Benchmarking Service Desk and Desktop Management Pricing for a Multinational Electronics Company

Executive Summary

One of the world’s largest electronics companies was in the midst of selecting a third-party service provider to manage its IT infrastructure. As a part of the vetting process, the client engaged Everest Group to benchmark the service desk and desktop management prices proposed by the providers, both in comparison to each other and to overall market standards, to support its customers in a wide range of countries.

The Client’s Challenge

The client has an extremely large base of business customers in mature delivery locations, including the U.S. and India, and in less mature delivery locations, including Brazil, China, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Singapore, and needed price benchmarks for each country. The client also required separate benchmarks for the packaging and scripting (i.e., desktop image management) component of desktop management.

Insight to Action

Everest Group leveraged a combination of two approaches to develop the benchmarks for the client. For the mature delivery locations, it used direct benchmarking wherein it filtered its own proprietary pricing database to isolate price points that were most comparable to the client situation. Everest Group then analyzed the price points to remove the low-end and high-end outliers. It used the resultant data set to derive the price benchmarks for the mature locations.

For the less mature delivery locations, Everest Group utilized a price triangulation approach to estimate desktop and service desk pricing. Everest Group also leveraged price triangulation to estimate the pricing for packaging and scripting in each country.

Impact

Everest Group’s price benchmarks enabled the client to compare each of the provider’s bids with prevalent market pricing for all the in-scope countries. Everest Group also provided the client with insights on pricing variations due to factors, including service location (i.e., campus locations versus remote locations) and SLAs (i.e., basic support versus VIP support). Everest Group’s in-depth explanation of the benchmarking and the pricing variation analyses enabled to client to internalize the benchmarks and be well prepared for negotiations with the service providers.