When we look at the now-famous Cognizant CEO factory, probably the best-known of the bunch is Debashis Chatterjee (known simply as “DC” to everyone in the biz), who now finds himself leading the new $4.2bn powerhouse that is LTIMindtree. He’s also one of the calmest and easy-going guys you can hope to meet in this business.
DC originally took the helm at Mindtree in August 2019, and soon found himself contending with a “non-merger” as LTI decided to keep Mindtree separate, and then a pandemic followed. But that all changed in November last year when DC was announced as the first CEO of the newly (and finally) merged LTIMindree entity. So let’s hear directly from DC… what makes him tick and what’s next for the new 7th largest Indian-heritage service provider…
Phil Fersht – CEO & Chief Analyst, HFS: It’s great to see you again, DC. I mean, you’ve been around the IT services space since before the internet. Right?
Phil: I can also remember the world before the internet, as well, so you’re not that old 😁. But let’s hear a bit about you, DC. What gets you up in the morning these days? And, as you look back over your career, was running a multibillion-dollar IT services shop what you always wanted to do when you started?
DC: So, Phil, my background is I am a mechanical engineer, by education. I used to be a very avid sportsperson in my school and college days and played a lot of sports, including cricket, which is my favourite sport. And if I was not pushed hard, I would not have become an engineer; I would have rather liked to continue in sports.
And having done my mechanical engineering, I joined an automobile manufacturing firm, spent two years over there, then – and I’m talking about 1989 – that is when I got an opportunity to work in TCS, which was a great opportunity at that point in time. I think IT happened to me by accident because it was just that everybody said, “IT is the future,” so I jumped onto it, and since then, I haven’t looked back.
We went through various S-curves within the industry, whether it is the initial mainframe era, or the client-server, or the internet, and then, subsequently, cloud and Digital, and went through various inflection points as well, like Y2K and the global financial crisis in 2008, in which I was right in the middle of, because I was running the Financial Services vertical at that time. So I think it has been a pretty exciting journey.
And if you ask me what it is that I think, getting up in the morning now, is these two organisations coming together, erstwhile LTI and erstwhile Mindtree, creating LTIMindtree. I think this is the first time, and a very unique scenario, where two listed entities are coming together which are almost of similar sizes, and bringing these two organisations together, the entire integration, and ensuring that we can create value over a period of time – one plus one equals more than 2, you know. I am always thinking about how to make that happen as we go along. I mean, we already have some plans, but how do you ensure that the plans can translate into execution? That’s something which I’m always thinking.
And, to your point, running a multibillion-dollar IT services company – who would not like to do that?! Not that it was the desire when I was studying my mechanical engineering, but definitely, as I went along, I felt if you are in the industry, you need to learn how to run scale, and how do you manoeuvre at scale. And scale is not something that I have not done before, and it’s really not just the scale, it’s the question of how do you leverage the scale, and get the best out of that scale? And that’s what I have been trying to do for several years.
Phil: It must be tremendously satisfying, DC, having spent such a significant career working in some of the biggest IT services companies in the world, actually to run your own shop, and drive some areas that are special to you. I mean, I was an analyst for 15-20 years, and I always had a personal view on how an analyst firm should be led, and getting the opportunity to build my own company, and add my own stamp, was tremendous. So who influenced you along the way as you built your career, when you started to build this vision?
DC: Well, I think there are many people who influenced me; people whom I have met,Read More
Managed services markets in functions such as finance, procurement, and HR have matured over the years, and it’s increasingly hard to differentiate across service providers… most deliver via an effort-based FTE model; they all compete for the same pool of talent, and they all have similar issues controlling attrition in this environment. However, enterprise leaders are increasingly desperate for rapid access to centralized data to make critical decisions in a hugely unpredictable and complex business environment.
Helping firms access centralized data at speed is critical to growing value-based partnerships, and none more so in financial planning
Hence those providers engaging in financial planning and analysis (FP&A) managed services, where they are supporting these critical data and planning decisions for their clients, are getting much deeper into the high-value controllership areas for them. This is where the whole relationship shifts from one of providing effort to one of performance and purpose.
The HFS Strategic Finance Horizons report analyzes services provider capabilities shaping the financial planning and analysis industry and their proven capabilities to help their enterprise customers access critical financial data at speed. HFS assessed 13 major service providers’ prowess in the strategic areas of FP&A, based on the “Big 4” who are leading in some of the more specialized pieces of strategic finance and delivering managed services programs, and the F&A service providers with proven ability and scale to deliver FP&A work.
The new Horizon landscape (below) demonstrates the providers’ positions within the three horizons. Horizon 1 refers to those providers who have been able to drive functional FP&A transformation, Horizon 2 includes those who have reached the level of business transformation, and, Horizon 3 includes all those providers who have closed the gap and moved towards ecosystem transformation.
Agility and an evolving mindsetare key in this ever-changingfinance landscape
The last few years have shown us just how much enterprises need to focus on staying agile through uncertainty, change, and disruption. Financial planning and analysis strategy, technology, talent, and processes must evolve to keep up with finance leaders’ aspirations for helping the business navigate uncertainty and create long-term business value. In their quest for agility, we see finance and risk leaders engaging with third-party service partners not just on traditional FP&A activities but starting to move into strategic finance and performance management.Read More
Nothing dictates real secular change to enterprise operations than financial pressures, and we are rapidly arriving at a third major trigger that will lead to the evolution of many autonomous enterprises where leaders have no choice but to drag their operations out of the dark ages:
Trigger 1: 1995 – The Internet drives globalization. The advent of the Internet at the turn of the millennium drove the first major wave of globalization of business and operations.
Trigger 2: 2008 The Great Recession brings about mass low-cost offshoring of IT. In 2008… the Great Recession drove a 15-year wave of tremendous offshoring growth… based on lower-cost labor to slash costs.
