Tag: PEAK Matrix

Enterprises Should Jump – Carefully – on the Cloud Native Bandwagon | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

With enterprise cloud becoming mainstream, the business case and drivers for adoption have also evolved. The initial phase of adoption focused on operational cost reduction and simplicity – what we call the “Cloud for Efficiency” paradigm. We have now entered Wave 2 of enterprise cloud adoption, where the cloud’s potential to play a critical role in influencing and driving business outcomes is being realized. We call this the “Cloud for Digital” paradigm. Indeed, cloud is now truly the bedrock for digital businesses, as we wrote about earlier.

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This is good and powerful news for enterprises. However, to successfully leverage cloud as a business value enabler, the services stack needs to be designed to take advantage of all the inherent benefits “native” to the cloud model – scalability, agility, resilience, and extendibility.

Cloud Native – What Does it Mean Anyway?

Cloud native is not just selective use of cloud infrastructure and platform-based models to reduce costs. Neither is it just about building and deploying applications at pace. And it is definitely not just about adopting new age themes such as PaaS or microservices or serverless. Cloud native includes all of these, and more.

We see cloud native as a philosophy to establish a tightly integrated, scalable, agile, and resilient IT services stack that can:

  • Enable rapid build, iteration, and delivery of, or access to, service features/functionalities based on business dynamics
  • Autonomously and seamlessly adapt to any or all changes in business operation volumes
  • Offer a superior and consistent service experience, irrespective of the point, mode, or scale of services consumption.

Achieving a true cloud native design requires the underlying philosophy to be embedded within the design of both the application and infrastructure stacks. This is key for business value creation, as lack of autonomy and agility within either layer hinders the necessary straight-through processing across the integrated stack.

In this regard, there are salient features that define an ideal cloud native IT stack:

Cloud native applications – key tenets

  • Extendable architecture: Applications should be designed for minimal complexity around adding/modifying features, through build or API connections. While microservices inherently enable this, not all monolithic applications need to be ruled out from becoming components of a cloud native environment
  • Operational awareness and resilience: The application should be designed to track its own health and operational performance, rather than shifting the entire onus on to the infrastructure teams. Fail-safe measures should be built in the applications to maximize service continuity
  • Declarative by design: Applications should be built to trust the resilience of underlying communications and operations, based on declarative programming. This can help simplify applications by leveraging functionalities across different contexts and driving interoperability among applications.

 Cloud native infrastructure – key tenets

  • Services abstraction: Infrastructure services should be delivered via a unified platform that seamlessly pools discrete cloud resources and makes them available through APIs (enabling the same programs to be used in different contexts, and applications to easily consume infrastructure services)
  • Infrastructure as software: IT infrastructure resources should be built, provisioned/deprovisioned, managed, and pooled/scaled based on individual application requirements. This should be completely executed using software with minimal/no human intervention
  • Embedded security as code: Security for infrastructure should be codified to enable autonomous enforcement of policies across individual deploy and run scenarios. Policy changes should be tracked and managed based on version control principles as leveraged in “Infrastructure as Code” designs.

Exponential Value Comes with Increased Complexity

While cloud native has, understandably, garnered significant enterprise interest, the transition to a cloud native model is far from simple. It requires designing and managing complex architectures, and making meaningful upfront investments in people, processes, and technologies/service delivery themes.

Everest Group’s SMART enterprise framework encapsulates the comprehensive and complex set of requirements to enable a cloud native environment in its true sense.

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Adopting Cloud Native? Think before You Leap

Cloud native environments are inherently complex to design and take time to scale. Consequently, the concept is not (currently) meant for all organizations, functions, or applications. Enterprises need to carefully gauge their readiness through a thorough examination of multiple organizational and technical considerations.

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Our latest report titled Cloud Enablement Services – Market Trends and Services PEAK Matrix™ Assessment 2019: An Enterprise Primer for Adopting (or Intelligently Ignoring!) Cloud Native delves further into the cloud native concept. The report also provides the assessment and detailed profiles of the 24 IT service providers featured on Everest Group’s Cloud Enablement Services PEAK MatrixTM.

Feel free to reach out us to explore the cloud native concept further. We will be happy to hear your story, questions, concerns, and successes!

