Tag: next generation global services

Software Eats Everything | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

A widely quoted phrase these days is “software eats everything.” It refers to the great value that software delivers. I believe it also applies to the profound impact it’s making in the services world. Software is disintermediating the industrialized labor arbitrage model and also infrastructure services. Let’s look at the huge implications for the services industry.

How is software eating services? It’s happening in a number of important ways and areas.

Software eating BPO

First, software enables automation and RPA to replace much of what the current industrialized arbitrage model does. Much of this work is repetitive and screams for a more automated approach. BPO work, for instance, bridges the gap between the labor that interfaces between records and the system of records. As I’ve blogged before, software is about to eat BPO labor.

DevOps and software eating infrastructure services

The DevOps revolution’s impact on infrastructure services is another example of software eating everything. A fully integrated DevOps platform allows defining code for infrastructure hardware at the same time as defining code for functionality. Increasingly in a software-defined infrastructure, companies can build an integrated DevOps platform that enables simultaneously configuring the entire supply chain from functionality all the way down to the number of cores it requires to run and test it.

Prior to the DevOps movement, all these steps were labor based, and much of this work migrated into the industrialized arbitrage model. They now become largely automated and software controlled.

Software and virtual services eating infrastructure services

Another example within infrastructure is the infrastructure itself. Five years ago, companies operated in a world where they were trying to move from 20 servers per FTE to 50. Most of the infrastructure service providers succeeded based upon their ability to make that shift.

Today, the services industry tries to get up to somewhere in the range of 200 to 500 FTEs per server. But the highly automated world in Silicon Valley has over 100,000 virtual servers per person. They’ve completely severed the link between people and servers. Again, a dramatic example of software eating everything.

SaaS, BPaaS impact

Another dramatic example of software eating everything is the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) offerings. These software-based services offerings completely automate and configure the software, hardware, and business process experience for customers. SaaS and BPaaS completely upend the classic functional model previously used to deliver these functions.

Implications for the service industry

Software eating everything is a relentless focus on different ways to sever the traditional link of labor (FTEs) to service. The dislocation to labor-based businesses will be immense over the next few years as this journey to a software-defined world continues and existing business models struggle to adapt.

A software-defined marketplace will dramatically change the current services market. It will create opportunities for new industries to emerge and force tremendous tension on the incumbent service providers to survive by embracing the change and cannibalizing their existing work.


Photo credit: Flickr

Lessons from IBM | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Have you noticed how few service providers have the ability maintain a market leader role when the market changes to favor new technologies, or new service models? It’s very difficult to make this shift, and I’ve seen very few companies achieve the shift – let alone do it three times. Just one. Wow!

If we look back at the service provider landscape in the early 1990s in the classic outsourcing space, the leaders in the service industry were Accenture, CSC, EDS, IBM, and Perot.

Then the growth opportunities shifted to the labor arbitrage model in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Suddenly the group of leaders changed to Accenture, Cognizant, IBM, Infosys, and Wipro.

Now as we move away from those classic leaders and shift to the new models (SaaS, BPaaS, platforms, and consumption-based), there are three leaders: ADP, IBM, and Salesforce.

Lessons from IBM

Looking back at the market leaders over the years, some have disappeared, as the figure above illustrates. EDS is now owned by HP, Perot is owned by Dell, and ACS is owned by Xerox. What stands out in the graph is that only one company has been able to consistently shift when the market shifts – IBM.

How have they managed to do this? Here are some lessons we can learn from Big Blue.

  1. Be willing to divest. IBM has been absolutely ruthless and relentless in forcing itself to divest businesses that constrain the firm and prevent them from successfully moving into the markets.
  2. I blogged about the noise in social media earlier this year about IBM’s potential layoffs and explained it was a reskilling issue. I think this is yet another example of the firm having the discipline to take the medicine and do the things that allow it to succeed and maintain a leadership position.
  3. Buy, don’t build. IBM’s approach to entering new markets is often through acquisitions. The firm is quite willing to learn from others and leverage an existing business. IBM recognizes that business models are different, and it’s very difficult to build a new business model inside of the old one. Therefore, they buy new companies.
  4. Protect new businesses. After acquiring a company, IBM protects that business. They incubate them and allow them to grow. In the last two years, IBM launched two new divisions: analytics (Watson) and cloud. The firm pulls those businesses out of the rest of the company and connects the R&D to Big Blue’s customers in a tight loop. It also protects these businesses from IBM’s mainstream businesses, which would tend to prey on them and inhibit their progress.