Trigger 3: 2023 Inflation drives organizations to supplement or replace human labor with autonomous technologies. In 2023… wage inflation, recession, and people refusing to return to the office will drive a considerable wave of autonomous enterprises… based on technology to perform the tasks of humans to stay afloat.
What is an “Autonomous Enterprise”?
An autonomous enterprise is one whose leadership continuously seeks to refine the data it needs in real-time to be successful. Its governance capability ensures it has the talent, tech infrastructure, automation, and AI to deliver the data that will drive success with minimal manual interventions that impede progress and speed. The ultimate goal of an autonomous enterprise allows us humans to remove ourselves from some parts of the system so that we can make continuous improvements to the ecosystem as a whole.
Ultimately, this is about machines making decisions where we previously had humans and removing humans from loops that don’t need humans anymore. Leadership must understand the data they need to be successful and assemble and govern the right system to deliver success (see our Six Principles of the Autonomous Enterprise).
We are on the verge of the third significant trigger of business operations arbitrage – autonomous technologies at speed and scale
The advent of the Internet at the turn of the millennium drove the first significant wave of globalization of business and operations. Still, it wasn’t until the Great Recession of 2008 that sparked the first massive wave of IT offshore outsourcing saw the likes of Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, and TCS enjoy enormous growth to become the multi-billion dollar firms they are today.
During the last decade, we have flirted with the advent of automation, where the rudimentary screen scraping, process, and system patches of RPA sparked the dreams of many CFOs and investors to “Automate the Enterprise.” The reality was that real progress with automation was never going to happen, while business unit leaders refused to make fundamental changes to their underlying processes and data. Plus, the fact that the global economy has been on a constant upward growth curve in recent years, and no one really drives painful, transformative change until economics forces them to.
Inflation-driven pressures will likely culminate in a huge wave of job reductions, sparking the demand for autonomous technologies to fill the void
In so many recent HFS roundtable conversations with enterprise leaders, there is one constant topic dominating proceedings: how to keep businesses functioning effectively when most staff are not willing to come to the office, when it’s impossible to coordinate complex process and workflow changes to the business, all while there is huge pressure to reduce inefficiencies, drive down costs and improve the quality of data.
In short, many businesses are limping out of the pandemic confusion, still struggling to pull themselves together, and in many cases, are slipping backward in terms of cementing their digital foundations and joining up key workflows across front-to-back offices.
Many organizations face significant staff reductions and have to figure out how to deliver on their operations and achieve their business outcomes with fewer people.
Operations leaders who cannot deliver on automation will become obsolete – it is now an expectation. Losing people will force smart managers to rethink how they can achieve more with less – you’ll simply have zero choice but to act. You’re running a finance department of 500 people, which is reduced to 250. How do you get stuff done now? You’d better reconfigure how processes work so you can take advantage of automation that can interact – via voice and digital – with self-learning capabilities that don’t need constant human supervision.
On the flip side, less people will make it easier to identify areas that demand urgent changes, and as they identify the critical data they need to be effective: do they know what their customers’ needs are? Is their supply chain effective in sensing and responding to these needs? Can their cash flow support immediate critical investments? Do they have a handle on your employee morale and performance?
Where technology can deliver routine tasks via simple automation and self-learning AI is becoming critical. HFS is using the team “digital employees” to describe how smart bots can function autonomously, can respond to both voice and digital interactions, can develop both short and long-term memories, can genuinely replace or supplement human activities to deliver workflows and processes that can provide the data company leaders need – at speed and at scale.
Automation is the leading tech investment being made among Global 2000 enterprises
10 years since HFS introduced RPA to the industry (see link), and we’re finally focusing on automation as a value-lever that drives business outcomes, as opposed to mere cost takeout in the back office.
The pandemic has shifted the automation focus from creating efficiencies in the back office to delivering immediate business impact, where talent shortages can be overcome, where digital workflows can operate despite broken supply chains, and where businesses can find new opportunities in their virtual and hyperconnected ecosystems.
Our recent pulse data of 602 enterprises proves beyond doubt that automation is the number one initiative currently underway to support enterprises in meeting their strategic priorities:
Automation is a discipline and a mindset
Automation is becoming so increasingly important to businesses as it helps solve so many of these endemic problems being caused by labor shortages, wage inflation, and poorly integrated systems, workflows, and processes. Simply put, if you get better at automating, you’re solving a lot of these other problems at the same time.
Smart business leaders have realized that automation is a mindset and a discipline that needs to be ingrained into every business practice. It is not why we do things; it’s how we do them. Automation makes what we have function effectively without needing constant human attention and manual workarounds. And the better we understand automation, the more autonomous it can become to drive genuine artificial intelligence interactions and processes in the future. AI and automation are becoming increasingly synonymous as we figure out how automation can really work within a business operation.
If there’s one thing the pandemic taught us, it’s been the necessity to re-think processes to get the data; what should be added, eliminated, and simplified across our workflows to source this critical data. And there is simply no option but to plan to design processes in the cloud using web-architected applications. In this virtual economy, our global talent must come together to create a borderless, completely digital business ecosystem where we can connect with other organizations that share common goals and purposes. This is the true environment for real “digital transformation” in action.
The Bottom-line: Most enterprises are only at the start of the real autonomous journey
As we reflect on our research covering over 500 automation leaders of major enterprises, what hits us the most is that 70% admit they are still novices. It seems the more they learn, the more they realize they need to know. We’re only at the start of a long journey for the majority of today’s ambitious organizations, and selecting the right partners along the way to help them design, implement and learn from automations across their businesses is so important. As one CIO delightedly pointed out to me recently: “I’ll keep finding automation ’till I die”… now that’s the attitude that is changing the whole approach to automation as the new IT mindset.
