Enterprise Archives - Page 3 Of 9

The Innovation Dance Floor is Getting Crowded | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

January 26, 2015

The innovation dance floor is getting awfully crowded with a lot of eager participants. CIOs want to re-establish their traditional role of custodian of technology driving innovation. CMOs wants to be at the forefront of using innovation to change the customer experience and outreach. Data scientists are using the new analytics tools and want to participate in innovation strategy. And as I blogged recently, an IBM study found even chief purchasing officers are making a bid to join the innovation party. Unfortunately, they’re all joining the product managers, who are historically in a slow dance; so not only is the dance floor getting more crowded, but there are also a lot of different beats that they’re dancing to.

Each of these positions has its own point of view, its own agenda, and sees innovation differently. On the plus side, this provides for a rich mix of opportunity. But on the downside, few innovative ideas have come out of committees.

The IBM study indicates that CPOs are attempting to become more strategic and influential and they believe they are more critical to the enterprise. So by necessity, they have to better align with the corporate strategy and therefore want to participate in developing strategy.

I think it opens up even bigger questions:

In what areas will they seek to set strategy?
Do CPOs have the right background and perspective to do this?

Particularly in the area of services, which are an important ingredient to a change strategy and require deep understanding of the business and how to shape or manipulate the components to create a differentiated position as an advantage, CPOs may struggle as the champions of change.

Enterprises need to protect the innovation strategy

My view is that CPOs are not the right people to influence innovation. Their idea of innovation is do it at half the price rather than doing something different. A data scientist, for example, can get at a certain kind of innovation because they bring a fresh, different capability to the table. I don’t see purchasing bringing something fresh and different.

So this poses some very significant questions to the enterprise:

How do you allow for innovation?
Who do you want driving it?
How do you protect innovation from amateurs who may not be helpful?

Problems for service providers

With purchasing and other departments trying to crowd onto the innovation dance floor, service providers wanting to bring new innovative ideas or capabilities will have to navigate a gauntlet of powerful stakeholder groups. It certainly makes for an intriguing tango.

Photo credit: Piotr Pazola

As-a-Service Implications for IT | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

January 16, 2015

One of the great struggles in today’s enterprises is the ongoing shift of influence from the CIO community into other stakeholder groups. I’ve blogged about this before. An important aspect of this influence shift is the fact that IT has increasingly become unaligned with business goals. But the pendulum is now swinging back. The mechanism the pendulum is using is the as-a-service offer set.

During the recession, companies focused on cost reduction and operational excellence, and IT increasingly lost touch with the business. Purchasing departments focused relentlessly on driving up unit costs and countless operational process improvement vehicles to further lean out organizations. As a result, IT organizations became more efficient — but also less aligned with business needs.

Business users reacted by demanding greater focus on business outcomes and began taking things into their own hands and purchasing as-a-service offerings.

The as-a-service path is a reorganization

One of the benefits of the as-a-service model is that it creates a seamless linkage between business functionality and delivery. And it cuts through layered IT organizations, reorganizing according to business functionality.

The benefits that an organization extracts once it goes down this path is tight alignment by business functionality — close to functionality on demand — and far more flexibility. It enables focusing on the business impact of technology. Businesses can move more quickly and flexibly to adopt the functionality and also scale their consumption to usage.

The implications for IT are enormous in that it requires a rethinking of the classic IT functional organization, which has been in place for the last 15 years. It requires a reconceptualization of the following aspects:

How IT is organized
How assets, services and software are procured
How IT is measured and managed

The benefits of the functionality and scaled consumption to usage are extremely powerful and can only continue to reshape how IT is delivered. But the reconceptualization of IT is far from trivial. It is not just a new pose for IT. The as-a-service model fundamentally reshapes the IT philosophy on how it’s organized, procured, measured and managed.

Remedying IT Overcapacity | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

January 14, 2015

Too much. That’s an accurate assessment of IT environments in most, if not all, enterprises. They have more data center space than they need and more servers than they can use at any point in time. They have more software operating systems, middleware, and enterprise licenses than necessary. They also have more of the wrong resources and never enough of the right resources in application development and maintenance. The as-a-service movement seeks to address this, but the journey to get there isn’t as simple as it appears.

So how much overcapacity is present in enterprises? At every level there seems to be a 25-50 percent overcapacity in IT. Since IT varies from 1-7 percent of revenues, the 25-50 percent overcapacity is in the range of 40 percent overcapacity overall.

