Growth Strategy Archives - Page 4 Of 6

Infosys Divides in Two — a Bold Move | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

June 19, 2014

Infosys made headlines recently, announcing the separation of its products, platforms and solutions (PPS) business into a subsidiary called Edgeverve Systems. It’s a bold move, but in many respects it makes sense. Here’s my take on the implications and potential net result of the spinout strategy.

As I explained in an article in The Times of India, Infosys’ PPS business — platforms, cloud products, and other digital services — are fundamentally a different kind of business than the firm’s historical labor arbitrage, skills-based business. The two models have different value propositions, selling maneuvers, adoption patterns and investment profiles.

Separating the two kinds of business allows Infosys management to keep the focus unconfused and allows Infosys to become masters of both business models. It allows them time and investment to develop its Edge series digital products in anticipation of demand, rather than focusing on revenue from the PPS business (historically only 5.2 percent of Infosys’ business).

It also allows management to continue focusing on the labor arbitrage business while revenue grows over time from the new-generation offerings of the Edgeverve subsidiary. Cognizant, TCS and other providers have demonstrated that there is still plenty of room left for growth in the labor arbitrage model. Although the growth is slowing, it is growing faster than the overall services industry.

Infosys recognizes that growth in its labor arbitrage business will be harder and not like the good old days; but at the same time, they recognize that they can do better. By separating the two business models of Infosys, Infosys acknowledges that they can and should go faster in the labor arbitrage, skills-based space. And this is coupled with a focus on going after larger transactions.

Two notable potential outcomes

If Infosys executes this spinout strategy successfully, I think it will result in better growth than they would otherwise get. The net result hopefully will be faster growth in both areas and more focused and nuanced value propositions for serving their clients.

As I said at the beginning of this blog: it’s a bold move, but it makes a lot of sense. So if it’s successful, I think it could lead the way for other service providers to separate their historical businesses and new-generation digital businesses.

ERP Hits the Wall | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

May 30, 2014

The services industry is facing a big issue. The market for ERP implementation cycle and corresponding transformation projects has matured and is coming to an end.

We can see the ERP decline in the reported results from IBM and Accenture and HCL. These three providers have had very big SI practices around large-scale ERP implementations. I’m not saying there are no more ERP implementations or transformation projects; it’s just that this market is in decline.

Factors driving the market decline

One of the contributors of the decline is maturity. Most large companies that need ERP now have ERP. Furthermore, they are now in their second or third generation of their ERP and are much smarter about how they use ERP. So there is much less transformation.

The green field is gone. Much of the ERP market it now add-ons to the existing base. And companies have learned how to implement ERP within the guidelines of ERP manufacturers, SAP and Oracle, which enables less costly implementation when new releases come out. Further, moving into an as-a-service or cloud future will continue to erode or diminish the re-implementation markets driven by software upgrades because they become a monthly occurrence via SaaS products.

So ERP implementations and its associated SI and transformation projects is hitting a wall, and we’re going to see far less of it in the future.

What will drive future growth?

The decline is a big issue for the industry because much of the discretionary spend used to be captured by the ERP implementation and renewal cycle. It has been one of the big secular drivers of growth in the services space since the mid-1990s, but we’re now seeing its decline as a primary driver for growth.

Many SI consultants, shared services consulting companies and BPO firms that ride the ERP wave have, wittingly or unwittingly, linked their growth engines to the dislocation and transformation activities that happen around ERP implementations.

So the current decline has very significant implications in terms of where these service providers will find growth in the future services market.

What we know about technology is that, given enough time, there is always another big technology disruption that will drive large integration services. Right now the best case for this is the digital revolution and the huge company-wide implications that embrace the digital marketplace for large organizations. Much like ERP, digital affects everything and requires significant transformation for alignment.

So the open question is: will digital take up the mantle that ERP is shedding?

Capgemini Rides the Wave of Demand for Industrialized, Standardized and Pre-packaged Services | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

May 29, 2014

At Capgemini global analyst event in London last week, the company provided a holistic view of its business growth strategy and internal initiatives to enhance skills and sales capabilities.

