The current enterprise shift in strategic intent toward cloud services has major implications for the outsourcing market. I’ve blogged about the implications for the infrastructure outsourcing market. Clearly the strategic shift will also affect application development outsourcing. We see three major implications for this market.
Everest Group is working with large enterprises as they consider the issue around migrating to the cloud. It’s very clear that they over-provisioned their application development and maintenance teams. And they spend a lot of time and effort in managing teams rather than focusing them on delivering business value.
The as-a-service orientation seeks to address this by aligning apps with infrastructure by application or by service area application family.
Increasingly application maintenance and development are more commoditized and less sticky than they were in the past. We see this demonstrated in the big jump in challenger wins in recompetes.
Implications
- The incumbent providers will need to shift to new models or suffer loss of market share. However, it is unclear at this time whether or not providers that have succeeded with the traditional factory arbitrage model will be able to make the shift, potentially opening the door for a new range of challengers coming through.
- The shift to an as-a-service orientation appears to put more emphasis on the need for provider domain and industry expertise
- The as-a-service model also will require a greater proportion of flexible delivery close to the user, hence challenging Indian firms’ established factory model so prevalent in the arbitrage era.
The implications are still emerging. But it is already clear that the services industry has a potential challenger model emerging in the outsourcing applications development space.
