Enterprise Adoption Themes for Field Service Management (FSM) Solutions | Market Insights™
November 22, 2022
Field Service Management
Field Service Management
The best strategy to maximize business needs amid inflation involves appreciating existing shifts in economic forces to source partnerships for improved business value.
Amy Fong, Partner at Everest Group, says that industry stakeholders can only lower outsourcing costs by appreciating the concern’s existence and developing appropriate strategies to improve flexibility in industrial operations.
With increasing disruptions to traditional business models and the rapid adoption of exponential technologies such as Web 3.0, the metaverse, and 5G, enterprises need a new technology strategy to compete in the market.
“As organizations across industries claim to be technology firms, CIO and IT leaders are getting a seat at the table to shape the organization’s growth strategy,” said Ronak Doshi, Partner at Everest Group.
With the launch of 5G in India last month, the 2022 Indian Mobile Congress (IMC) demonstrated many exciting possibilities for the high-speed network to deliver innovative use cases in India. Beyond the technology benefits, 5G can be leveraged to solve efficiency and optimization challenges and enable future growth for enterprises. To learn more about 5G business opportunities, read on.
India embarked on its “new digital universe” with the official unveiling of 5G technology by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the sixth edition of the Indian Mobile Congress (IMC), Oct. 1-4 in Pragati Maidan in New Delhi. In this blog, we share some of our key takeaways from the event organized by the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) and India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT).
The evolution of connectivity technologies with 5G as a platform for boosting productivity and innovation was among the key themes that emerged from this India mobile conference that drew an enthusiastic response from technology service and infrastructure providers, manufacturers, industry and government officials, academia, and the public.
While the 5G benefits of increased connectivity speed, low latency, and improved reliability are now well known, the India mobile conference highlighted several 5G-enabling technologies. These include carrier integrated 5G network (low- and mid-band); open-source technologies and architectures (O-RAN); network cloudification through Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC); small cell 5G architecture, private 5G, network slicing, and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA).
An interesting highlight of the event was the increased emphasis on showcasing the applications of 5G. Among the possible use cases spotlighted were massive and critical Internet of Things (IoT), machine-to-machine communication, collaborative robotics, autonomous driving, vehicle edge computing, metaverse and Augmented Reality (AR) powered collaboration, predictive maintenance, remote surgery, real-time analytics and decision making, cloud-based gaming, smart cities solutions, intelligent supply chain and logistics, and smart retail.
With 5G resolving connectivity problems and other building blocks like cloud, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML), and IoT now mainstream, enterprises have all the needed elements to optimize and modernize their technology landscape and capture the next wave of growth opportunities.
While 5G network equipment and components are generally expected to consume more power than the previous generation, recent equipment and software innovations aim to make products as energy efficient as possible.
Some examples of the energy-efficient technology presented at IMC included lightweight massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radios and software solutions such as traffic-aware dynamic network management solutions for energy monitoring and management that provide 5G levels of expected network performance while consuming the same amount of energy as the traditional 4G network.
5G also is expected to power the next generation of sustainability applications around Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions monitoring and management, optimal resource management, smart transport, and other uses. Its higher bandwidth will make it possible to connect large numbers of IoT devices over the Internet and enable faster decisions through increased connectivity speeds and low latency.
While 5G offers numerous benefits, from optimization and efficiency to unlocking new growth avenues, the strategic business value needs to be clearly communicated to enterprises.
Currently, the 5G ecosystem is a bit fragmented, with different types of players offering their own strengths. For example, OEMs are focusing on improving the equipment and hardware; communication service providers are focused on increased speed and low latency; and system integrators (SIs) bring data, AI/ML, IoT, and cloud expertise.
To move to the next level, industry players need to combine 5G’s benefits of connectivity, reliability, and low latency with AI/ML, IoT, and cloud to build business use cases that add value to enterprises beyond just showcasing the possibilities.
Ecosystem players need to help enterprises realize that 5G is not only an improved wireless network technology but also a solution to their long-standing efficiency and optimization challenges that can enable their next wave of growth.
To further discuss the India mobile conference and how to capture the most value from 5G business opportunities, please reach out to us at [email protected] and [email protected].
Watch our webinar, What’s Ahead After a Decade of Digital Transformation?, to hear our analysts share perspectives on what’s in store for the digital transformation industry in the next ten years.
The next-generation exponential technology of Web 3.0 holds promising opportunities for brand, technology, marketing, and business strategy providers to partner with enterprises in five key service areas. To learn more about the opportunities in this emerging market, read on.
Multiple consumer and business brands have taken the first steps in experimenting with Web 3.0 business by building non-fungible tokens (NFTs), purchasing virtual lands in metaverse platforms, organizing virtual events, and creating enabling platforms.
