Tag: NASSCOM

NASSCOM GIC Conference North — February 10 | Event

Everest Group is the Content Partner at the NASSCOM GIC Conference North: Future Proofing Your GICs through Digital and RPA.  At this event, Everest Group Partner H. Karthik will be the key speaker for a session titled, The Theme and What You Can Expect. He will also be the moderator for a discussion titled Crystal Ball Gazing – The Future of GICs in the Digital ERA.  Partner Rajesh Ranjan will be the moderator for a session host a case study session titled Breaking Ground – How I Did It for RPA.

When:
February 10, 2017

Where:
Gurgaon, India
Hotel Crowne Plaza, Sector 29

Everest Group speakers:

  • H. Karthik
    Partner, Global Sourcing, Everest Group
  • Rajesh Ranjan
    Partner, Research, Everest Group

Register to attend

Dominating themes at the #NASSCOM Design and Engineering Summit 2016 | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Digital technologies are fundamentally changing the demand ethos of the US$75 billion Engineering and Research and Development (ER&D) global sourcing market, which is expected to grow at a CAGR of more than 18 percent over the next five years. With rapidly evolving consumer needs, an increase in global regulatory pressures, the rise of the shared economy, increasingly complex security needs, and technology’s shift from enabler to disruptor, following are the major themes I expect to dominate the NASSCOM Design and Engineering Summit 2016, which is being held in Bangalore on October 5 and 6:

    1. The connected digital ecosystems: The proliferation of smart devices and radical improvement in connectivity infrastructure are shaping the evolving digital ecosystem of everything. Orchestrating this connected digital ecosystem and creating products that tap into it are creating a new demand portfolio of ER&D services across industries. Think rapid consumerization in the healthcare industry with increasing use of connected smart medical devices, the connected and autonomous vehicles defining the future of mobility in the shared economy, or the convergence of machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies and advanced analytics driving the industrial 4.0 revolution.
    2. Designing for the future: Enterprises must understand the needs of tomorrow’s customers, and will need to push the boundaries of innovation and design thinking to engineer products that are at the intersection of leveraging cutting edge technologies and re-imagining processes and business models.
    3. Smart, smarter, and smartest: The rise of cognitive computing technologies has pushed the boundaries of process and task automation to create smart products. Research advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and edge computing will drive development of products that dramatically improve the user experience, and provide convenience beyond expectations for consumers and employees alike. This creates demand for a talent model with hybrid skills of product engineering and design, domain knowledge, and ability to leverage cognitive technologies.
    4. Making sense of data: Enterprises are collecting a lot of data through a multitude of external and internal data sources, and are looking at how to enhance product design and engineering processes, reduce costs, improve quality, and meet evolving user expectations. Enterprises in the retail, defense, media, and financial services industries have been at the forefront of using data and analytics to answer these questions. Demand from these industries is driven from adoption of further sophisticated analytics initiatives that helps deliver competitive advantage. Industries including manufacturing, energy, telecoms, and healthcare and life sciences are rapidly adopting big data and analytics technologies.
    5. Real use cases beyond the cool stuff of AR/VR: Augmented reality and virtual reality technologies have great potential in areas such as remote monitoring and predictive maintenance, training, and simulated testing environments. Expect to hear more use cases for AR and VR technologies.
    6. Software-defined everything: “Software eats everything” across all industries – software-defined infrastructure, software-defined manufacturing, software-defined networking, software-defined datacenters, and so on. The delivery of software product as-a-service, the ability to remotely support and maintain customer premise equipment, and the increasing demand for configurable over customized software products are creating a new demand paradigm for ER&D services in the software products industry.
    7. Time-to-market: Speed is the new currency in the product engineering world. Sourcing has enabled enterprises not just to reduce costs but to drive agility and flexibility to respond to market volatility and constantly changing consumer demands. As technology becomes core to all activities, concepts such as agile and DevOps are becoming relevant across the ER&D services industry value chain.
    8. Standards, security, and compliance: Security is among three priorities for all C-suite executives globally. In the age of connected digital ecosystems, building security into product design is becoming an absolute necessity. Compliance but is a critical component of the demand driver for the ER&D services industry.

I look forward to interesting discussions on these and other topics with the engineering services enterprises and vendors during the #NASSCOM Design and Engineering Summit. If you’re there in person, feel free to contact me or my colleagues H Karthik and Bhawesh Tiwari.

Click here to read about Everest Group’s latest research on the engineering services global talent spot, and here, here, and here to check out detailed insights from this research.

NASSCOM Design and Engineering Summit 2016

Everest Group Experts to Headline “Go Digital or Die” Event for CIOs | Press Release

Taking the message a step further, Everest Group cites recent research in warning, “No DevOps, No Digital.”

No longer a peripheral facilitator of business operations, technology must now be at the heart of every enterprise. It is time to “go digital or die,” according to Everest Group, a consulting and research firm focused on strategic IT, business services and sourcing. To become truly digital, enterprises need to develop a holistic applications and infrastructure strategy, with DevOps as the pivotal enabler.

Everest Group experts Sarah Burnett, vice president, and Eric Simonson, managing partner, will discuss these findings at an exclusive event, “Go Digital or Die,” to be co-hosted by Professional Outsourcing magazine and Nasscom on June 23 in London.

Burnett and Simonson will join R. Chandrashekhar, Nasscom president, in discussing technology from the capital point of view, disruptive technology, and making the digital transition.