These four strategies have enabled IBM to maintain market leadership despite market shifts. They stand out as lessons for other firms seeking to stay relevant and stay in leadership positions in the market.


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Why Everest Group Changed its Point of View on Infosys | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Since publishing our two most recent blogs about the business situation at Infosys (Connecting All the Dots and Silicon Valley company) and comparing those perspectives to our blogs over the past two years, people have asked us: “Why did you change your point of view about Infosys?” Here’s why – it’s because most of what we predicted about Infosys came true.

We have a relentlessly objective point of view, and our blogs over the past couple of years pointed out the internal problems we observed at Infosys. We called the firm out early on its arrogance and hubris in the marketplace, evidenced in its commitment to premium pricing despite the unsustainability of its pricing vis a vis the marketplace, along with its inward-looking focus instead of focusing on customer intimacy.

Because of these actions, in the midst of the maturing AO market and changing customer expectations, we predicted a slow down at Infosys. And it happened.

As the board at Infosys started to understand the same things that we called out, they made some interesting moves; and we’re largely supportive of the moves. If they want Infosys to be a leading high-tech firm, they need to bring in different leadership. They did that by bringing in an external executive as the new CEO in 2014. And it’s clear that the firm’s leadership is now deploying a customer-facing strategy rather than continuing to be inward-looking. This isn’t just a story line; Infosys is backing up its statements with investments in new leadership talent over the past two months as well as in other actions.

Before, we saw a once-proud firm with internal problems, which talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk. We increasingly see Infosys pivot strongly to next-generation leadership, taking steps to give the firm a chance at success again.

It’s too early to say whether the recent moves and strategy will work. And as I said in my earlier blog, execution eats strategy. But the next step in strategy is putting their money where their mouth is, and there is every sign that Infosys is starting to do that. As such, we applaud Infosys’ progress.

As we called out Infosys when we saw problems, we now comment on it as it moves forward. To date, history validated our point of view. Now that Infosys is dealing with its issues and taking consistent actions to move the firm forward, we’ve acknowledged their progress and amended our point of view accordingly.


Photo credit: Infosys

 

Is Infosys Repositioning as a Silicon Valley Company? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

At Everest Group, we’ve heard industry rumors that Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka – formerly on SAP’s Executive Board and global lead for products and innovation – recently hired two former SAP executives based in Silicon Valley. This move comes on the heels of Sikka planning to invest in startups in Silicon Valley. What does all this mean for Infosys and for the rest of the services industry?

Upon hiring Sikka from SAP, we knew Infosys was changing its direction to become an IP company, and we expected him to make significant changes. In addition to his former exec role at SAP, he earlier worked in Xerox’s research lab in Palo Alto in the Valley. He is a well-known figure in the American software world, and he continues to be based out of Silicon Valley.

As I predicted in a blog three months ago, Sikka had begun the transformation and I thought his next step would be to build on the Infosys talent pool by bringing in selected additional talent. Now he has done that and is using his relationships at SAP in Silicon Valley to recruit other executives to join him at Infosys.

This move means a number of things. Most importantly, it means that Infosys drinks its own champagne. Following Cognizant’s example, Infosys is establishing North American headquarters – but going one better. Rather than basing its business in New Jersey as Cognizant did, Infosys is building on its next-generation theme and basing its American business in Silicon Valley. This strategy has a number of potentially positive attributes for Infosys.

Commitment to disruptive technology wave 

First, it helps reinforce the brand that Infosys is committing to the “leading technology” aspect of its new-and-renew strategy. And lining up Silicon Valley executives to supplement the Infosys leadership team is another clear demonstration of its strategy.

Significantly, having North American headquarters in the middle of the Silicon Valley ecosystem allows Infosys to tap into the Valley’s rich innovation talent pool as Infosys moves from its traditional labor arbitrage-based model to an IP-based model. It also places Infosys close to its customer base. Soon to be gone are the days of the factory control from Bangalore dictating to customers how to use services.

I think this speaks volumes around the provider’s commitment and willingness to stay the course and pace as the services industry evolves with the digital world’s new technologies and new business models. Infosys is trying to catch that wave of next-generation digital disruptive technology that emanates from Silicon Valley’s ecosystem.