But building a Web 3.0 business goes beyond just creating NFTs for a company and requires embracing the concepts of Web 3.0 business, the creator economy, decentralization, social commerce, immersive experience, trust, and sustainability.
As enterprises like Ferrari, Starbucks, JP Morgan, McDonald’s, Samsung, NBA, Walmart, Disney, Google, Nike, Oracle, EY, and Stripe begin to see traction in this space, they will seek to partner with brand, technology, marketing, and business strategy providers who understand this ecosystem to scale initiatives and drive newer ones.
Let’s explore the following five key demand areas where providers can offer their expertise.
Business strategy services: Web 3.0 business needs to be conceptualized and aligned with the enterprise strategy. Beyond that, service partners should also be bold enough to push clients to adopt Web 3.0 business models that may not be entirely related to their existing businesses. This has already started to happen and has blurred the boundaries between industries and company classifications.
Normally enterprises start with building NFT offerings for their brand to engage consumers. NFT design and implementation can create short-term demand and may eventually become a small part of overall Web 3.0 initiatives. Many enterprises use celebrities, while others use crowd contributions, technology, and various other models to build NFTs. Professional service partners need to understand this complex landscape and advise clients accordingly. With an estimated 15,000 Web 3.0 start-ups, making the correct selection is important.
At the beginning of a Web 3.0 journey, clients will seek services tailored to their specific industry, such as an automotive company creating a virtual showroom in metaverse; an apparel company using NFTs to trade for physical goods; a bank building a Web 3.0-enabled payment system; or an energy company incentivizing customers to sustainably consume power with crypto assets. In addition, many clients may want finance, procurement, and Human Resources to leverage Web 3.0 principles. Service providers who support such enterprise functions need to be at the forefront to serve this demand or risk near-term losses.
Architecture and platform services: Recently, leading cloud vendors such as Google and AWS launched blockchain node services. In addition, start-ups are focusing on Web 3.0 infrastructure services to enable out-of-the-box offerings. Start-ups such as InfStones, ChainSafe, and Alchemy collectively raised US$300 million to enhance their blockchain infrastructure offerings.
Service providers need to work with these vendors to build enabling infrastructure for clients’ Web 3.0 journey. Even for seemingly simpler initiatives such as building NFTs, clients have multiple platform decisions to make, such as NFT marketplaces, wallets, and underlying blockchain. Not only do service providers need to understand these complex technologies and work with an extended ecosystem, but these firms also need to be thought partners to guide clients in the right direction and drive initiatives.
In addition, the core offerings for edge, network, and pervasive computing must be delivered. Unlike cloud-based workloads, the Web 3.0 ecosystem will heavily rely on edge processing. Materially high network bandwidth and resiliency will be required. Therefore, ongoing hyper-automated technology operations services will need to be amplified using next-gen observability, resiliency, and predictive maintenance. Service partners will have to focus on the right messaging infrastructure, decide between off/on-chain computing, build digital simulations, and create the underlying Web 3.0 core for their clients, much like they did for cloud services.
Brand and experience services: At the core of Web 3.0 businesses is the experience it can create for end consumers. Branding and experience service providers such as Dentsu and Publicis are already investing in the Web 3.0 ecosystem. Moreover, technology providers such as Adobe and Salesforce have also launched offerings to address this client need. Although “user centricity” has gained pace in recent years, Web 3.0 businesses need to take this even further. Brands such as Adidas have already experimented with token-gated communities and provide exclusive access to assets.
The enabling technologies, platforms, and environments now available to build such experience offerings are powerful but complex. Socially distributed networks, creator platforms, crypto payments, generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), enhanced reality, and various other solutions have the power to create previously unimagined customer experiences. Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) have to become extremely tech-savvy to explore the potential Web 3.0 business has for their brand strategies.
Software and integration services: Web 3.0 business requires thousands of software to work together. Enterprises will build many of these internally to drive differentiation. However, many back-end software will be SaaS-based and bought through vendors that will need integration. In addition, numerous Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) will be built and purchased that will need to work in unison.
This will not just be the software we see today but will have AI/Machine Learning (ML) and other advanced data technologies as their core. These context-aware software will need to leverage advanced auto-development, auto-tuning, and auto-management concepts to be more efficient and sustainable. Rather than being cloud-first, these software will have to be edge-first and compatible across various hardware, unlike browser-based systems. Building lightweight yet rich workloads will be a complex engineering problem to solve for.
Governance, risk, and cyber security services: The legalities of Web 3.0 businesses are unknown, and clients need significant help from service partners to navigate this complex new pioneer. Enterprises will need assistance deciphering contractual obligations, data privacy, personal identity, cyber security, and interpreting platform terms and conditions.
