa in the same way I like death metal and bagpipes—meaning that I occasionally enjoy Frank in relatively small doses. In this quotation about “all the good music,” Frank fails to recognize the innovative contributions to music of composers and writers like Penderecki, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Wham!—not to mention Frank himself. If all the good stuff really had already been written by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, does that mean that the music of Brian Eno, White Zombie, and REO Speedwagon is crap? Hardly.

I’ll posit that music, like a lot of other stuff, needs innovation to grow and thrive. Although I appreciate Baroque-period music on occasion, if Frank’s take on the music scene were right, I’d be listening to the harpsicord for hours every week—ugh…

Zappa also said, "Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible." Tech companies, like music, also have a need for innovation. They need to provide an appropriate innovation platform for their customers in order for them to thrive. Several systems integrators are doing that right now with the cloud.

Pricewaterhouse Coopers offers a Cloud-Powered Innovation solution that enables companies to get faster real-time feedback from their customers and quickly zero in on what their customers wantso they can focus on innovation.

Companies not only need to innovate, they need to innovate quickly to capitalize on current trends and outmaneuver the competition. It reminds me of these words from Steve Jobs, “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” According to Accenture, Leaders in technology adoption experienced 5 times the revenue growth over Laggards from 2018 through 2021. Leaders have learned to embrace technology like they do change. Further, Accenture notes that “Leapfroggers” will pass the Leaders. Leapfroggers combine two characteristics:

• They’re cloud native. They’ve built their core systems in the cloud.
• They’ve flipped the script on their IT budget. Instead of 70% going to maintenance and 30% for innovation, they budget 70% for innovation and the rest for maintenance.

Is there ever a bad time to invest in innovation? Apparently not. According to McKinsey, companies that continue to invest in innovation during crises outperform the market (S&P 500) by 10%. Not only that, they also continue to outpace the market during the subsequent recovery years (there’s always a recovery) by 30%. That’s really growing the top line and beating the competition.

Innovative NetApp^® offerings can help you get new products and services to market quickly and effectively. NetApp’s deep integration with the major hyperscalers (Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services) enables you to devote more resources to innovating and to reduce the resources required for maintenance.

NetApp has been at the forefront in providing an innovation platform that leverages the hybrid cloud. It’s the same platform that you can use for your Oracle, SAP, and SQL Server environments to deliver more to your top line. Check it out today.