Capgemini management was relatively upbeat about growth opportunities while acknowledging the continuing headwinds in its main market in Europe. Economic uncertainty continues in continental Europe, but the need for cost cutting and efficiency is driving demand for services. Capgemini also expects growth from wider adoption of outsourcing and offshoring in continental Europe with a number of large deals on the horizon. Disruptions from cloud and offshoring continue to negatively impact revenue growth but improve margins. At the same time, cloud and other disruptive technologies such as big data, are increasing demand for services and boosting business.

Against this backdrop, Capgemini provided guidance of 5% – 7% organic revenue growth for the mid-term. Paul Hermelin, Group CEO, also indicated that the company is well on its way to achieving an operating margin of 10%. Assuming a 2-3 year period for mid-term, this is in keeping with outlook at the end of Q1 2014: organic revenue growth of 2% to 4% and an operating margin rate between 8.8% and 9.0% for 2014.

In terms of services, industrialization, standardization, innovation and pre-packaging dominated the company’s strategy. In infrastructure services the strategy has seen service delivery standardized and globalized with increasing focus on RIM, automation, cloud migration, orchestration and brokerage services. Capgemini saw +19% growth in cloud bookings year on year in 2013.

Application management has turned into a success story for Capgemini too. This is something of a turn around with dwindling bookings reversed into an increase of 60% in 2013 and 40% in Q1 2014. This has been achieved through industrialization and taking a factory approach to AM. Capgemini highlighted circa 30% cost savings for clients through this approach. It is also offering a new approach to AM services with a business process focus – where KPI’s include related business process metrics. This is a novel approach to AM that Everest Group will cover in a separate piece.

Another key lever for growth is innovation with Capgemini investing in IP in its strategic offerings (which are based on major technological transformation themes such as customer experience, cloud, mobility, big data, and social media). In keeping with this strategy, Capgemini will continue to target demand in the market for digitization of services and for transforming big data into new business opportunities. Similar opportunities from the Internet of things is also on its radar.

The widening of the strategic offerings portfolio with more IP is to boost profitability with higher margin services. Capgemini has shown that it can do well in these. Its strategic offerings grew by 19% in 2013 and are on the way to grow by 20% in 2014.

The drive for innovation is likely to lead to more acquisitions and partnership co-development. The latter brings with it the risks of investing in ambitious technology that proves too difficult to bring to market in a timely fashion e.g. Skysight, the cloud service orchestration product which Capgemini is developing in partnership with Microsoft, has been delayed.

Verticalization is another growth lever for Capgemini. One example is industry managed services offerings with OnePath Suite. This consists of pre-packaged SAP solutions that have been pre-configured for specific verticals, such as CPG, Energy and Life Sciences, and which will be delivered and set up as part of hosted and managed services with the potential to add business process services on top of bundled infrastructure and software integration.

BPO services are also being extended from the core F&A offerings to a broader set of services aimed at CFOs, including spend analytics, internal audit, SC analytics and MDM, and tax efficient accounting.

Internal organizational measures include:

HR: Increasing the size of the offshore workforce and its leadership while flattening the labor pyramid in other regions
Sales: A unified ‘One Group’ approach is being rolled out with dedicated major account teams, new rules across P&Ls and priority access to Group assets.

With globalization of services have come the challenges of managing resources better and increasing utilization rates. Capgemini needs a robust global organization to support its evolving delivery model. The HR strategy is addressing this requirement.

Capgemini has had an entrepreneurial culture with many P&L centers. This has led to a sales structure that has adapted to local market conditions. The implementation of a ‘One Group’ approach to major accounts is needed to tap into large multi-national opportunities that can now be supported by Capgemini’s global delivery model.

Overall, Capgemini has made excellent progress in transforming itself to ride the wave of demand in the market for modernized services and to compete with India-based vendors who are targeting Europe, Capgemini’s biggest market. Offshoring and globalization of service delivery has been largely achieved. Other aspects of the strategy are still work in progress but with the economic outlook generally brighter across the globe, the company is set well to achieve its latest guidance.