There is major rethinking taking place for 2023, where many firms are simply struggling to navigate this current maze of complexity and cost. The Autonomous Enterprise vision is where the survivors are looking, but getting there requires fewer people, politics, resistance to change, and great partnerships…
It’s 2023, and there are no excuses left for enterprise leaders to figure out how to run their organizations as autonomously as possible.
Definition: What is an “Autonomous Enterprise”?
An autonomous enterprise is one whose leadership continuously seeks to refine the data it needs in real-time to be successful. Its governance capability ensures it has the talent, tech infrastructure, automation, and AI to deliver the data that will drive success with minimal manual interventions that impede progress and speed. The ultimate goal of an autonomous enterprise allows us humans to remove ourselves from some parts of the system so that we can make continuous improvements to the ecosystem as a whole.
Ultimately this is about machines making decisions where we previously had humans and removing humans from loops that don’t need humans anymore. Leadership must understand the data they need to be successful and assemble and govern the right system to deliver success.
The Six Principles of The Autonomous Enterprise
So we have put together Six Principles that leaders need to adopt to ensure they can keep refining the autonomous abilities if their enterprise within its business ecosystem and adjacent ecosystems:
Your leadership must understand the data needed for your enterprise to be successful.
Your teams must know your processes and interactions in digital detail and have a continuously updated audit trail of these digital interactions and processes.
You must have the right infrastructure to breakdown the silos of data across your enterprise and its ecosystem.
You must ensure a robust and scalable automation capability that is trusted both internally and externally.
Artificial Intelligence (ML, deep learning, and decision engines) must continuously find patterns in your data to keep you ahead of your market.
You must establish a robust governance system embedded across all decision touchpoints to ensure the effectiveness of your autonomous enterprise.
Stay tuned for Part II where we delve into the sixth principle of how to assemble and govern the right blend of talent, tech, automation, and AI to deliver looping success…
We’re still clueless about sustainability. Key people, in key organizations, in key rooms, still need help with contextualizing their roles and where to best spend their time and energy. Here we run over some musing across the global context, sustainability services, the energy and utilities industries, and the supply chain. If you make it to the bottom, you’ll find the last sources of optimism in the hand of both services firms and the increasingly powerful coalitions of the willing, hoping to overcome the failures of politics and apologize later.
In 2023 we’ll continue to get little to no help from politics or changes in consumer behavior
COP28, the UN climate summit series’ next installment in the UAE, will likely be as useless as COP27. See our recent take on why mediocrity at COP27 was worse than its implosion. Organizations we speak with are often lacking in materiality assessments and the roadmaps that need to encompass the whole global sustainability context. Too often their energy is easily diverted to the latest problem.
Are we going to hit a 1.5-degree temperature rise in 2023?
Probably not. But in a few years, probably yes. The Economist has a good take on the all-but-death of the Paris Agreement target.
Will we see climate related disasters and system tipping points?
Almost certainly on both fronts. Here’s a good Guardian compilation of an Oxford University summary. Floods, fires, droughts, and more will continue to reinforce that policy, and the public cannot move at the speed and systems-level required to tackle climate change and the global sustainability context covering all environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors. It’s already too late for so many. It’s now a question ofRead More
It’s hard to believe that ten years have passed since HFS introduced RPA to the industry. Now we’re finally focusing on automation as a value lever that drives value beyond cost reduction and productivity gains. However, we still have a long journey ahead, with two-thirds of automation leaders self-declaring themselves as novices.
The economic conditions in 2023 will put automation in the hot seat, and expectations are on operations leaders to roll out automation initiatives
In short, the pandemic was good for automation technologies because enterprises used them to fix immediate problems that were impeding organizations, whether it was adding chatbots to fix CX shortages, plugging gaps in broken supply chains, fixing government loan systems to save struggling businesses, pulling together critical data across healthcare value chains, etc. RPA created a narrative that was eons away from what it really did, but the real solution to automation’s problems is its role in helping organizations out of a hugely complex economy in 2023, with companies laying off and being forced to automate to keep the wheels on.
Far too many firms have been fat and happy and inefficient for years, and their chickens will finally come home to roost in this challenging market. Moreover, the utter confusion being created with so many staff working from home is becoming a huge farce… just watch companies ordering staff back to the office in January (the pendulum has swung). This is a moving dynamic…
There will likely be a lot of layoffs in Q1 next year, so firms will be forced to do more with less… will they be able to? Bad managers will use work-from-home as an excuse and either force staff back in or lay them off. The net result will be a lot of confusion and complexity, and firms will find themselves short-staffed and needing a lot of help. Automation will be expected to fill the labor void by many firms, especially as it tops investment levels in organizations, and operations leaders are now expected to be able to drive automation projects. There are enough case studies out there, and there are no more excuses – get automating and do it quickly!
The need for partners to drive automations deep into the enterprise is ramping up fast
So one thing is clear, most organizations will need a lot of help to roll out real automations that perform more than basic RPA – they need to evaluate automation and AI technologies across the board to move their organizations forward across our three Horizons:
Horizon 1: Ability to drive functional optimization outcomes through cost reduction, speed, and efficiency
Horizon 2: Enablement of the OneOffice model of enterprise-wide end-to-end automation
Horizon 3: Ability to drive synergies and completely new sources of value across the business ecosystem
To find out, we looked at 18 automation service providers and management consultancies across these three horizons:
Providers were assessed across a series of four criteria
The Why: Value proposition, including market vision and strategy, and competitive differentiators;
The What: Execution and innovation capabilities, including breadth and depth of automation services, technology capabilities, proprietary tools and solution accelerators, patents and intellectual property, the strength of their talent pools, and the strengths of their ecosystems;
The How: Go-to-market strategy, including relevant acquisitions and other investments, co-innovation and collaboration approaches, industry and geographic client portfolio, creative commercial models, and thought leadership and market education.
