Services Prediction: More Mega Deals Coming | Sherpas in Blue Shirts
An interesting trend is developing in the services industry, reversing the trend we’ve seen for the past five years. I predict that this year, and for the next few years, we will see a modest rise in mega deals – deals with $500,000,000 or more in Total Contract Value (TCV). Where are those deals coming from?
At Everest Group, we watch services transactions closely. Over the last five years, the industry experienced a big move away from mega deals, preferring smaller and smaller transactions. This was then exacerbated by digital rotation where customers were interested in digital pilots – which are small deals. But this year we note a renewal of interest – in some specific situations – for large deals.
Here’s my take on three forces driving mega deals now.
Force #1: IP-Plus-Services Model
One force driving mega deals is where the service provider wraps services around the intellectual property (IP) platform the provider owns. TCS’s book of business of large deals is a good example of this. TCS has an IP platform around insurance and mega deals tied to that platform. The $2 billion-plus TCS transaction with Transamerica earlier this year is a good example. What makes the deal so large? The customer is modernizing its IT by jettisoning its legacy technology and transferring it to TCS for modernization through the TCS platform.
As the services industry pivots to digital models, IP ownership plays an increasingly important role. Automating work diminishes the importance of labor arbitrage, and the profit pool reconfigures around IP owners. The nature of the IP-plus-services model allows mega deals to happen. I expect more of this kind of deal to happen at TCS as well as at providers like Cognizant, which has a similar platform in the pharmaceutical healthcare space with TriZetto. Both TCS and Cognizant are using their investments in IP platforms to differentiate their offerings and capture large contracts.
Where service providers own important IP platforms, I see those as the basis for some very large deals.
Force #2: Leveraging the Balance Sheet
Another source for large deals is providers leveraging their balance sheet to finance a customer’s large-scale IT modernization. HCL and Wipro are good examples of providers using this approach to create very large deals. They use their balance sheets to fund expensive IT modernization deals, including taking over a customer’s legacy assets. This strategy accelerates a service provider’s growth, and I expect to see more mega deals using this strategy.
Force #3: Digital Transformation Programs
This year, we’ve seen digital transformation move out of the pilot phase into full-blown transformation programs. The amount of money customers spend on these transformations is staggering, often hundreds of millions of dollars. The large availability of enterprise funding for transformation is likely to encourage larger deals.
The net result of these three forces? I believe we will see a modest increase in mega deals, and in certain areas, larger deals for the remainder of this year and next year.
I’m not claiming the entire services market is moving to mega deals. In fact, two size-diminishing secular trends that were well underway continue: (1) decomposing the legacy, multi-tower deals to single towers and bidding those out (2) the move from managed services to systems integration and digital work. These trends will continue to create a fabric of smaller transactions.
However, some large deals are emerging. I believe the three forces I described are working against the well-established trends for smaller deals we saw during the last five years.