It Stinks to be an Incumbent Service Provider | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

May 27, 2014

In our tracking of industry contracts and trends, we find that, in the infrastructure space, incumbent service providers now win recompetes 85 percent of the time. However, the ACV (annual contract value) is 27 percent less scope.

This means that the incumbent must be able to add new new logos.

The good news is the volumes in contracts have been growing at about five percent a year. So an incumbent can expect to have revenue growth once it has a contract. The bad news is that growth is unlikely to continue as cloud starts to take over. Workloads will migrate from the traditional infrastructure models to a public or private cloud model, which is both more efficient and outside of the purview of the infrastructure marketplace.

You may ask how we can reconcile the explosive growth of HCL, TCS, Cognizant, and other RIM providers with this bad-news picture. The answer is they’re not incumbents and they’re using a RIM management model to attack an asset-heavy model, which increasingly is losing out to the RIM challengers and is at a lower price point. The RIM model is more profitable and cheaper.

Bottom line: we expect disruption from cloud to further impact the difficult situation of decreasing ACV. The net result is we predict difficult times for incumbent infrastructure players.

Cloud Places Service Providers on the Horns of a Dilemma | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

May 20, 2014

The Promised Land of SaaS and cloud models in the services world is clearly visible, but it’s frustratingly difficult for service providers to get there. The new models are the land for service providers’ growth and profits, but providers are finding it painful and frustrating as they try to move to the new models.

Software companies are shifting from the traditional on-premises licensing/deployment model to SaaS and cloud subscription models, and it’s not a trivial matter to make the switch. They have to change operational practices and investments and stop doing some activities to be able to do the new models’ activities. The transformation pulls them in two different directions.

Outsourcing service providers have the same problem as the software vendors. As SaaS takes hold, it changes customers’ expectations, and they want to buy services on a consumption or subscription basis instead of buying a set of components. They want to pay only for what they use rather than a take-or-pay model where they have to buy commitments.

In attempting to accommodate these increasingly vocal clients, providers are forced to move in two opposite directions at the same time. First they have to accommodate their original client demands with their existing service contracts structured in a business model where the provider charges customers on the basis of service components (e.g., buying 30 applications people, 15 servers, 50 licenses). But new demands require that these components are bundled, delivered and priced on a functionality on demand, or consumption basis. Their SaaS or Saas-like expectations require different approaches and even different customer support.

These two different business models are driven by different customer adoption patterns and also often driven by a different set of stakeholders making the decision. The new business stakeholder buyer is less concerned about cost per unit and more concerned about meeting the business needs. And they are increasingly influential in driving new opportunities.

Hence the dilemma for incumbent providers. The traditional business model won’t support a SaaS model, and the SaaS model won’t support a traditional model. The result? The provider is like a carriage drawn by two horses pulling in different directions. It’s not good for the carriage and quite frustrating for both horses.

Providers, thinking the dilemma is just a pricing issue, try to make their existing teams and business operate in both worlds and price services on a consumption basis the way new customers want to buy it. But they quickly find that’s not the case. To succeed, they need to backwards-engineer their entire delivery platform so it can work that way.

The alternative is to have two “carriages.” But then they have double the costs. There’s the frustration in getting to the Promised Land: they’re faced with having one carriage and two horses pulling it in opposite directions or having two carriages and twice the cost. The trip to the Promised Land of growth in the cloud world isn’t as simple as it appears.

Novartis and GSK Restructure to Adjust to the New Normal | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

April 24, 2014

Novartis on April 22, 2014, announced a succession of deals in a sweeping restructuring. It agreed to buy GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) oncology products unit for US$14.5 billion, plus another US$1.5 billion subject to certain milestones. In turn, it divested its vaccines business to GSK for US$7.1 billion, plus royalties. The two companies also announced the creation of a new consumer healthcare business through a joint venture, in effect combining Novartis’ OTC drug business with GSK’s consumer business, with nearly US$10 billion in annual sales. In a separate deal, it hived off its animal health business to Eli Lilly for US$5.4 billion.