Best of the Best: Everest Group Picks Top 5 Leading Vendors in the RPA Market | In the News

In a report identifying the top 18 top robotic process automation (RPA) vendors, Everest Group has named Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, NICE, Thoughtonomy, and UiPath as the five market leaders.

The a Dallas-based consulting and research group’s highly respected “Product PEAK Matrix Assessment” for the industry noted that the standouts outperformed their peers in several key areas.

Read more in Cognitive Business News

Everest Group’s 3rd Annual Service Provider of the Year™ Awards: Did Your IT Services Provider Win? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

2017 was a seminal year for IT services. Digital adoption finally broke free from the shackles of marketing’s lip service and moved from “pilot” to “program.” The of role CIOs resurged as business stakeholders relied on them to deal with an ever-growing supply landscape and procurement conundrum to deal with new-age technology. And growth challenges appeared to have bottomed out for the two key industry verticals: BFSI (the largest) and Healthcare & Life Sciences (the fastest).

Hence, our 2018 Service Provider of the Year™ awards for IT services providers – our third edition – recognize companies that not only weathered a challenging year but reinvented themselves to chart out a new phase of growth for 2018 and beyond.

Our methodology

We select the IT Service Provider of the Year award winners based on the consolidated scores they achieve in the Star Performer, Leader, Major Contender, and Aspirant positions on our PEAK Matrix™ evaluations. In 2017, 67 service providers participated in 24 PEAK Matrix evaluations.

Awards categories

This year’s awards categories:

  • Leader boards
    • ITS Top 20: A list that recognizes the top 20 service providers
    • Top 10 Challengers: New this year, this list recognizes the top 10 service providers with annual revenue less than US$2 billion that increasingly position in the PEAK Matrix evaluation segments as challengers to the established leaders.
  • Individual awards
    • Leader of the year: Recognizes the service provider(s) with the maximum number of Leader positions
    • Star Performer of the year (overall): Recognizes service provider(s) with the maximum number of Star Performer positions.

We awarded these recognitions in the following areas:

  • Overall IT Services
  • Application Services
  • Digital Services
  • Cloud and Infrastructure Services
  • Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance
  • Healthcare and Life Sciences

Highlights of 2018 Service Provider of Year Awards

Here’s a look at the top five on the ITS Top 20 leader board:

PEAK SP of the Year

  • Accenture and TCS took the top two positions in the ITS Top 20
    • Accenture retained its top slot from 2017
    • TCS moved into second place, leapfrogging Cognizant and IBM
  • Accenture won Leader of the Year (overall)
  • TCS won Star Performer of the Year (overall)
  • And in the new Top 10 Challengers category, LTI and Virtusa snagged the top two positions.

Wondering if your IT services provider – or the firm you work for – received one of these coveted awards? See the complete list of winners.

Everest Group Announces Winners of 2018 IT Service Provider of the Year Awards | Press Release

Everest Group names 10 new challengers to the top 20 IT service providers, as stalwarts Accenture, Cognizant, IBM, TCS and Wipro lead the industry for the third consecutive year.

Everest Group—a consulting and research firm focused on strategic IT, business services and sourcing—today announced the winners of the 2018 PEAK Matrix Service Provider of the Year™ awards for IT services. The awards, now in their third year, recognize IT service providers who have demonstrated consistent leadership in the PEAK Matrix™ reports issued by Everest Group in the previous year.

Topping the 2018 Top 20 ITS Service Providers list are Accenture, TCS, Cognizant, Wipro and IBM, in that order. Accenture retains its position at the top of the leaderboard for the second year, and TCS moves up to second place (from fourth), leapfrogging Cognizant and IBM, who take the third-and fifth-place spots, respectively. Wipro claims the No. 4 spot, improving from fifth-place ranking in 2017.

***All winners are listed in the report, “2018 PEAK Matrix Service Provider of the Year Awards” available for complimentary download here.***

“Throughout the year, Everest Group evaluates service providers who are distinguishing themselves in the eyes of enterprises with their innovative service strategies,” said Jimit Arora, partner at Everest Group. “We also evaluate the service providers’ market success, their business strategies and how they are investing in the future. By taking all of that into account, these PEAK Matrix Service Provider of the Year awards recognize the IT providers that truly set themselves apart.”