So What: Market and client impact, including size and growth automation practice, nature of value delivered, and voice of the customer
The 18 service providers covered in this report include, alphabetically, Accenture, Bain and Company, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, EXL, EY, Genpact, HCLTech, IBM, Infosys, KPMG, NTT Data, PwC, TCS, UST, Virtusa, and Wipro.
HFS subscribers can download the report here (available free for a limited time).
In October 2022, HFS said goodbye to the Top 10’s and welcomed HFS Horizons, a forward-lookingconstruct to evaluate service providers. Our first industry-focused horizon report is the healthcare payer service providerreport that was published inNovember 2022. This report helps healthcare enterprise buyers make high-confidence buying and partnering decisions in the context of the specific challenges they are attempting to address.
Note: All service providers within a “Horizon” are listed alphabetically
A healthy list of 21 service providers evaluated
The service providers were evaluated across four dimensions – Why, What, How and So What – to arrive at a comprehensive conclusion categorizing service providers into three horizons: supporting Functional Transformation (Horizon 1), driving Enterprise Business Transformation at scale (Horizon 2), and leveraging deep healthcare expertise to craft Domain-Specific Transformation (Horizon 3).
The HFS Horizons report is about matching service provider capabilities to enterprise buyer needs
This study aids health plans, government agencies, and self-insured employers to understand the forward-looking capabilities that service providers will bring to bear.
The Healthcare Horizon report is an effort to help healthcare enterprise buyers evaluate service providers fit for the challenges they face as the market needs evolve. It shines a light on where the puck will be for enterprise buyers and the ability of service providers to meet the puck where it will be instead of where it is.
Unlike a ranking study, each Horizon reflects a set of capabilities aligned to a set of industry challenges that require addressing. It’s a practical tool for making high-confidence buying and partnering decisions.
The Healthcare Horizons Report boldly indicates how healthcare funding is shifting and its implications for service providers
Funding for healthcare in the US has been shifting from fully funded commercial insurance to self-insured employer and government programs steadily for several years. Governments (state and federal) and large employers have become the largest underwriters of medical risk.
Consequently, traditional health insurance companies are changing from financial institutions to service providers. This fundamental shift will continue to strengthen co-opetition between health plans and service providers, requiring a different solution portfolio and go-to-market to address the evolving needs of a reconfigured market.
Healthcare provider choices are driven by health insurance. In 2020, enrollment in self-insured employers surpassed enrollment in plans underwritten by health insurers. Self-insured employers will likely seek direct-to-provider contracts both for primary and acute care to drive improved employee productivity instead of just reactive care. The shift in this market dynamic could make a positive change in aligning HCPs to health vs. just volume-driven sick care.
Vertical integrations mean new opportunities for service providers
The shifting markets are forcing healthcare enterprises (health plans and providers) and new entrants to create new business models that require a new level of vertical integration. Integrated delivery networks or IDNs, such as Kaiser Permanente and UPMC, have shown that the power of vertical integration through proliferation across the healthcare ecosystem has been limited.
However, a new wave of vertical integration is reimagining how synergies could redefine the value proposition. This will require service providers to rethink their solution portfolio and go to market.
The Healthcare Horizons report includes service providers with heritages across IT services, BPO, consultancy, and healthcare
The 21 service providers covered in the healthcare horizon report, alphabetically, are Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, EMIDS, EXL, EY, Firstsource, Genpact, HCL, Infosys, KPMG, Mphasis, NTT DATA, Optum, PWC, TCS, UST, Virtusa, Wipro, and WNS.
This report includes detailed profiles of each service provider, outlining their placement, provider facts, as well as detailed strengths and opportunities.
HFS subscribers can download the report here (available free for a limited time).
As HFS reflects on last week’s AWS re:Invent event, it becomes increasingly clear that the firm could lose steam as the migration to the cloud, as a technology platform, gives way to the cloud’s role in making data a business asset.
While AWS’ growth numbers are still holding up, there could be significant changes on the horizon as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) makes up lost ground with its approach to a data-centric cloud environment. In addition, cool kids on the block like Snowflake and Databricks are changing the narrative from commodity cloud to data-driven cloud.
The fact that AWS forced HFS to digest these proceedings online speaks volumes for AWS’ preference to have only analysts in-person who will sing their praises, repeat their rhetoric, and refrain from challenging them. Why risk analysts who dare to talk to enterprises and question the logic of where (and why) they are spending vast amounts of their money with a half-baked cloud vision?
If you move your existing crap into the cloud, you’ll end up with even worse crap… and less than 50% of cloud native transformations are currently successful
AWS continues to cash in by bolstering its commodity cloud offerings and pouring funds into a morass of new products. The result is the significant complexity for enterprise customers to navigate this portfolio and piles pressure on them to seek out increased support from partners with both domain and data experience.
Our research shows that migrating to the cloud is costing enterprises many billions a year, and that cost continues to rise as many enterprises move too fast and fail to fix their underlying data infrastructures. Throw in the massive wage hikes, attrition and skills shortages in the tech space, and the cost of migrating your critical data into the cloud becomes unconscionable, especially at a time when most CFOs are freezing spending in anticipation of a very challenging economic period.
Net-net, you can’t migrate processes and workflows that don’t get you the data you need until you’ve fixed them first. If you move your existing crap into the cloud, you end up with even worse crap, and you just wasted a lot of time and money in the bargain. And you don’t even need to survey what enterprise buyers are spending – you just need to examine the huge growth numbers enjoyed by the majority of consultants and IT services providers in recent years, cashing in on rushed and poorly prepared cloud migrations.
The move away from “all in on hyperscalers” is more a threat to AWS’s bottom line than it is to either of its notable competitors, Azure or Google Cloud, as hosting data, facilitating compute, and managing web storage is now a commodity whose costs-to-ROI is being questioned (although nicely) not as the “move to the cloud” but the “move to hybrid.”