Sikka talks about Design Thinking, which puts him right into the heart of how Silicon Valley thinks and tries to behave. Infosys is making a commitment to be at the heart of the Valley’s ecosystem to better leverage that thinking. Bangalore is a long way from that ecosystem. New Jersey is closer, but Infosys chose to be in the heart of it, right in the Valley.

Will Infosys succeed in these new moves? 

I think this starts to ask hard questions of the rest of the industry, and I believe the rest of the industry will watch Infosys intently to gauge its success. In the event that Infosys succeeds in making this pivot, I think we can expect other Indian pure-plays to follow suit quickly.


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Infosys’ New Strategy Connects all the Dots | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

I recently had a chance to sit down with Infosys’ CEO and his team, and they shared with me their new/renew strategy. From what I understand, it resonates with where the market is heading. This is remarkable as it addresses the vexing problems and risks service providers now face in trying to change their business to address new models, new technologies and new customer expectations. It is always easy to drink the Kool-Aid, and I am definitely experiencing a sugar high. However, the Infosys strategy is one to watch as it appears to connect all the dots in a quickly evolving marketplace.

There are a number of things I find attractive about this new/renew strategy. First is the simplicity of its messaging. It’s easy to understand where they’re coming from and that they are focusing on their customers, not on Infosys like their past strategies. That in itself is powerful for customers’ understanding of what Infosys stands for and where they are heading. And it’s also powerful for the Infosys team to be able to understand what to focus on and what not to focus on. That resonates.

The new aspect

Second, I find the direction compelling. Clearly there is much in the market that is new. New technologies and new business models are driving the market and, when combined, are extremely powerful.

Digital changes how companies interact with their customers, and there’s nothing more powerful than that. Cloud changes the speed and agility and price at which companies can move. The consumption-based and as-a-service models allow companies to align services closely with business outcomes and only pay for services as they consume them. Taken together, these new technologies and business models are very relevant to where customers are headed with their business, and these new areas are capturing the growth in the services segment.

Infosys aligning itself with this direction makes perfect sense as they move to redesign their growth and maintain their leadership position in the services industry.

The renew aspect 

This aspect of Infy’s strategy is equally powerful. There is a second set of technologies that allows providers to change the way they deliver services. I’ve blogged often about four of these technologies: automation, analytics, robotics and artificial intelligence. Providers such as Infosys are looking to harness these technologies transform their environment, lowering costs and making their existing services far more responsive than they’ve been before.

Customers are more demanding

So Infosys is tapping into the big themes in the marketplace. They’re leveraging new technologies and new models to connect the dots to new opportunities for growth. And they’re renewing their existing business by harnessing new technologies and capabilities to optimize their service delivery.

Underpinning the strategy is a sea shift in customer expectations. Enterprises are increasingly more demanding of their existing services and at the same time impatient to take advantage of new technologies and business models.

I like Infy’s new/renew strategy because I believe it is directly in concert with where we at Everest Group see the market moving – taking advantage of new technologies and rethinking how to optimize existing services. And it embraces the “old wine in old wineskins” concept I recently blogged about.

I think this strategy will position Infosys well. A word of caution: as an often-quoted lines goes, “Execution eats strategy for breakfast.” So we look forward to seeing how they execute in this marketplace.


Photo credit: Flickr

The Tantalizing Crowdsourcing Model | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Crowdsourcing is a tantalizing business model. It leverages access to free or very cheap labor through technology platforms or through social media. We see examples of it, and we sense intuitively that they have broader application. So why does it seem to be just out of reach for most services firms? Why do service providers struggle when trying to apply this model to their business?

There are several highly successful, intriguing examples of crowdsourcing.

  • Uber’s technology platform allows individuals to collaborate and coordinate to provide a transportation service that is different from traditional taxi and limo services.
  • Trip Advisor’s platform relies on individuals reporting and rating their travel experiences. The result is a superb way to better understand the kind of service you’re likely to get at a bed and breakfast, hotel or restaurant.
  • IT Central Station puts crowdsourcing to work providing user reviews of software.
  • Urban Spoon provides crowdsourced restaurant reviews from diners and critics.

