Monthly Archive:: April 2015

Perspective on Wipro’s Cost Reduction

Wipro is reportedly looking at headcount and cost-reduction exercise in the realm of $300+ million. Why are they doing this? Is it a good idea? Of a few possible interpretations for wringing out costs, here’s my opinion – starting with my belief that this undertaking was inevitable. The more important question is how will

Is the Services Industry in Decline?

Information Services Group (ISG) publishes a quarterly “ISG Outsourcing Index,” which is widely read in the services industry. Q1 2015 wasn’t a pretty picture. The Americas saw a modest 10 percent gain in ACV, and India/South Asia showed strong. But the rest of the world took a bullet, so to speak; EMEA’s ACV declined

Price Takes a Beating in the Services World

What I’ve predicted for several years is now happening and the global services industry is experiencing a pricing war. The industry’s core arbitrage marketplace is moving from modest pricing competition to an intense pricing war. Providers’ prices are coming down not by 3 to 5 percent but in some cases by 20 to 30

Services Industry on the Cusp of a Changing Provider Landscape

I’ve blogged before about consolidation in the services industry, and I believe the industry is now on the cusp of a new round of significant acquisitions. But don’t expect a repeat of the usual M&A strategy. We’ll see a shift from the usual tuck-in acquisition strategy to billion-dollar-capability acquisitions. At this game-changing level, consolidation

Why Hasn’t Automation Made Much Progress in Services?

I hear people in the services industry asking why automation hasn’t taken off yet. Actually, as long as I’ve been in the industry since the 1980s, we’ve been working on automation. Back in 1983 we were talking about automating business processes and the elimination of most of the people in the services value chain.

Service Providers are Killing the Goose That Lays Golden Eggs

I blogged last year about the growing anti-incumbent bias in the services industry. That’s not to say that clients are biased against incumbent providers, but there are more clients who want to switch out providers than there used to be. This is true across every segment of global services (applications, infrastructure and BPO). We

Why Everest Group Changed its Point of View on Infosys

Since publishing our two most recent blogs about the business situation at Infosys (Connecting All the Dots and Silicon Valley company) and comparing those perspectives to our blogs over the past two years, people have asked us: “Why did you change your point of view about Infosys?” Here’s why – it’s because most of

Is Infosys Repositioning as a Silicon Valley Company?

At Everest Group, we’ve heard industry rumors that Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka – formerly on SAP’s Executive Board and global lead for products and innovation – recently hired two former SAP executives based in Silicon Valley. This move comes on the heels of Sikka planning to invest in startups in Silicon Valley. What does

Sell Digital Services, Not Apps Rationalization

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