The recent collapse of crypto exchange FTX is a good example. Some law firms have found the terms and conditions of popular Metaverse platforms extremely one-sided. If these platforms shut down their business, the consumer would lose all their virtual assets. Service partners need to work with clients to help them understand the risks and build recovery solutions. Providers also will need to deliver cyber security, content moderation, trust, and related security and risk services so clients feel secure that customers will trust their Web 3.0 business initiatives.
In addition, given Web 3.0 enabling technologies are under scrutiny for their environmental impact, clients will look for service partners who have sustainability as a primary offering. Environmental sustainability will take near-term priority for such initiatives.
Moreover, massive opportunities will emerge to build technology workloads by adopting Web 3.0 concepts. In the same way clients adopted Web 2.0 social media and digital commerce to enhance their businesses, they will want to adopt business-contextualized Web 3.0 technologies. The key difference is that Web 3.0 will propel enterprises to engage with stakeholders in previously unknown ways, learn about newer architectures and monetization models, and embrace the creator economy – all pushing them beyond what they are now and realizing the art of the possible.
For more on Everest Group’s research in this area, see our reports on the following topics: NFTs, Decentralized Finance, Metaverse, crypto assets, Blockchain, and trust. If you are a brand management, technology, or strategy consulting provider, please reach out to [email protected] to share your experience in building Web 3.0 business for clients.
Start planning for the future of your organization. Join our upcoming webinar, Key Issues for 2023: Rise Above Economic Uncertainty and Succeed.
I’ve discussed in several recent blogs software-defined operating platforms, which cause a dynamic, much more intimate relationship between a company’s tech stack and operations. The new world of these platforms is different from the old tech and operations relationships with ERP systems. In fact, this new dynamic relationship challenges the fundamental view of technology components. Question: Is the whole tech stack changing, or are companies just adding layer after layer on top of the tech stack’s existing foundation? In this blog, I explain why it is important to understand the answer to this question.
As pointed out by an Everest Group Study conducted for the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP), as the usage of alternate channels such as social media, mobile, web, and chat proliferates and experiences enabled by data and analytics becomes the norm, contact centers are taking up the role of customer experience hubs.
Another acceleration lever suggested in the Everest Group study is to enhance the focus on creating awareness through marketing efforts to scale the outreach of educational programs and other training initiatives.
Read more in BusinessWorld
2022 has proven to be a constantly shifting and unpredictable year for outsourcing services. The first half witnessed an unprecedented demand surge accompanied by cost and price inflation, and the second half saw a slowdown in client decision-making with fears of a recession.
In this webinar, Everest Group’s pricing experts will analyze the trends observed this year and deliver the pricing outlook for IT and BPO services in 2023.
Our speakers will discuss:
Who should attend?
As the foundational technology for metaverse, a cloud infrastructure can unleash metaverse’s true promise and help it grow. To learn about the five critical elements cloud offers metaverse and how it is impacting enterprise strategies and the future, read on.
Metaverse holds the promise to transform the way we create, consume, and communicate information by integrating virtual, augmented, and physical realities in a world where users can engage and gather immersive experiences.
Technology pioneers are betting on this multi-billion-dollar industry that can offer experiential engagement to digital customers. With a potential growth rate of more than 50% by 2030, it is considered the technology of the future.
From redefining the hybrid work model to modernizing product payment systems and innovating experiences at speed and scale, metaverse has found applications most everywhere across all enterprises. It has evolved from only being accessible through Virtual Reality (VR) headsets to becoming directly available through smartphones.
“The metaverse is here, and it’s not only transforming how we see the world but how we participate in it – from the factory floor to the meeting room.”
– Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft
But what enables metaverse to create synced avatars that can interact in real-time with such ease? Which underlying technologies integrate to create the virtual existence of our physical realm?
Beneath this world of enhanced user experience and engagement lies the core of all the new-age order – the cloud. Metaverse seems to be a natural use case of cloud adoption. Its ever-expanding universe of existence demands resources that can support its growth.
Moreover, cloud can exhibit its true potential to be purpose-led with the expansion of metaverse. Thus, with the underlying requirements of accessibility and connectedness, a cloud-native infrastructure can unleash metaverse’s true promise.
Cloud caters to the metaverse in the following ways:
Industry players have recognized the cloud’s pivotal role in the metaverse space. Social media companies, game developers, and technology vendors have begun to meaningfully invest in strengthening their cloud infrastructure.
The race to embrace metaverse is changing future cloud adoption strategies in such ways as:
We expect enterprise leadership to increasingly push for metaverse adoption to meet evolving internal objectives or changing environmental dynamics. Transforming the underlying infrastructure to be metaverse-ready is the first – and most critical step – for enterprises embarking on this journey.
For more details on metaverse adoption, see our Metaverse Primer: What Is It and Where Can It Be Used? To discuss leveraging the cloud to have a metaverse-ready infrastructure, contact [email protected] and [email protected].