Wikipedia is also a great example of the power of crowdsourcing. The success of these and other businesses tantalizes us with the model. But it’s a radically different model and it’s frustrating to try to apply a crowdsourcing capability to most businesses. Here are some of the issues that make it difficult to develop this kind of business:

  • It requires different philosophies about sourcing information such as reliability of the information and using information from multiple sources rather than a high-quality, expert single source. Crowdsourcing businesses rely on people who are motivated to share information that helps others or makes them appear to be an expert.
  • It requires scale advantages before it’s useful.
  • It often necessitates change in security as well as intellectual property rights.

Resolving these issues is really hard to do under the constraints of an existing organization.

Most, if not all, crowdsourcing businesses evolved without being inside an existing organization and thus having to navigate the concerns and insecurities of the existing organization. They were built from the ground up, which allowed them to resolve or iterate through these issues and come up with a complete working model that was then usable.

To avoid the tantalizing call of revenue from crowdsourced platforms, we need to study crowdsourcing‘s successes and learn how to duplicate them in our normal services businesses.


Photo credit: Flickr

How Automation Will Change the Services Industry | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

As we at Everest Group look at the service delivery automation landscape and think forward to where we believe it’s heading, there is truly a lot of disruption in the picture. From working with and talking to service providers and enterprises implementing automation, we recognize that it’s more than just a labor-to-technology substitution. It opens up a lot of issues around service delivery and even how processes should be designed. It could change everything.

Let’s look at four areas of issues that result from automation.

Upgrade cycles

Some of the rationale for upgrading ERP systems or systems of records is to make incremental improvements. Automation eliminated that need. It’s not that you won’t need to invest in an upgrade; but there will be less pressure to upgrade.

Work location

As you automate transactional or rote work, you separate judgment and exception handling. This results in new choices as to where and who does that work and how you manage the talent for that work.

Process design

Automation also requires that organizations build a more intentional view of their business processes; otherwise, they will lose some knowledge residing in the rote staff doing the day-to-day work.

Sourcing

Customers may also change their thinking with regard to the providers that do this work. They will certainly ask more of the provider. Labor arbitrage will become less powerful and the ability to drive and maintain the automation layer will become more important.

Investment upgrade cycle choices, location choices, process design choices, sourcing choices … indeed, automation could change everything in the world of service delivery.

Dangers in Overreacting to Services Industry Challenges | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Timing can be crucial. I recently blogged about trends that are powerful enough to drive substantial changes in the services industry, even to the point of restructuring the hierarchy of the industry. We at Everest Group believe these are very important trends and service providers must develop their strategies for reacting. Here is our guidance to avoid overreacting to the impending changes.

As a provider, if you react to the challenges by putting new emphasis on new models too fast, you will lose focus on your core business. But if you don’t change quickly enough or are not able to make the requisite changes, you run the risk of becoming a dinosaur. The industry saw this happen 15 years ago when the Indian ISPs with their labor arbitrage and factory models caused tremendous disruption in the MNCs that dominated the industry at that time (e.g., Capgemini, CSC, EDS, HP).

Organizations struggle when changing business models. It’s difficult to change a services organization without losing its identity and value. There are basically two strategy paths providers can take in dealing with the industry changes.

Two strategies for changing

First, don’t fall into the temptation of trying to make your company be something it’s not. For example, most of the Indian ISPs are effectively talent companies; they manage and deliver talent. There will always be a need for talent. The kind of talent and the work the talent undertakes will change, but there will still be a need for talent. So one potential strategy is to stay true to your company’s identity and value and manage talent.

Another strategy is to try to develop completely new business offerings and intellectual property (IP).

However, this strategy carries several risks, and some companies that take this route run into significant problems. Some try to build a new business model but use philosophies and structures that evolved for the talent-pool model instead of digital-age models. Others rethink their philosophies and structures and also change their IP, investment model and pricing structure. They also must change their customer interaction model.

It is particularly instructive that there are very few examples where companies were able to develop their new IP in house. IBM is an example of changing IP numerous times, but they tend to do it through acquisitions, not through developing new vehicles in house. If that’s the strategy other providers adopt in reacting to the impending changes, we can look for a big spree of well-funded service firms buying software or as-a-service products.

