Tag: applications outsourcing

EPAM Defies the Odds in Global Services Market | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

EPAM, a midsize, $800+ million service provider, is growing faster than the market. And it’s achieving this notable status in a mature application space where others have struggled and also in a services world that favors scale and size. What is its secret for beating the odds and seemingly defying gravity?

At first glance, EPAM shouldn’t be able to succeed. Its customer base is large enterprises with mature sourcing models. And although it has an arbitrage value proposition, it uses Eastern European resources, which are more expensive arbitrage than available in India. Yet it achieves attractive margins and is quickly growing.

EPAM succeeds because it has a highly differentiated value proposition around its talent model, client intimacy and capabilities. It’s a compelling story.

It delivers against the traditional pyramid offshore factory model with its incumbent churn. EPAM provides, instead, talent from Eastern Europe who have deep engineering skills and are more technically savvy. Once it puts a team in place, it keeps that team in place; so there is low turnover in staff. This positions EPAM as better understanding its clients and bringing a more stable, higher-productive, knowledgeable team than its competitors, with deep customer and technical knowledge. They don’t take over all the operations; they focus on highly technical applications that tend to be mission critical.

EPAM succeeds because it hits the market with the right differentiated story and a set of capabilities, messaging and business practices that align well for large, mature companies. In today’s mature market, EPAM presents a nice counterpoint to the big Indian firms. And they are taking share.

Sell Digital Services, Not Apps Rationalization | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

After coming back from Nasscom and discussing the inflection change coming to the services industry, I’ve observed a lot of service providers preparing for the shift – especially the apps providers. But I see them making a mistake: putting too much emphasis on apps rationalization and rearchitecting.

It’s not that apps rationalization and rearchitecting isn’t happening. But providers are justifying it as a necessary step for digital readiness, advising clients that they need to do this if they are looking into a digital agenda. I know of a few situations where it was necessary, but I believe those instances will be the exception rather than the rule.

Here’s the issue: If you go to market and emphasize apps rationalization and rearchitecting, you’ll likely end up in – at best – an interesting conversation without sufficient sales coming out of it, for the following reasons.

  • First, for the most part, you don’t have to rearchitect the client’s legacy systems to run a digital agenda, at least not with where the digital agenda currently is. You have to interface the apps, too. So you end up making unsubstantiated, incredible claims.
  • Second, in a world where business stakeholders have greater influence, they don’t want to spend their money and time on rearchitecting old functionality; they want new functionality. They are impatient to get to the benefits of changing their customer experience, and they are far less willing to listen to proposals that involve enduring long timeframes. They expect that their digital revolution will happen quickly, but rearchitecture is a long, three- to five-year journey.
  • Third, rearchitecting doesn’t fit in with the CIO’s agenda; CIOs are trying to rebuild their relevance to their business. It also doesn’t play to the business stakeholders’ agenda.

It’s just not what organizations are buying right now, and it will confuse and slow down your sales process. So my advice is to be very careful about pushing apps rationalization and rearchitecting linked to a digital agenda. I’m not saying that customers won’t ask for it, but it’s likely that they’re really asking for just a connection into digital.

A better story might be:“Let’s drive your digital agenda and connect that back to the apps.”

I think a lot of providers are not resonating with their clients and not getting the kind of growth because they are confusing clients on this issue of apps rationalization and rearchitecting. This may change. But this is my belief about where the market is right now. We’ll keep our eye on it.

Implications for the Application Development Outsourcing Market from Strategic Intent to Cloud | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

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

  1. 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.
  2. The shift to an as-a-service orientation appears to put more emphasis on the need for provider domain and industry expertise
  3. 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.

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