New for this year’s awards, Everest Group names the Top 10 ITS Challengers—service providers with less than US$2 billion in annual revenue who are credible partners for enterprises in the digital-first era. LTI, Virtusa and Syntel top the inaugural list.

“Although smaller in size, these challengers are credible alternatives to the leading players in the industry in certain niches,” said Abhishek Singh, practice director at Everest Group. “Challengers have successful service strategies that focus on specific solution segments, geographies or industries that align well with enterprise needs.”

Everest Group also identifies Top Leaders and Star Performers in five market segments: Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS); Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI); Cloud and Infrastructure Services (CIS); Application Services (AS); and Digital Services (DS). These honors are awarded to IT service providers who appeared in “Leader” or “Star Performers” positions most prevalently within the previous year’s PEAK Matrix reports specific to that segment.

Companies recognized either as Leaders of the Year, Star Performers of the Year, or both, include Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, IBM, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro.

Other Findings of Note

NTT Data made the most impressive move up the rankings, moving up ten places from No. 20 to No. 10. Seven additional service providers improved their rankings:

  • TCS moved from No. 4 to No. 2.
  • Wipro moved from No. 5 to No. 4.
  • Infosys moved from No. 9 to No. 7.
  • Tech Mahindra moved from No. 14 to No. 12.
  • LTI moved from No. 16 to No. 13.
  • Virtusa moved from No. 15 to No. 14.
  • Syntel moved from No. 17 to No. 16.

New entrants to the ITS Top 20 list include Mphasis (No. 17) and Genpact (No. 20), and there were no exits from the list. DXC Technologies—a merged entity of CSC and HPE, both previous members of the list—appears for the first time at No. 9.

In 2017, Everest Group published 24 PEAK Matrix reports, evaluating a total of 67 service providers in various segments of the IT services market.

About the PEAK Matrix™

The Everest Group PEAK Matrix is a proprietary framework for assessing the relative market success and overall capability of service providers based on Performance, Experiences, Ability and Knowledge. Each service provider is comparatively assessed on two dimensions: market success and delivery capabilities. Market success is measured by revenue, number of clients and year-over-year growth. Delivery capability is measured by scale of operations, scope, technology and innovation, delivery footprint and buyer satisfaction. The resulting matrix categorizes service providers as Leaders, Major Contenders, and Aspirants. Companies that demonstrate strong upward movement in successive reports are recognized as Star Performers.

Sourcing Professionals Face Increasing Complexity as Stakes Rise, Driving Changes at Everest Group | Press Release

Everest Group expands and deepens research in PEAK Matrix™ to address needs of sourcing professionals as industry turbulence swells.

Sourcing professionals face formidable challenges in the global economy as 2018 approaches, and they are looking for better strategies in an industry experiencing unparalleled turbulence. To provide sourcing professionals with broader and deeper data and insights for decision-making, Everest Group is expanding its research efforts while consolidating a diverse portfolio of comparative analyses under its flagship PEAK Matrix™ brand.

Sourcing Complexity Soars

The sourcing industry is changing fast, disrupted by digital technologies, shifting talent requirements and evolving service provider capabilities. Moreover, fluctuating geopolitical and legislative issues are causing enterprises to rethink substantial, long-held sourcing strategies and provider relationships.

***Read more about the turbulence in the global sourcing industry and the complexities faced by sourcing professionals in the blog “Sourcing Professionals Have a Tough Job”***

In the midst of this complexity, buyers of global services require fact-based research that assesses a growing body of providers, locations, products and solutions in order to make the critical decisions that so often impact a company’s top-line, bottom-line and viability.

Everest Group Expands Comparative Analyses Offered Via PEAK Matrix

Responding to these needs, Everest Group has announced that it is doubling down on its commitment to provide fact-based comparative assessments. The firm is consolidating its comparative analysis offerings—previously offered under a variety of product names—under its flagship PEAK Matrix brand and is expanding the market segments addressed in its research to include new functions, processes and industry verticals that market is demanding.

Everest Group’s PEAK Matrix™ is well known in the industry as a proprietary framework for assessing service providers and categorizing them as Leaders, Major Contenders, and Aspirants. (Companies that demonstrate strong upward movement in successive reports are recognized as Star Performers.)