As noted in HFS’s recent Cloud Native Transformation Horizons study, “The buy side is struggling to capture the value of their cloud investments, as very few enterprise customers have a well-defined cloud transformation strategy at an organizational level, which can lead to transformations done in silos.” The results are showing that less than 50% of cloud native transformations are a success…
HFS views Google Cloud Platform as a refreshing future for enterprises considering their cloud migration more strategically to address data in the domain context
The “Cloud” is quickly becoming a commodity platform. Adopting a cloud-native mindset is about leveraging multi and hybrid cloud solutions to deliver business outcomes, empowering employees, customers and partners, all the while managing costs. While AWS is the current leader in the hyperscaler market, it’s clearly feeling the pressure as GCP closes the gap.
HFS has repeatedly been documenting the importance of data. From “forget apps, it’s about the data” to a view on “data is your strategy,” and on modernization, there are many articles where we’ve done deep dives into the importance of data, automation, analysis, visualization, implementation, governance, and partnering to deliver results. We firmly believe that data is crucial to building, maintaining, and growing a robust, resilient ecosystem.
In fact, we flagged this in our HFS Pulse data from early 2021, where Global 2000 firms cited databases as the top workload being moved to the cloud:
The importance of data isn’t new… it’s your business strategy more than ever
To be a truly autonomous organization that operates in the cloud, the principles of OneOffice hold truer than ever: workflows need to execute in real-time between customers and employees – and engage partners in your ecosystem. OneOffice is about understanding and discovering the data you must have to win in your market – right now in real-time – as the market environment keeps changing.
Google has been an advocate of data for years and tied this theme from their data center to Google Apps used by millions of firms. Yet, if a vendor (ahem, AWS) believes they can win with data, they really must improve how they tell their story if they want to expand their services and revenue opportunities further. And this is where we see GCP closing in fast on AWS – hence the attempt at re:Invent in which AWS attempted to re:Position itself as a data leader as well, which is so critical to the datacycle that drives OneOffice:
Five steps you must take to get the data you need into the cloud
Moving data into the cloud has to be both a business transformation and a technical exercise. You can’t keep separating the worlds of business and IT any longer if you want your workflows to be executed autonomously in the cloud. Business executives must identify the data they need to be effective in making decisions and work with their IT counterparts to build a data structure that can be effectively migrated and operated in a cloud environment:
Get data to win in your market. This is where you must align your data needs to deliver on business strategy. This is where you clarify your vision and purpose. Do you know what your customers’ needs are? Is your supply chain effective in sensing and responding to these needs? Can your cash flow support immediate critical investments? Do you have a handle on your staff attrition?
Re-think processes to get this data. Then you must re-think what should be added, eliminated, or simplified across your workflows to source this critical data. Do your processes get you the data you need from your customers, employers, and partners?
Design your new workflows to be executed in the cloud to deliver the data. There is simply no option but to have a plan to design processes in the cloud over three-tier web-architected applications. In the Work-from-Anywhere Economy, our global talent has to come together to create our borderless, completely digital business. This is the true environment for real digital transformation in action. This means you can’t migrate processes that don’t get you the data you need until you’ve fixed them first. If you move your existing crap into the cloud, you end up with even worse crap and just wasted a lot of time and money into the bargain.
Automate processes and data. Automation is not your strategy. It is the necessary discipline to ensure your processes provide the data – at speed – to achieve your business outcomes. Hence you have to approach all future automation in the cloud if you want your processes to run effectively end-to-end. This is where you need to ensure connectors, APIs, patches, screen scrapes, and RPA fixes not only support a digital workflow but will scale in the cloud. Many of these patched-up process chains become brittle and fall over in a scaling situation if the code is weak. We’ve seen billions of dollars wasted on botched cloud migrations in recent years because underlying data infrastructures were not addressed effectively, and bad processes became even less effective or completely dysfunctional.
Apply AI to data flows to anticipate at speed. Once you have successfully automated processes in the cloud, it is easy to administer AI solutions to deliver at speed in self-improving feedback loops. This is where you apply digital assistants, computer vision, machine learning, augmented reality, and other techniques to refine the efficacy of your data. AI is how we engage with our data to refine ourselves as digital organizations where we only want a single office to operate with agility to do things faster, cheaper, and more streamlined than we ever thought possible. AI helps us predict and anticipate how to beat our competitors and delight our customers, reaching both outside and inside of our organizations to pull the data we need to make critical decisions at speed. In short, automation and AI go hand in hand… AI is what enables a well-automated set of processes to function autonomously with little need for constant human oversight and intervention.
Being a leader in data is more than having lots of storage, compute, and add-on SKUs
Connecting data workloads across multi and hybrid clouds, cloud data warehouses, data lakes, and applications is the world we live in. the orchestration of these is crucial and a focal point of projects from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to Kubernetes.
While both firms are active in the CNCF and have solutions that support K8S, AWS is the more clunky of the two. To be successful, data must flow across internet, storage, and servers; thus, the configuration must be simple to implement and maintain. AWS growth is its own weakness here as tools like managing IP domains to microservices, containers, and Kubernetes are being driven by Google’s efforts ahead of AWS.
The orchestration of data is a prime example. With regards to orchestration, the EKS (AWS version of Kubernetes) has been considered so poor that firms like Red Hat have come to their customer rescue with Red Hat Open Shift for AWS (ROSA). AWS continues to improve its EKS, but it is substantially behind GCP and its customers are leaning on third parties to deliver these solutions.
Domain experience is key and AWS needs partners to deliver this – and they may be disintermediated as a result
AWS is the first to market leader. Our hat is off down for the efforts they put into developing the hyperscaler market. But as the pioneer, much like every innovator they now have a dilemma of how to stay in front while watching both Azure and GCP create more functional solutions for enterprise customers to build their business upon. As GCP continues to ramp the number of certified engineers and experts in core cloud-native solutions like Kubernetes, AWS has found it critical to shoring up partnerships to attempt to lock out the young Turk.