The deals – given their scale and impact – principally reshape Novartis, which has been evaluating its businesses since last year. The move reflects a strategic imperative to focus on higher margin products, such as cancer drugs, and let go of low margin ones, which rely on scale and volume. This signals a momentous shift for the firm, which under its previous chief executive transformed into an expansive healthcare behemoth, fueled primarily by M&As. The deals have substantial implications for GSK as well, reorienting its business across respiratory, HIV, vaccines, and consumer health products – together accounting for nearly roughly 70 percent of its sales. It also consolidates its position as the leading global vaccine player.

These changes reflect an important inflection point for the pharmaceutical industry. The industry is coming to terms with multi-faceted challenges arising out of patent cliff implications, middling R&D productivity, and rising consolidation, leading to a rethink of business models.

Life sciences M&A bandwagon

Bigger is not always better

Consolidation has been a standard practice adopted by Big Pharma to tide over industry challenges, maintain growth momentum, diversify into emerging geographical and product markets, beef up R&D efforts, and boost sagging drug pipelines.

However, with middling R&D productivity, patent cliff losses, and expansion into newer product/service lines, pharma companies are reconsidering the conventional paradigm to factor in these multi-pronged challenges. Incessant consolidation has had a detrimental impact on many companies with decreasing post-merger productivity, culture mismatch, integration challenges, and declining agility.

That has resulted in firms such as Novartis refocusing their priorities to focus on core competencies instead of having its fingers in too many pies. These restructuring efforts call for a carefully thought-out technology strategy that encompasses organization-specific challenges and hurdles. The roadmap for pharmaceutical firms must be evaluated on a profitability-productivity matrix to test for efficacy. The imperatives brought by wholesale value chain digitization in the pharmaceutical industry entail a re-examination of the organizational structure and resource allocation/rationalization required for driving top line and bottom line growth. Technology will serve as a key enabler to free up resources and ensure optimal utilization levels.

The profitability-productivity matrix of pharmaceutical firms

Big Pharma will continue to take the acquisitions route as new drug development becomes more expensive and exhibits declining productivity. But companies need to take a more balanced and individualized approach as they assess their unique value proposition and go-to-market strategies in order to thrive in the new world order.

The Services Industry Is Not Getting Its Return from Investing in Innovation | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

April 2, 2014

At the request of a BPO provider, we did a fairly exhaustive study of all vendor/provider-funded innovations and their impact on the business growth. The data were startling. Our study clearly revealed that the hundreds of millions of dollars that providers invested in innovation yielded very disappointing returns. Although they often succeeded in taking their innovations to market, they realized only scanty returns and not the kind of return that creates a differentiated accelerated growth. Why is that? Were their hopes too ambitious?

The biggest culprit in the poverty of their return on investments is that those investments didn’t have the necessities for success built into their DNA. What was missing? In many cases innovation initiatives don’t resonate with existing and prospective clients because they simply don’t meet the clients’ needs. In other cases the offerings require a different kind of sales discussion as the provider tries to sell something the client isn’t looking to buy. In both cases this creates a difficult sell and largely proves unsuccessful.

Strategy for innovation that leads to business growth

As I explained in a previous blog post about innovation agendas, these disappointing outcomes from provider-funded innovation initiatives often start with trying to design a solution for multiple clients rather than innovating on a single client’s defined needs. Providers fall into the seduction of believing it makes sense that just because one client wants a particular innovation other clients also will want it that way.

Further, building things in a vacuum away from a client is not helpful and tends to result in outcomes that are off target.

The path to innovation that accelerates growth lies with the provider working closely with clients to define their needs and then bringing the provider’s capabilities to meet those needs. It’s a powerful strategy that results in much deeper client satisfaction.

It also allows a provider to deal with the issue of changing influence structures that we’ve noted in previous blog posts, where the business stakeholder is now more influential in defining a client’s business needs and driving investment and work that goes to third parties.

Providers that interact with business stakeholders to address their needs find the effort pans out and they can move to more impactful innovations that the client will be ready to fund.