However, providers need to change their acquisition strategies. Yesterday’s strategy was to buy tuck-in companies at low valuations and leverage them for customer access, but today it’s necessary to buy technology. Should you buy an early-stage startup that’s affordable but hasn’t fleshed out its business model and hasn’t honed its pricing structure or built market momentum; or should you buy one that has – and pay a premium for it? Obviously there is a huge difference in valuation. And the valuation can change in the course of three months for a fast-moving tech company. So the pace at which you make the valuations has to change, and the risk is different. As I mentioned earlier, timing is crucial.

Another acquisition issue: should you nurture the company and hold it separate so it doesn’t get cannibalized and shut down? Should you let them have an independent sales force and marketing arm, or should you roll them under your existing teams?

So there are substantial challenges and some daunting issues along the road to evolving to an IP-driven organization. There will be a huge learning curve at every level of change.

So which is the best strategy?

You basically have three choices in strategies for dealing with the impending industry changes:

  1. Stay the course and stay true to your talent model and refocus it on the opportunities that the new digital-age technologies will present.
  2. Fundamentally change your DNA in order to play in the new services world.
  3. Attempt to do both #1 and #2.

All the necessary change I described above is a difficult and risk-filled proposition. But it’s even more difficult to try to sustain both models at the same time.

The consequence of option #1, to stay the course with talent, could be that your company ends up on the sidelines and has to watch your talent get commoditized, deal with reduced earnings and slower growth while other providers soar to huge valuations.

The consequence of option #2, shifting to the digital-age models, include a huge learning curve. Can you make that pivot fast enough to offset the revenue runoffs or the lack of growth from your shift in direction? Will it confuse your existing client base? Can you learn the new business model quickly enough to compete successfully?

The consequence of option #3, trying to maintain the old while shifting to the new, will feel and look schizophrenic. You’ll have a split focus in every aspect of your business. And all the while, each model will seek supremacy. If you allow that to happen, you’ll lose focus on the other model.

There is no obvious “right” answer to which strategy your company should undertake in dealing with the impending industry changes. Choose the one that you can best execute on and is the best choice for maximizing shareholder value and growth opportunities.

KABOOM! Is an Implosion of the Services Market Coming? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

There is rising concern among the Indian service providers that their arbitrage model is about to go through a significant and abrupt change – and not to their benefit. As I look at the various factors driving their concern, I see a set of challenges that will fundamentally reshape the industry and create new winners and losers. What remains to be seen is how quickly it will happen and exactly how it will affect the providers. Here is my analysis of the situation.

What is driving providers’ concern – even fears for their business?

Challenge to FTE model. Clients want automation, and the providers fear that automation will require far fewer people to deliver services. They now want to buy software-as-a-service rather than people. It’s basically a substitution of technology for labor, which manifests itself as robotics, SaaS and cloud. Growth of the Indian ISP businesses is slowing as the customer demand now is to have a different conversation around capabilities instead of just moving the work to India for labor arbitrage.

Challenge to factory model. We’re seeing increasing commoditization of services. The Indian providers recognize that they built factories that, at the core, break work into different constituent pieces and drive that work to be done with the most junior people possible. But that actually caused commoditization. The client mindset is: “If you can segment the work like that, why not go ahead and automate it?”

Clients today want domain industry knowledge, rare skills, more capabilities on site at the client location and more intimacy from their service providers – and all four of these demands are hard to deliver in the factory model.

Challenge to profit margins. The challenge to the FTE and factory models drive providers’ fear that they won’t be able to maintain profit margins like those in the past built on labor arbitrage.

We’ve known that arbitrage wouldn’t last forever and that providers couldn’t keep extending it indefinitely. It had natural limitations. Now we see the market moving in a new direction. At Everest Group, we believe this will fundamentally reshape the industry.

Kaboom

Important issues in heading in the new direction

I think there are important questions around the reshaping of the Indian ISPs’ businesses.

In what way will the change manifest itself? Will the change in business models result in growth, cannibalism, or both? And to what degree? Will the change, for the most part, only affect where the new growth opportunities are? Or will it cause providers to cannibalize their existing client work?

If it just affects where new work is, it’s much easier for challengers to capture those opportunities. But it’s more difficult for incumbents to transition. For example, in automation they would need to cannibalize the existing work by reducing the number of FTEs, which also will reduce revenue. It will be difficult for incumbents to react to their existing clients’ demands in the change in direction.

There are other questions:

  • How soon will the changes come?
  • How will the Indian providers react?

These are unanswered questions today, but they’re very important. How quickly it happens will affect how the incumbents react. And how they react will determine whether they will succeed or whether challengers will reap the benefits of the new direction the market takes.

