Brownfield Opportunities in Demand Profile for Application Services

In my previous blog post, I discussed greenfield opportunities, an exciting area of demand for application services. Among the three factors in the demand profile for app services today, another factor is the desire to change the way services are delivered. For these “brownfield” opportunities, the approach to app demands is very different from the greenfield opportunities.

Services are already being delivered in the brownfield opportunities, but new technologies or approaches allow reshaping the way they’re delivered. Technologies and approaches in this space include agile, DevOps, automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) or cognitive computing. They allow organizations to reconceive the existing way they do business and do it differently and better.

There are very significant app demand opportunities in the brownfield space, and the outcomes are potentially very significant. JP Morgan, for example, achieved a 700 percent improvement in software developer productivity, a 59-day reduction in time to market, and 45 percent savings in infrastructure cost.

However, unlike the greenfield demand, brownfield opportunities face an existing ecosystem and existing way of doing business. Changing the way a company does business is very difficult. There is a lot of entrenched behavior in organizations, plus incumbent vendors have to be dislodged. So the brownfield space includes moving people’s cheese and reallocating resources, which can be quite painful to do.

In my next post, I’ll discuss the third factor driving demand for application services today and how all three factors are changing organizations and app services in fundamental ways.