However, while enabling partners to develop and improve on your technology and bring its products in larger domain and ecosystem projects, it opens the door to being disintermediated. A case in point that AWS to rushing to address is AWS outposts. With the rise of hybrid Cloud and the extension of public Cloud, AWS is seeing customers retreat from its hyperscaler services to diversify and reduce costs. Integration firms are partnering with competing compute and data solutions to bring in stateless cloud solutions optimized for the customer domain, not the IT.
We see AWS as a very strong player when it comes to partnerships from a revenue perspective, but GCP is emerging when data is top of mind for enterprises. Partners are leveraging the AWS brand to boost revenues as the complexity of AWS is a challenge for even the most sophisticated organization. With the industry reaching this cloud-data pivot point, the door is wide open for these partners to increase their revenue streams by offering domain expertise, complex integration, and long-term support services. AWS’s own industry solutions lack real drawing power without these partners. And some partners, like IBM, bring tools such as Red Hat Open Shift for AWS (ROSA) that are sorely needed by customers to orchestrate hybrid and multi-cloud solutions.
Data holds the keys to cloud supremacy and AWS knows they are in for a real fight with Google
In Adam Selipsky’s keynote, he brings up the importance of data early (about 15 minutes in for those watching at home). Based on his keynote, “data is the center applications, processes, [and] business decisions. And is the cornerstone of almost every organization’s digital transformation.” Going on to the need for tools, integration, governance, and visualization. Much like what HFS has proposed (and re-iterated recently) as data being your strategic level for everything you do.
In the keynote, Mr. Selipsky spent most of his time on AWS investments across the data modernization value chain of data storage, compute, load management, analytics, governance, and visualization. Several key products to manage, visualize and forecast data were announced; while these are much needed to round out the AWS data story, they also add more SKUs that customers will need help determining how these new solutions map to their ability to implement, train, and manage.
Organizations are being asked to put all their eggs in one basket to take advantage of AWS’s data story as painted by Adam and Swami Sivasubramian (AWS VP Data & ML). And in many cases, while AWS has the first mover advantage, the power, and tools of Google’s Big Query, Cloud Dataflow, and Data Studio.
Key messages from Google Cloud Next that must have shaken AWS
At Google Cloud Next, they announced strategic partnerships with Accenture and HCLTech. These partnerships build on how services firms can merge hyperscalers’ capabilities with the domain-centric intellectual property of services providers. Customers like Snap, T-Mobile, and Wayfair continue to put their trust in Google Cloud’s expertise in data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning and expand the ongoing partnership. Further, Rite Aid signed up with Google Cloud for a multi-year technology partnership that will help its customers with expanded and personalized access to the company’s pharmacists, an enhanced online experience, and intelligent decision-support systems—powered via Google Cloud technologies.
Google is very clear on how data is core to its DNA, and the firm is bringing its knowledge and expertise to market with partners. In fact, many of the mergers and acquisitions of IBM, Accenture, Capgemini, and more are of firms with GCP practices. Data and multi-cloud, delivered through proven user applications to the masses, is clearly the future to democratize decision-making in ways that companies only dreamed up. Making data easy to find and action is bringing velocity to Google – and the likes of Databricks and Snowflake – that can’t be ignored.
We listened to AWS: what we liked and didn’t like
What fell flat (or at least was left in ambiguity):
Cloud costs are important. In Adam Selipsky’s keynote, he made a show of AWS’s focus on customer, domain, and ESG values. However, he quickly moved to the defensive as less than 10 minutes in he began arguing the Cloud is cheaper to run on than traditional data centers. Citing company examples like Carrier, Gilead, and others and their savings. While these data points may be valid in aggregate, there is little detail or scope on how or what costs were saved – e.g., were they supporting or mission-critical workloads or solutions? The proof is in the data, and that really wasn’t on offer.
Data is critical, and the lens to analyze hyperscalers is changing completely. AWS wants to be your data partner – but hasn’t really appreciated the complexity of migrating that data to the solutions. Hence the need to lean on the development of a more robust partner ecosystem.
Millions of choices and crazy product fragmentation. AWS is becoming Baskin-Robbins, with more flavors and choices. Hey, it’s great to have a choice, but there comes a point with too much choice, too many overlapping features and a need to carefully evaluate the pros and cons of each becomes more of a burden than a blessing. For instance, AWS offers 13 databases (8 purpose build (proprietary) and five relation data engines), 12 analytics tools, and 19 AI/ML SKUs! AWS’s increasingly fragmented product catalog is creating challenges for customers and their partners to implement and support.
AWS focused on technical outcomes, leaving business cases to customers and partners. From Elastic Fabric Adapters to Graviton chips to Redshift product names made up a cluster of new choices that will need to be educated, trained, and validated. AWS focused on what they must buy, not why they are building these.
AWS’s data democratization story comes up short. Amazon DataZone was pitched as a solution for data users across an organization to deliver market insights. While creation, tagging and governance were strengths, the usability and collaboration components lacked the functionality of Google’s Looker, which offers broader integration with more industry solutions and visualization tools.
What we liked and feel AWS can continue to build on:
AWS recognizes that data is the cornerstone. re:Invent has joined the data is critical bandwagon. AWS is getting much sharper on its messaging about how it aspires to be a trusted partner in developing solutions for developing data as an asset in the Cloud. With AWS Aurora, they are taking the fight to Microsoft and Oracle, pushing open-source SQL (PostgreSQL-based) solution that has the functionality with lower overhead and costs.
AWS is improving the marketing of its portfolio to partners. AWS celebrated its software and services ecosystem. This is needed, given how complex the AWS product and marketplace have become. Customers need their trusted partners to help them sort through the AWS offerings to help them choose the right solution for their business.