You can also watch our LinkedIn Live session, Trust and Safety (T&S) in the Metaverse, to learn risk mitigation strategies for challenges that could arise when taking on metaverse initiatives, and implications for the third-party T&S services market.
By bringing together disparate data to gain a single customer view, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are becoming increasingly important to help brands drive personalized marketing efforts while maintaining trust and privacy. Learn more about the benefits of Customer Data Platforms and why they matter in this blog.
With the explosion of data on consumers’ spending and online behavior available from a multitude of sources today, gleaning valuable insights from the massive amounts of information is a top priority for brands.
But unifying the various disconnected touch points clearly and comprehensively to make sense of all the data is one of the biggest challenges facing marketers.
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have emerged as an important software solution that can help businesses get closer to consumers and achieve their organizational goals. Let’s explore what is driving the rise of CDPs.
Third-party cookies stored within users’ browsers have historically been a key marketing technology to track visitor behavior activity, improve the user experience, and collect metadata.
But today’s new consumer priorities, data privacy laws, and evolving technologies are leading to the third-party cookie’s demise. Following Safari’s lead in 2016, the world’s three main browsers eliminated (or will eliminate) the use of third-party cookies.
In addition to the demise of third-party cookies, other developments are limiting the use of consumer data for marketers. On the mobile/tablet devices side, Apple’s iOS 14 now requires explicit consent for any mobile identification collection.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and other similar regulations are impacting consumer data collection and processing. In addition, 71% of countries have data protection and privacy regulations and 9% have draft legislations, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD.)
These developments significantly impact the consumer targeting capabilities of advertisers who often depend on third-party data. The vast majority of advertisers use or have used retargeting and old-generation Data Management Platforms (DMPs) that rely heavily on segments fed by third-party data.
Along with targeting, measurement is also significantly hindered. With more stringent consent collection requirements, collecting the consumer identifications needed to track impressions, clicks, or views and reconstruct complete customer journeys is more difficult.
These changes represent a major shift in data-driven marketing – leading to greater reliance on first- and second-party data to meet the challenges of an increasingly privacy-focused world.
But the unfortunate reality is that most organizations simply aren’t ready to adapt to these trends.
In our report Emergence of CDPs: Charting the Path to Data-driven Personalization, we estimate that even though 90% of businesses agree that data-driven marketing is the future, only 20% consider themselves highly mature enterprises, citing the high cost of data acquisition, limited automation, and data fragmentation as some of the top challenges.
With this imminent shift from third-party to first- and second-party data, the changing regulatory environment, and evolving customer expectations for omnichannel and hyper-personalized experiences, enterprises are actively investigating new ways of collecting and activating customer data to drive personalization while fostering customer trust.
This is where CDPs become increasingly important and act as a central repository for the marketing stack.
A CDP allows enterprises to capture and store user data to link with all the users’ interactions, including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and eCommerce platforms, social media, websites, and apps. Having data from multiple different systems improves the likelihood of identifying an individual. See the customer data platform framework below:
Customer data platform framework
By gaining a single customer view, brands can better understand customer requirements and up-to-date communications preferences, personalize individual brand experiences based on past behavior, and create personalized recommendations for customer segments. All of this can be achieved using unique, relevant, and accurate information that a person has willingly shared with the brand.
CDPs do not replace existing data systems. Instead, their role is to enhance current tools’ capabilities, mitigate risk from the third-party cookie demise, and power marketing teams with near real-time best-in-class audience selection. CDPs bring together existing customer data, anonymous floating attributes, and digital behavior across channels, devices, and tools.
Adoption is on the rise with, CDPs being viewed by enterprises as one of the most viable, future-proof solutions for managing the overwhelmingly disparate data streams that today’s brands gather and generate about their consumers and prospects.
Enterprises have many choices in this rapidly expanding market, including:
Along with the growth in new entrants, the CDP space has seen a flurry of merger and acquisition activity in recent years of players that have showcased their unique data, campaign, analytics, and delivery capabilities, as illustrated below to see merger and acquisition activity in the customer data platform landscape.
Merger and acquisition activity in the customer data platform landscape
As the data management landscape continues to rapidly evolve, CDPs will play an important role in the marketing tech stack and enable marketers to achieve true 1:1 personalization.
For enterprises to reach the desired business outcomes and mitigate risks in their personalization journeys, they should follow a comprehensive roadmap with the following four steps for data-driven 1:1 personalization:
Roadmap for data-driven 1:1 personalization
For more, see our report, Emergence of CDPs: Charting the Path to Data-driven Personalization, or view our webinar, Hyper-personalization Using Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). To discuss Customer Data Platforms further, please reach out to Sandeep P at [email protected].
Discover how CX leaders can meet the expectations of their digitally enabled customers in our webinar, How are Leading Organizations Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience?
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