As we at Everest Group look at applying as-a-service principles into IT environments, we see an opportunity to remove 40 percent of the IT cost by eliminating the wastage in service capacity. But the journey to achieve this as-a-service cost benefit is neither quick nor easy.

Renegotiating enterprise licenses takes time and often requires waiting until they expire. Reconceptualizing the infrastructure and application support is also complicated and requires a resolute effort and substantial patience.

It can take a year to three years to complete the journey. But the benefits are very substantial, starting with a 40 percent cost reduction in IT — a heady prize for the journey. In a future blog I’ll discuss other benefits.

Enterprise Technology 2015: Heavier Apps, More PaaS, Troubled Security… and more | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

January 6, 2015

As enterprises freshen their technology mandate for 2015, they stand at the cusp of a multi-dimensional interplay of agility, flexibility, and rising security considerations. Beyond the usual SMAC stack, enterprises are also grappling with challenges to the status quo in terms of faster application development, automated IT operations, the Internet of Things, and process fragmentation.

Following are five technology trends that rose to the top of our list for the important role they will play in enterprise technology in 2015.

Mobile Apps – Will Need a RethinkThe IBM-Apple partnership to tackle enterprise mobility is a significant development that validates our earlier hypothesis. However, the enterprise apps now require a rethink. These apps were conceived to be “light weight” and easy to use, focused on a specific range of capabilities. But, due to increased adoption and constant demand for additional functionality, enterprises are going against this fundamental tenet by coding in multiple features that are making mobile apps heavy and difficult to use. Yet, this same “overhead bulk” has become compulsory to provide features such as analytics across apps usage, offline access, and cloud collaboration that help enterprises perform meaningful tasks. In 2015, enterprises will need to walk a fine line between honoring the basic principles of mobile apps and the persistent demand for increased functionality.
PaaS – The Needle Will Move FurtherWhile Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has been touted as the “next wave” since its inception, it never fulfilled its purported potential of adding meaningful value. However, enterprise technology may see that change in 2015 given the push from leading vendors such as Microsoft (Azure), IBM (Bluemix), Red Hat (OpenShift), Salesforce (Salesforce1), and AWS (Elastic Beanstalk). The PaaS business case will be enhanced by IaaS providers offering “PaaS-like” features (which is already happening), as well as PaaS platforms getting integrated with IaaS (e.g., the recent partnership between Apprenda and Piston Cloud). Although we do not believe PaaS will become the face of the cloud, we indeed expect 2015 to push its adoption within enterprises.
Cyber Security and Open Source – Conundrum Won’t be SolvedThe Sony hacking scandal reiterated the importance of enterprise security – which is often taken lightly as compared to most cool next-gen initiatives – and has turned cyber security into a top priority for 2015. However, with the proliferation of Open Source Software (OSS) in enterprises, this “insecure” perception will surge. Enterprises are aggressively looking toward OSS with a host of next-generation technology areas such as cloud (OpenStack), Big Data (Hadoop), mobility, IT operations automation (Chef, Puppet), and content management (Drupal, Joomla!). With marquee B2C corporations such as Netflix, Samsung, and Facebook already having undertaken major, well-publicized OSS initiatives, other traditional enterprises will be pushed hard, despite a concern for security. Google teaming up with Samsung to include Knox (additional enterprise security features) to make Android more appealing for the enterprise is a step in answering this conundrum. However, it won’t be solved in 2015.
Battle for Container Supremacy – Docker Will be ChallengedApplication development is getting a relook within enterprises with increased interest in container technology. Docker, the poster child for containers, whose open platform helps developers to build, ship, and run distributed applications, was rocketed in 2014 with competition from CoreOS. While Docker container technology is now supported by most platforms such as Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and VMware, its shortcomings are becoming visible. Developers believe Docker “replaces” virtualization but provides limited platform-type support, and its containers are becoming resource intensive. Moreover, given Docker’s early foray into container management, it will be pitted against the might of Google Kubernet and AWS, as well as nimble players such as Giant Swarm. This may dilute Docker’s focus on developing next-generation container technology, leaving an ample field for competitors to exploit.
Analytics – Focus Will be on Bread and ButterWith millions of dollars invested in data analytics initiatives, 2015 will make enterprises reassess the opportunity cost and value of data. While tools such as Hadoop and NoSQL have greatly reduced the entry barriers to analytics, they have witnessed middling adoption. Enterprises still have a long way to go to embed analytics in their existing processes. Therefore, despite the Internet of Things and wearable devices taking off and generating more machine data for organizations to tap into, these new initiatives will not be an immediate priority for 2015. In 2015, enterprises will get their analytics act together to focus on existing processes, consolidation, rationalization, and targeted spending, with data management, governance, and security taking priority.

Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr once commented that, “prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” So, please join us out on the limb. What are your predictions for 2015 enterprise technology?

HP Rebooted | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

December 5, 2014

With continued momentum in its turnaround strategy and a raft of announcements at HP Discover, the technology giant appears reset and rebooted. Its strategy to focus on products and services supported by cloud, analytics, mobile, and security, the so called “new style” of BPO and IT is paying dividends with a number of new contract wins. At the same time, HP’s cost cutting measures are increasing profitability, as commoditization pushes prices and revenue down.

HP Discover week saw a raft of announcements from the company including:

Disaster Recovery as-a-Service Agreement for HP Helion OpenStack in partnership with Symantec
Expanded consulting and support services including HP datacenter care and HP consulting for software-defined infrastructure
Enterprise services for Office 365
A new HP Enterprise Services contract to support business expansion by Ted Baker, awarded to HP Enterprise Services and its partner, OCSL

These announcements follow the publication of HP’s FY14 results on November 20, which showed HP’s turnaround to be on track.

Focusing on HP Enterprise Services, the FY 2014 operating margin of 3.6% reversed the downward trend of the previous two years but revenue at $22,398 million continued to shrink (-7% y/y). There is still some way to go before the new style of services help halt the revenue decline. There is a legacy of older style services contracts that HP Enterprise Services will have to handle for now. Not all clients are ready for change but some are and the proportion will go up steadily over time as more organizations upgrade and transform their capabilities. HP Enterprise Services is making progress by winning contract renewals and expansions based on its new style of services. It won 11 out of 12 deals that it bid for against competitors such as Accenture, Capgemini, Genpact, IBM, and Wipro in 2014 to date. The wins included three contract expansions, four renewals and, four new logos.

The strategy to focus on new style of IT and BPO is to continue enhanced with new commercial models. The focus on HR, F&A, customer engagement, and digital is to continue with HP taking more advantage of state of the art technology such as service delivery automation (SDA). Cloud, big data, mobile, and security are inherent to the new style of IT and BPO. These, HP can support on its software-defined infrastructure which should give it a clear advantage over some competitors.

It is a no brainer for HP to flex its technology muscle and to focus on the so called new style of services. The question is why it took so long for this to become a strategy for the company. It is thanks to Meg Whitman’s ability to mobilize HP that the strategy has been implemented and the turnaround is working. She has been able to do what her predecessors failed to do – set the course and get buy-in internally. Other measures have included a renewed salesforce armed with enhanced offerings to go to market with and a reorganized group to support sales.

Next is the planned split of HP, as part of which it will be divided into two separate companies:

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise will deliver technology infrastructure, software, and services
HP Inc. will deliver personal systems and printing

When the split is completed the new companies will be able to focus on their core strengths and growth. The challenge for HP is not to let the task of separation distract senior managers from supporting sales and ensuring that the ship remains on course.

Photo credit: Juan Ignacio Sánchez Lara

Sales Strategy Shift in the Cloud Services Market | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

November 13, 2014

The fact that enterprises are making a strategic intent shift to cloud and as-a-service models changes more than the service delivery model. It also changes the value proposition and therefore causes implications for provider’s sales strategies. For starters, the focus turns away from the provider’s capabilities.

Sure, those capabilities are still important. But with the new models the focus shifts to the customer’s needs.

The old strategic intent and value proposition was to achieve cost savings. Providers presented offer-based solutions touting the provider’s services. For example, a provider selling to a potential client in the P&C insurance industry might describe the kind of clients it services and how many clients it has, as follows:

“We have 25 clients in the P&C space with five million policies, 1000 analytics professionals with advanced statistical knowledge. We have 5,000 FTEs in eight offshore, nearshore and onshore locations. And we have a platform-based solution.”

Competition would take place on which provider’s offer is the most compelling to the customer. Typically in an offer-based solution the winning provider would be the firm with the most experience in the industry that targets the customer’s areas at appropriate price points.

