Most ITO Deals Are Structured Around ADM, Testing, DW/BI, and Network Services | Market Insights™
December 20, 2014
The major share of ITO deals are structured around ADM, testing, DW/BI, and network services
The major share of ITO deals are structured around ADM, testing, DW/BI, and network services
Increasing buyer preference to unbundle services leads to shorter deal duration
Singer/songwriter Lyle Lovett wrote a song with the line “If I were the man you wanted, I would not be the man that I am.” With apologies to Lyle Lovett, I think this is a very appropriate line when applied to IT infrastructure services today. Clients’ changing expectations of their incumbent IT infrastructure service providers leave the providers lamenting like the forlorn cowboy in Lovett’s song.
It’s only natural for companies to want their incumbent service providers to bring them cloud offerings. Their expectations are set by what they read and see from Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They want the infrastructure services price dropped, the benefits of elasticity and flexibility of the cloud model and usage with no commitment. Companies are trying to persuade or force their infrastructure providers to bring cloud offerings.
But IT infrastructure providers are unable to provide what they want.
The clients helped created the underlying problem. The incumbents’ services are bespoke, unique, and have been dictated through client contracts in a different kind of delivery model. In this model, costs rise every year through COLA rather than plummeting like the price of public cloud. The cost of public cloud services had been dropping around 20 percent per year but is now accelerating with the latest adjustment between 60-80 percent in a single downward-pricing adjustment by Google, quickly followed by all the major cloud players.
The pricing components are not apples to apples, and companies understand that. But plummeting prices play into client expectations. Expectations of business users that they ought to be able to have deflating costs with elasticity and flexibility and limited or no long-term commitments just cannot be met in the traditional outsourcing base.
The incumbent providers’ delivery model is a recipe of the client’s own making. Clients dictated where the provider can provide services from, what kind of service the provider must deliver and demanded customization to address their needs. As a result, providers have huge stranded investments tied up in providing what the clients demanded.
There is no “they lived happily ever after” end to this situation. Among infrastructure clients, the situation causes increasing unhappiness as their unmet expectations further diverge from the reality of the services their incumbent providers deliver. But because of contractual obligations and because of their orientation, the incumbent service providers simply cannot change.
So, like the forlorn cowboy in Lyle Lovett’s song, the lyrics resonate with great poignancy among today’s service providers … “If I were the man you wanted, I would not be the man that I am.”
Photo credit: Cristian Viarisio
The global IT outsourcing market reached $US472 billion in 2013
Demand for infrastructure outsourcing in healthcare IT will rise in the coming years, as that for application outsourcing and systems integration/consulting will fall
Software-defined infrastructure:a revolution for the infrastructure landscape
On 19 May, Wipro signed a US$400 million+, multi-year strategic alliance deal with Japan’s largest pharmaceutical firm, Takeda Pharmaceutical. Wipro will provide infrastructure management services across Takeda’s global operations, thereby creating a unified platform across the company. Less than a week earlier, HCL announced a landmark infrastructure deal with pharmaceutical major Novartis. Per the terms of the deal, HCL will provide remote infrastructure management services for Novartis across its entire data center landscape, covering more than 70 countries across six continents.
The Life Sciences Infrastructure Bandwagon
These deals are indicative of a sharp inflection point for IT infrastructure services in the life sciences industry. Until now, service providers have been largely focused on delivering application outsourcing services such as ADM, testing, ERP, and package implementation. Demand for infrastructure services was largely linear and predictable. However, the winds of change sweeping the overall healthcare landscape have brought about strong momentum to infrastructure uptake.
These winds include regulatory reform, consumerization, market consolidation, and the emergence of next-generation digital avenues. The volume, variety, and velocity of incoming data are fundamentally impacting how life sciences organizations view their infrastructure needs. Exponential growth in data, coupled with evolving engagement and drug development models, has resulted in a significant need for analytics. Dimensions such as real-time reporting, proliferation of mobile devices, and automation are providing additional impetus.
The Opportunity At Hand
Among the various sub-segments of life sciences IT outsourcing, we see infrastructure poised to assume the lion’s share of growth in the coming years. While applications and SI/consulting are likely to grow at a healthy rate, the infrastructure opportunity in life sciences could triple in value over 2014-2020. This is likely to be fueled by increasing traction in cloud delivery and storage models, data warehousing efforts, consolidation of information systems, and the move to obtain a unified view of customer data to enable actionable business outcomes.
Life sciences has traditionally been a mature IT market. Across medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical firms, biotech companies, life science firms spend more on IT than typical buyers. Life science companies have innovative R&D efforts at the core of their operating model. Given the rise in personalized medicines, there will be a surge in data storage/processing requirements and, consequently, infrastructure needs. These themes impact life sciences IT infrastructure requirements to give rise to various technology imperatives across the ecosystem.
Buyers in the life sciences space need to evaluate their infrastructure services roadmap on a business impact versus investment paradigm. They need to establish meaningful relationships with strategic partners in order to enable the true synergistic benefits of a comprehensive and relevant infrastructure services roadmap.
At the same time, services providers need to expand their infrastructure footprint to partner with enterprises in this transformative journey. They need to adopt a holistic mix of traditional tenets (co-location models, data warehousing, BI, hosting, and network services) along with next-generation services such as multi-tenancy solutions, cloud delivery and storage, and BYOD.
What are you experiencing in infrastructure services? Our readers are eager to hear!
About 2/5 IO incumbent providers were replaced with new providers in 2012 and 2013 as buyers sought change and control
Growth of cloud services is driving preferences for smaller deals with more flexible constructs
Double the fun! HCL’s stock valuation doubled in a just a little over 12 months. They’ve been on a tear, improving every month, with revenue per employee skyrocketing and the corresponding profitability rising. Sure, HCL has shifted some positions in its leadership team. But what really caused the investing community to value HCL at twice the price as before is HCL’s successful shift to transaction-based pricing.
The strategy behind the leadership shifts was to ensure future growth. Former CEO Vineet Nayer became Vice Chairman a year ago, and Anant Gupta moved from President/COO to President/CEO. Gupta has been with HCL for 19 years and built its infrastructure business — which is now the dominant marketplace for HCL.
HCL’s growth strategy is taking hold, and it successfully transitioned its infrastructure offerings from an FTE-based pricing model to per/service transactional pricing.
Previously I blogged about payment companies outperforming their BPO brethren: it was because they implemented platforms for transaction pricing. As I explained then, there are few examples of transitioning successfully to transaction pricing models outside the payments space. It’s almost as rare as catching lightning in a bottle.
Spectacular and Rare
But HCL is one of those rare instances and succeeded in the infrastructure space.
Where success happens in rolling out and implementing transaction pricing, a service provider can reap tremendous benefits because it captures productivity gains from automating. When a provider can scale this strategy, as HCL is doing, the financial and competitive benefits are spectacular.
©2023 Everest Global, Inc. Privacy Notice Terms of Use Do Not Sell My Information
"*" indicates required fields