Data security got major props. AWS has realized to be a valid place for data, it needs robust security. It has offered some interesting solutions about AWS Security Lake with both its own and partner (Cisco, Snowflake, Palo Alto Networks, etc.) solutions. But how will these security solutions allow for multi-cloud solutions?
AWS is becoming a marketplace for cloud solution. As Siemens showed in their part of the keynote, they recognize AWS reach to resell their software solutions. By moving their code to AWS, they can drive new revenues streams and provide the market with industry-centric solutions.
Supply chain tools and insights. AWS Supply Chain Insights is a very interesting solution to see how your ecosystem is working to address data from multiple companies into a singular view for businesses to address inventory, supplier management, and customer outcomes.
The Bottom Line: Objects in the rear-view mirror, may appear closer than they are. In AWS’s rear-view mirror is Google…
As AWS pivots its story from scale, storage, and cloud servers to data the firm further validates Google’s relentless focus on data for the past several years.
AWS has ridden the cloud wave into this very dominant position in the market, but as we have seen, this race has many more cycles to run as we face a deep European recession and an uncertain US market as enterprises grapple with multiple headwinds. Cost is king, and the focus will be on data-driven value as opposed to mere commodity compute. AWS must avoid resting on its laurels if it’s going to keep the likes of Google from eating into its market share with its deep, deep resources and second-mover advantage.
The complexity and large number of choices the average user must now navigate to deploy, manage, and govern AWS investments is creating an opportunity for customers and the global IT Services market to reinvest in their relationships with Google to drive data, multi-cloud orchestration, and user application integration.
Honestly, there was lots to unpack at re:Invent. We, like millions, peered in for hours on the internet, and saw some very cool innovations coming from AWS. However, once compared with a quick ‘google’ to those of Azure or GCP, it lost a fair bit of its innovative luster.
Look out AWS, GCP is coming for you. And it’s coming fast in this choppy, demanding, data-obsessed, and hyperconnected business environment.
The assault on everything we once knew as stable is now in full throttle, choking the very life out of businesses whose leaders are struggling to find immediate answers to many emerging problems. There has never been a time when third-party help has been so needed to help businesses drowning in spiraling inflation, wages and energy costs, crippled by attrition, tormented by cyber criminals and new compliance regulations, and under massive pressure to drive down operating costs. Net-net, enterprises are desperately in need of access to skills and capabilities just to keep their business operations viable as they fight this global assault on their survival.
Outsourcing is going through its most significant pivot-point to help enterprises with this plethora of crises
The whole focus on pricing and scoping outsourcing engagements is being completely rethought, as are the strategies of the leading service providers to support them. The IT and BPO services industry is reaching its most defining moment since Jack Welch doubled down on India in the 1990s.
The challenge facing outsourcers is three-fold:
The Great Resignation is over… keeping hold of key client-facing and delivery staff is now under extreme client scrutiny. Every organization has suffered from attrition since the post-Covid economic boom, with employees jumping jobs for large pay hikes or pursuing their “dreams” in start-ups, where most got hired from the comfort of their living rooms. Most providers got a free “attrition pass” for a little while, but the Great Resignation is now behind us (we will reveal data on this very soon). If you can’t keep hold of your talent now, you’re in real trouble as a services firm. Enterprise customers are walking away from providers whose delivery quality is falling apart from staff turnover.
Smaller deals and price competition are forcing innovative engagement models. Enterprise clients are demanding engagements at similar pricing levels from pre-inflation days. The sheer number of competitive service providers is piling pressure on them to stay price competitive to win engagements while maintaining their profit margins. In addition, most enterprise customers are demanding smaller-sized engagements to deal with focused areas in immediate need of support, such as cyber, app modernization, cloud migration, customer and sales support, data management, etc. While smaller deals make it even harder for providers to benefit from scaling people on the engagement, it also opens the door for performance-level pricing that involves more automation, SaaS delivery, and better data integration. Hence, providers that have a strong capability to deliver services with less need for people-effort are in a position to offer creative pricing that rewards performance, not merely effort (you must read our earlier piece on this). The key is to convince enterprise customers to de-link pricing from simply provision of effort and align it with the delivery of services, provision of data, and (where appropriate) provision of innovation that creates new value for the client over and above the existing baseline of services.
Big “consolidation deals” are back on the table, but select them carefully, as bad client moves could cripple you. For larger multitower multi-year areas, we are seeing an increased appetite for larger deals that take advantage of economies of scale, vendor consolidation, and commitment to pre-inflationary pricing. UK firms, for example, are especially concerned about inflationary pressures and how this impacts services pricing, with many trying to get IT services contracts locked in quickly at pre-inflation rates. In short, we are actually seeing interest from enterprise customers in longer-term deals to protect themselves from the unpredictable economy. We are also seeing a similar appetite for large ‘consolidation’ deals in industries struggling in the current economy, such as financial services, mortgage brokering, consumer packaged goods, real estate, etc. Any services provider worth its salt has a bulging pipeline and selecting the enterprises to build long-term partnerships with has never been as crucial. The consolidation deals come with real margin pressures and can suck up precious resources from the onset, so investing in the right clients is critical for future growth and development.
So what must outsourcers do to thrive (not fade away) in today’s market?
Invest in technology but sell services. Many services firms have been talking about Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) for years, while others have made software investments and attempted to resell licenses to customers and bundle their services on top. The stark reality is that enterprise customers do not want to buy technology products from services firms – and services firms are not good at selling technology products either (requires a completely different channel and capability set).