But cloud and as-a-service solutions focus on the customer’s needs. This gives providers the opportunity to shift to needs-based messaging, as in the following example for a P&C insurance company:

“P&C insurers are battling high expense ratios, coupled with low interest rates globally. This is putting strains on their finances. Our solution can help you automate underwriting and shorten quote times by up to 60 percent, improve fraud detection by over 40 percent and facilitate early identification for subrogation helping improve overall margins.”

One of the most significant implications of the enterprise shift to the cloud is that focusing on needs-based messaging instead of the provider’s capabilities offer-based messaging will change the brute force product-selling mechanism that has come to define the market as we know it.

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

November 3, 2014

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.

Implications of the Enterprise Strategic Intent Shift toward Cloud | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

October 29, 2014

Since the beginning of 2014 Everest Group has seen a real shift in large enterprise CIO organizations in their strategic intent toward cloud services. What are the implications on the traditional infrastructure outsourcing market from this strategic intent?

Timing

First, we expect that this shift will not happen overnight. As organizations work on their cloud plans, it’s clear that this is a three-to-five-year journey for migrating some or all their environment into this next-generation environment.

Runoff of work from legacy environments

Second, we expect the runoff on traditional outsourced contracts to accelerate. The runoff has been running at about 5-10 percent a year. We expect this will pick up to something close to 50 percent of the workloads to shift over to the cloud in the next three years with 30 percent of that shift happening in the next two years.

So this is a dramatic runoff of work from legacy environments into the next-generation models. This will put significant pressure on the incumbent service providers in that space.

Who will be the likely winners?

The third implication is the likely winners from this strategic shift. We think that at least for the next two years the Indian players or those with a remote infrastructure management (RIM) model will enjoy substantial benefits. Often a move to cloud or next-generation technologies can be facilitated by a move to a RIM model. So we see RIM continuing its torrid growth.

We also believe the providers with enterprise-quality cloud offerings will be players. One that particularly comes to mind is IBM’s SoftLayer, which we think is well positioned for the shift. It has its own runoff and can grab share from asset-heavy or other legacy providers as runoff occurs there.

We expect to see Microsoft and its Azure platform play an increasingly prominent role in cloud services. It will be interesting to see if AWS, Google, and Microsoft can make the shift from serving rogue IT and business users to enterprise IT. At this time we certainly believe IBM can. And it looks like Microsoft is making deliberate efforts to transition its model. It remains to be seen if AWS and Google are willing to shift their models to better accommodate enterprise IT.

Photo credit: Photo Dean

Sea Change in Large Enterprises’ Cloud Strategic Intent | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

September 8, 2014

For five years we at Everest Group have tracked the cloud space in global services. Until this year, there was a lot of talk about cloud, but much true cloud adoption was driven in business units with large enterprises. CIOs basically sat out the game and watched the cloud’s performance. But since the beginning of 2014 we’ve seen a real shift in large enterprise CIO organizations, which signals a significant change for the services industry.

Until recently CIOs in large enterprises were reluctant to put cloud initiatives in place because they felt it was premature. They struggled with compliance and security questions. And they worked to make sure their organization understands and embrace cloud and as-a-service technologies. Their posture is moving from cautiously watching to actively planning and driving, and some have large initiatives underway. Their plans with regard to cloud have moved from the radical fringe to mainstream strategic intent to embrace and drive.

Large enterprise tech budgets are still controlled by the CIO organization because they are best able to drive technology initiatives to scale and to execute initiatives across functions.

This is a very important development and will cause significant changes in the technology and services industry. This undoubtedly will start to drive a significant shift in spend from the traditional structures into the cloud and as-a-service models. As that occurs, we believe it will pick up momentum and pull the rest of the industry through.

The Surprise in Mobile Services | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

July 23, 2014

Companies’ end-user compute budgets are flat to down. Yet they’re challenged by much more complexity in terms of many more devices. This is a surprising fact. There is an explosion of devices that need to be secured and managed and that are often paid for by the corporate enterprise. Why has the explosion of mobile devices not resulted in corresponding growth in companies’ budgets for servicing end-user computing?

There are several reasons for new offers not coming into play despite the hope generated by the increase in devices. But the main reason is that the way support is provided has shifted.

The level of robustness of the support has shifted spend away from the central groups that used to provide support. Increasingly the manufacturers of the devices are taking on far more of the support responsibilities. They do this through extended warranties and service agreements attached to the devices.

The end-user compute services landscape is shifting in unanticipated ways.

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Tag: enterprise