What do you think? Are we going to watch the implosion of the services model where it clashes in on itself and technology cannibalizes the industry, shrinks the revenue, changes the FTE model to a transaction model and shifts the terms and conditions to favor new players over old players?

Global Services Trends and Tipping Points for 2015 | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

It’s the season when analyst/advisory firms flood the media their predictions and top-10 lists. One problem with those lists is the services world rarely has 10 things that are different from the year before. Another problem is we tend to hype new technologies and business models and make predictions about their impact in the next year, when in reality they take multiple years to validate and start to build traction. So rather than falling into this trap that I and others fall into every year, here are my thoughts on a few big secular services trends and their tipping-point positions.

Cloud

We’re over the tipping point here. As I blogged previously, the cloud experiment is over. The last three years have been a grand experiment in examining cloud and the cloud products family. 2015 will see enterprises increasingly planning and implementing new functionalities in the cloud environment.

Labor arbitrage

We’re now atop an inflection point for change in the labor arbitrage market. It’s alive and well and still powerful, but in 2014 we saw value propositions that are dominantly arbitrage based diminish in effectiveness. We also saw the growth areas increasingly shifting to an “arbitrage-plus” model in new areas. The implications are that arbitrage-based offerings will be less effective and their growth rates will continue to drop.

2015 will be a year in which provider growth is driven by differentiation around industry knowledge, firm knowledge and functional knowledge, rather than cheap resources from India. Firms that pivot and provide more and better resources in country, more focus around industry and function, more specialization for those that will succeed.

Service providers talked the talk of differentiation in 2013-2014, but they didn’t walk the walk. In 2015 providers that are successful in growing share will execute really great, meaningful differentiation rather than just giving lip service to differentiation.

Automation

The tipping point for automation is still in the future. The industry has had a couple of years of experimentation with automation, but we don’t think the experimentation phase is finished. We have yet to see the automation play done at scale either on infrastructure or BPO; it is yet to move into the mainstream and is yet to be acknowledged for the full power and capability that it possesses. So the stories of automation destroying the arbitrage game are premature.

We think that, much like cloud in the last three years, in 2015 the automation journey will continue its experimentation and advance toward a time where it is implemented at scale and is able to change the value proposition in a meaningful way.

In 2015, we do not expect automation to take meaningful share from the BPO or infrastructure players. But we expect many more proof points to develop and more hype or industry attention to focus on automation.

As a service

We’re not near a tipping point in moving to a consistent as-a-service model, but we’re definitely seeing a growing uptick in experimentation with this model. In 2014, we saw a number of important companies experimenting with implementing as a-service solutions, but they weren’t multi-tenant. What they’re doing is taking their entire supply chain and turning it into a consumable, as-a-service supply chain and achieving similar benefits that are derived from a multi-tenant SaaS offering but without having the multi-tenant characteristic.

The implications of early experimentation are very significant for legacy environments. We expect 2015 to have a number of announcements of leading firms implementing this approach. We believe this is an important development but will not become an industry standard for several years to come.

Service provider landscape

As to the service providers, in 2015 we expect some changes in dominance and success. Cognizant and TCS always do well and will do so again in 2015. What’s interesting is to look at those that are going to change their fortunes. Specifically we’re watching two companies: IBM and Wipro. In 2013-2014 both made structural changes that position them well for entering 2015.

IBM decided to address the cloud issue head on. Big Blue’s purchase of SoftLayer, the moving of IBM’s middleware suite to an as-a-service delivery vehicle and willingness to deal directly and forthrightly with customers on cannibalization issues positions IBM for a potentially strong turnaround in 2015. We already see signs of that in the three megadeals IBM announced in the last quarter of 2014. We believe IBM is in for a strong year in 2015 if it stays the course.

Likewise, I’ve blogged before about Wipro laying the groundwork for a resurgence. Specifically I call out the firm’s early adoption of automation and increased focus on the large megadeal space. We believe Wipro’s adoption of automation allows the provider to be a cost challenger without giving up margins in the multi-tower megadeal space. I expect Wipro will continue its momentum into 2015, building on early successes.

This is not to say that other service providers won’t do well. I highlight these two because they took big steps to turn around their business and position themselves for the future and for velocity coming into 2015.


Photo credit: harmish khambhaita

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