The answer actually lies in services firms building technology-enabled service delivery themselves but only exposing and charging their customer for the services they consume or data/outcomes they need. For example, if a services firm wants to provide customer support services to smaller-scale enterprises, it could build its own CX platform that utilizes digital assistants, automates workflows, runs smart analytics etc., which all contribute to the enterprise client receiving efficient, low-cost services and the data they need to make decisions. If the provider has to partner with an expensive CRM platform, it is stuck with only making revenues from providing the people-effort, and has little incentive to automate to drive down costs and improve workflows. Hence the service provider can differentiate themselves by selling cost-effective services and providing the data its clients need. Why should their clients care about the people-effort being provided if they get exactly what they want at a price they are happy to pay? This is why we have been defining the emerging market for Business Data Services as the new generation of BPM, where enterprises pay for outcomes and data.
Control attrition, which is critical to stay in the game. If service providers can’t keep their workers and have them deliver more value to their clients, they will end up in a zero-sum race to the bottom, and many are already losing business because their clients are not tolerating the attrition and the impact on delivery quality. Net-net, we are in a war to retain people to keep our businesses functioning, and this is likely to be the case for several years to come as people reject employers who fail to develop them, pay them well, and offer them career expansion. This is especially the case for staff working in operational roles, whether it’s part of a shared services organization or a professional services firm. Smart service providers are getting ahead of this with increased investments in their talent development efforts, wage increases across the board, and announcements of plans to open new service delivery centers in locations with pools of concentrated talent that can be fast-tracked into their model. We are also seeing several service providers target talent from community colleges and high schools, where they can offer them their own development experience that is highly relevant to their clients’ needs. Most importantly, service providers must invest in training their managers to develop their staff effectively in today’s hybrid work environment. The old style of “check the box” management that may have worked in the old factory model is failing.
“Taking the people” with the deal is becoming more attractive. We can go back to my very first blog (here) on BPO value in 2007, and we were droning on about moving to standard processes and new technologies back then to make outsourcing add value beyond labor savings. Fast-forward 15 years, throw in a two-year pandemic, spiraling inflation, chronic attrition, a military conflict in Europe, and a desperate need from enterprises to hurry into functioning virtual models and supply chains, and enterprises need more help than ever from third-party outsourcers and their armies of millions of staff to keep their businesses moving forward. Outsourcing deals that involve talent moving to the service provider, many of whom may actually welcome their new employer, are looking a lot more appealing to many service providers in today’s environment. While most engagements are fairly small ($5m-$20m TCV), there are a few major consolidation deals under discussion where a lot of people transition is in play. Expect these to increase as recessionary pressures bite in the coming months, especially in Europe.
The Bottom-line: We’ve reached a make-or-break time in outsourcing history… those that invest in the right relationships, the right tech, and inspire their talent will win
Enterprise customers are quickly evaluating what talent is core to their differentiation and then determining whether they have the ability to attract, retain and develop it themselves or whether they are better placed (and the risk lower) to partner with a service provider. The latter option is becoming increasingly attractive in this recessionary economy and shortage of available talent.
Conversely, service providers are more hungry than ever to take on people they can integrate into their model to mitigate their own attrition risks and cement deeper and far more strategic relationships with their key clients. The main question now is whether the right firms are engaging with the right service providers to achieve mutual medium and long-term success. Those that get these new relationship decisions right to stay in the game will emerge as the leaders in their business ecosystems.
At HFS, we have redefined how we evaluate service providers and tech suppliers to reflect the value ambitious enterprises demand in today’s business environment with our new HFS Horizons. Now we’re excited to share the first-ever Horizons Report—on Cloud Native Transformation.
Cloud Native Horizons aligns the performance of today’s service providers with driving the functional building blocks of technology transformation (Horizon 1), creating the business transformation experiences their clients enjoy (Horizon 2), and the Cloud Native synergies their clients are developing across their ecosystem partners to create new sources of value (Horizon 3). And it’s all summed up in this picturesque new HFS Horizons landscape, which positions the leading service providers within the three horizons that their customer engagements typically demonstrate:
HFS Horizons – Cloud Native Transformation, 2022 Note: All service providers within a “Horizon” are listed alphabetically
According to the Horizon report co-author Tom Reuner, “There is a fundamental disconnect in how the industry discusses organizations moving toward the cloud. The supply side is evangelizing technology and capabilities with containerization and Kubernetes as the focal point for that marketing noise. Conversely, the buy side is struggling to capture the value of their cloud investments, as very few clients have a well-defined cloud transformation strategy at an organizational level, which can lead to transformations done in silos. Only by aligning technology transformation to business objectives will organizations get closer to capturing value from their investments. Thus, we need to reset the discussions on cloud native transformation.”
Some additional excerpts from the report:
The market noise around cloud remains deafening. Despite all the noise, the journey toward cloud native remains challenging. For many organizations, costs spiraled out of control, and the harsh lessons of ineffective controls are sinking in. Often, a change of provider has accompanied the realization of these challenges. Too often, the industry leads with capabilities and technology jargon rather than providing clarity on what broader strategic outcomes should be and how to deliver on them. We must confront the new operational complexity that moving toward becoming cloud native entails. To help, HFS is launching a new Horizons study on cloud native transformation (CNT) to learn from the experiences of organizations that have not only moved workloads into the cloud but also transformed their operating—or even business—model.
The inaugural HFS Horizons: Cloud Native Transformation, 2022 report examines the capabilities of 20 IT service providers and management consultancies (in alphabetical order: Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, EPAM, EY, Genpact, HCLTech, IBM, Infosys, KPMG, LTI, Mphasis, PWC, TCS, Tech Mahindra, UST, Virtusa, Wipro, and Zensar) offering differentiated approaches to meeting the transformation needs of clients. This research effort will assess how well service providers are helping their clients to envision and deliver cloud native transformation outcomes.
We assessed and rated the transformation capabilities of these service providers across a defined series of value propositions, innovation capabilities, go-to-market strategies, and market impact.
This report also includes detailed profiles of each service provider, outlining their placement, provider facts, as well as detailed strengths and opportunities.
HFS subscribers can download the report here (available free for a limited time).