***More information about this exclusive networking dinner and presentation at the Royal Horse Guards Parade Hotel is available here.***

According to Everest Group’s Application & Digital Services research conducted in Q1 2016, over three-fourths of enterprises believe in leveraging digital technologies to achieve competitive differentiation.

“Enterprises that embrace digital adoption are using technology to create new business, not just enable it. For example, enterprises are discovering how IoT and mobility can dramatically improve user experiences, which is unlike the traditional role of technology for driving efficiencies in back-office operations,” said Yugal Joshi, practice director and lead on the recently published report, “Application Services – Annual Report 2016: ‘No DevOps No Digital.’”

“Digital enterprises are those that employ emerging technologies throughout the enterprise—across internal and market-facing operations,” continued Joshi. “This requires an integrated applications and operations strategy with DevOps as its pivotal element.”

Everest Group also reports that though enterprises are keen to adopt DevOps principles, most organizations struggle with them and require hand-holding on their journey. Nevertheless, this has not resulted in higher engagement with service providers, as enterprises themselves are scaling up their portfolio to meet this demand.

Other Key Takeaways from Application Services Annual Report

  • Enterprises have begun adopting Agile and DevOps principles by themselves. However, they are struggling with scaling up their pilot projects to an enterprise-wide adoption.
  • Many enterprises already have adopted Agile approaches in the application development and testing phases of the lifecycle and are now experimenting with ways to integrate the crucial operations phase to embark on a truly DevOps journey.
  • While in some cases enterprises lack executive leadership commitment to institute cultural change, in other cases, enterprises overemphasize technology without getting the pre-requisite peripherals in place.
  • The Application Services market grew by approximately 5 percent in 2015, higher than the overall IT services industry growth of 3 percent.
  • Demand for consulting services spiked in the last year, driven primarily by enterprise adoption of digital technologies.
  • Anti-incumbency is gaining traction among buyers as they are increasingly seeking newer engagement constructs.
  • The Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) segment led overall deal activity with 26 percent share. Healthcare and life sciences enterprises increased their spending proportion to 14 percent share.
  • As for the outlook for 2016-2017, Everest Group predicts that digital adoption will continue to witness increased traction, but the bulk of enterprise spending will be on traditional application services that take up the majority of legacy application portfolios. Application services will begin to take up a slightly larger share of the market as demand for digital technologies and connected systems will necessitate development of ecosystems across multiple channels.

***Publication-Quality Graphics***

High-resolution graphics illustrating the key takeaways from the “Application Services – Annual Report 2016: ‘No DevOps No Digital’” may be included in news coverage, with attribution to Everest Group. Graphics include:

  • No DevOps No Digital
  • Signs of anti-incumbency in Application Services deals
  • Consulting scope rising in Application Services deals
  • Application services deal sizes see deep decline

Download graphics here.

NASSCOM Global In-house Centres Conclave 2016 — April 21 – 22, 2016

Everest Group is the “Strategic Partner” of NASSCOM GIC Conclave 2016. In addition, we’ll serve as “Strategic Partner” for NASSCOM GIC regional events throughout the year.

At NASSCOM GIC Conclave 2016, Eric Simonson, Managing Partner, Research, Everest Group, will address the topic of the intersection of talent and digital. Learn more.

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.

Business Process Outsourcing or Operations or Management or Services? What’s with the Name? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Nomenclature for third-party provision of business process related services (typically called BPO or Business Process Outsourcing) has stirred up quite a debate in the industry. Is it just a marketing exercise or a step in the maturation of the industry? Clients have to feel the difference before they are willing to adopt a new name; otherwise it is purely marketing.

Most of the conversation is about replacing the letter “O” in BPO. Accenture retained the “O” but are calling it “Operations.” Nasscom along with several other service providers started calling it BPM (Business Process Management). Several industry stakeholders have asked for Everest Group’s opinion, so here’s my list of different acronyms (in ascending order of my personal preference):

BPM
(M=Management)
My least favorite. The name should at least convey what it means. BPM tends to confuse the BP? industry with workflows and process management tools and technologies that enable BP? delivery but are not truly representative of it. With BPM, I tend to think more Appian and Newgen rather than Genpact, TCS, and Accenture.
BPO
(O=Outsourcing)
It accurately describes the market, but I can understand why people do not want to associate the industry with just outsourcing which often connotes commoditized offerings providing cost reduction through arbitrage. It also has a certain social and political stigma associated with it. A word of caution though – outsourcing is not the same as offshoring but is a superset that may include offshore, nearshore, and/or onshore delivery.
BPO
(O=Operations)
Nice play of words but again seems to imply “operational” value creation and not the “transformational” capability of BP? in terms of value creation.
BPS
(S=Services)
My current favorite as essentially BP? is an industry where a third-party provides enterprises with services across horizontal business processes (order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, hire-to-retire) and industry-specific business processes (mortgage processing, claims management, meter-to-cash). Service delivery requires people expertise, process excellence, and technology capabilities, and service performance can be measured across efficiency, effectiveness, and business outcomes.

The industry is desperately seeking ways to go beyond the cost reduction mindset and evolve into a cost+ value proposition. Changing the name of the industry will not be of much use unless the underlying behavior (both buying and selling), solutions, contracts, and performance of the industry change.

However, I fear the industry is just trying to change the name versus actually working on the value, which will leave it open to criticisms. It’s just like putting a new coat of paint on an old car that needs an engine replacement!

So let’s try and go beyond this “name game” and focus on things that really matter.


Photo credit: Quinn Dombrowski

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