And that’s a recipe for explosive growth.

Photo credit: Matter Photography

Genpact’s Q4 Performance: A Cautionary Tale for All Service Providers | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

March 17, 2014

The past year was not kind to Genpact. Q4 results show it underperformed the S&P by 25 percent over the last six months and by 7 percent year to date. This is surprising given that Genpact is a great organization with a record of superb delivery and a history of great performance. Unfortunately Genpact is a victim of the changing market and its sweet spot has lost its sweetness. We expect other providers will become victims as this story plays out again and again across the services industry. It’s a cautionary tale about growth engines.

Genpact does many things well, but its finance and accounting BPO practice has been the heart of its growth engine. Its F&A sweet spot was the $50-$100 million transaction size, and historically it expanded those contracts to even greater value. The sad fact is the number of new F&A deals of that size coming into the marketplace dropped precipitously as the market matured.

Today’s F&A transactions are different. Organizations often bundle F&A into larger transformation deals — where Genpact has a disadvantage against players like Accenture and IBM. They are better positioned to win broad transformation contracts, and they’re also the masters of the sole-sourced deals that now hit the F&A space.

The maturing market left Genpact with a string-of-pearls strategy, requiring stringing together a lot of small transactions to make up the difference. But there aren’t enough of them to make up for the volume of growth Genpact enjoyed in its sweet spot for the past five years.

To Genpact’s credit, it seems to be doing everything right to offset the shifting market: headquarters shifted to the United States, a world-class sales and marketing executive took over as CEO. Genpact saw the market shift coming and worked very hard to set up new lines of business. But its core F&A market matured faster than Genpact could put the new growth engines in place.

Even the best firms struggle to keep their growth engine up. We believe this story will be repeated again and again across the services industry as the labor arbitrage market matures and growth engines slow.

IBM Remakes Itself | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

March 10, 2014

You can bet IBM Global Services doesn’t want any more earnings announcements like its Q4 2013 report. Big Blue posted year-over-year revenue growth of only 4 percent instead of the 7 percent it indicated just three months ago and its 5 percent Q3 growth. Its margins are good, but clearly IBM has a growth issue. However, IBM is unfolding its strategic readjustment to drive global services growth in the future. It’s a three-pronged plan.

1. The exit path

Step one is to jettison the low-margin, commoditized and mature parts of the business, and I’ve blogged before about the crucial timing aspect of this strategy.

2. What is IBM doing with two acquisitions per month?

In the plan’s second prong IBM replaces its jettisoned revenue and direction by acquiring both software and services businesses. At the moment its acquisition pace is torrid — a little over two companies a month!

Rather than building products to move into more profitable business areas, Big Blue is buying companies so it can quickly shift high-growth platforms and embracing automation and the cloud. Four acquisitions show us where IBM is doubling down on acquiring capabilities:

Softlayer (2013) — global cloud infrastructure
UrbanCode (2013) — software delivery automation
Green Hat (2012) — software quality and testing for cloud
Big Fix (2010) — management and automation for security and compliance software updates

Two particular focus areas in automation platform and services stand out:

Analytics (automation of high-end analysis)
BPaaS (Business Process as a Service), which is an automated version of IBM’s infrastructure business.

Years ago IBM put hard caps on scaling the company by adding headcount, and this is a driver in chasing automation as IBM exits low-margin, labor-arbitrage offerings.

3. Battle-tested advantage

Unlike many of its peers building and piloting solutions and products, the third prong in IBM’s growth plan ensures the companies it acquires have fully formed battle-tested models. Instead of creating a baby that has to crawl before it walks, IBM acquires “teenagers” that can run — companies that already conducted pilots and ensured there is a market for the offerings. And then IBM super-charges the model with Big Blue’s awesome brand and sales and marketing strategies. This is a time-tested formula that has worked for IBM in the past.

As we watch IBM remake itself in this three-part plan to drive services growth, we expect the strategy will be successful.

Photo credit: Irish Typepad

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Tag: growth strategy