Now the PEAK Matrix framework will be applied to the relative positioning of other key global services players and functions, such as location talent and cost, technology vendors, and digital adoption maturity. The robust research methodology associated with Everest Group’s PEAK Matrix will remain; PEAK Matrix assessments are based on a diligent process of collecting, validating and analyzing data points as well as interactions with various market constituents that include providers, enterprises and industry/country associations.

“Making decisions in today’s rapidly changing global services market is growing more challenging —whether you are recompeting an outsourcing contract, selecting a location for a global in-house center, choosing a new product/solution, or contracting for new tech services,” said Eric Simonson, managing partner and head of research at Everest Group. “These decisions can significantly impact an organization’s performance and an executive’s career. So we are expanding our hallmark service provider PEAK Matrix assessments to include the other key players and functions that sourcing professionals must consider. For simplicity sake, this expanded portfolio of comparative assessments will fall under our PEAK Matrix brand, since it’s instantly recognized as the industry’s unbiased, non-pay-for-play assessment framework.”

****Learn more about the PEAK Matrix portfolio of assessments here***

Sourcing Professionals Have a Tough Job | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

If you are a sourcing professional, you have our deepest respect, because now, more than ever, your job is a tough one. The sourcing industry is changing fast, disrupted by emerging technologies, shifting talent requirements and evolving service provider capabilities. Moreover, fluctuating geopolitical and legislative issues are causing enterprises to rethink substantial, long-held sourcing strategies and provider relationships. Sourcing professionals face formidable challenges in the global economy as the new year approaches and they look for better strategies in an industry experiencing unparalleled turbulence.

Technology is Changing the Game

It used to be that a sourcing professional’s No. 1 responsibility was finding a way to get the work done as cheaply as possible. Not any more. Technology has changed the game. In nearly every industry, digital technologies are driving the development of innovative products and services and improved customer experiences. To keep pace in this digital world, enterprises are now pursuing a digital-first rather than arbitrage-first strategy. In fact, the global services market has seen a threefold increase in digital-focused deals.

Automation, once merely a service delivery tool, is now “front end,” with enterprises demanding strategy, vision and strong Proof-of-Concepts (POCs) for advanced automation in 33 percent of all application services contracts in 2016. Similarly, artificial intelligence, cognitive computing and robotics will soon begin to pervade the enterprise portfolio and will eventually become mainstream in sourcing landscape.

Talent Requirements Are Shifting

The increasing adoption of digital strategies is changing the workforce skills that enterprises seek, and, in turn, forcing sourcing professionals to revamp their location portfolios in the midst of a dynamic landscape. Location options for traditional global sourcing continue to expand, and new locations are emerging for unique talent demands, such as digital capabilities.

Geopolitical Disruption Adds Complexity

Sourcing professionals also must anticipate and react to numerous geopolitical disruptions that keep the sourcing landscape shifting like windblown sand. In the past year, for example, we have seen a significant decrease in demand from the United Kingdom given the uncertainty with Brexit; uncertainty about healthcare legislation in the US has dampened the healthcare sourcing market; and the uncertainty due to visa reforms has led to increased local hiring and onshoring in the U.S.

The Provider Landscape is Constantly Changing

Sourcing professionals also are challenged to stay abreast of changes in the provider landscape. Mergers and acquisitions are on the rise, and leading providers are making fundamental changes to their talent and service delivery models. Between April of 2016 and March of this year, Everest Group witnessed 40 acquisitions to expand digital capabilities, 140 alliances between providers and technology providers or startups, and the setup of 35 new centers and digital pods to help clients rethink their digital strategies.

Data for Sound Decision-Making

In the midst of this complexity, buyers of global services are tasked with making critical decisions. Recompeting an outsourcing contract, selecting a location for a global in-house center, or contracting for new tech services—these are the types of decisions that can significantly impact an organization’s performance and an executive’s career.

That’s why Everest Group has announced that it is doubling down on its commitment to provide fact-based comparative assessments. We’re consolidating our comparative analysis offerings – previously offered under a variety of product names – under our flagship PEAK Matrix brand, which will now evaluate services, solutions, products and locations. Additionally, we’ll be expanding the market segments addressed to include new functions, processes and industry verticals. Read more about it here.

In the midst of all the complexity and change that sourcing professionals face, one thing remains the same: Everest Group is your source for the fact-based analyses you need to make informed decisions that deliver high-impact results.

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