Author Archive

For five years we at Everest Group have tracked the cloud space in global services. Until this year, there was a lot of talk about cloud, but much true cloud adoption was driven in business units with large enterprises. CIOs basically sat out the game and watched the cloud’s performance. But since the beginning

The mobile app space offers service providers the potential for new growth platforms. However, these are often small projects that are delivered quickly and are not a great revenue stream. But recent studies we came across reinforce our growing opinion that the mobile app space is changing. Mobile apps are costing more and taking

Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations are Changing the Rules of Business, by Cognizant’s Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring, discusses the impact of the already huge and ever-increasing amounts of data surrounding individuals and our environment. The authors point out today many pieces of equipment or devices

Transaction pricing is a wonderful thing, a thing of beauty. We’ve seen payments companies and infrastructure companies delink labor from their pricing and harvest the benefits of this model. It’s the quintessential non-linear model. It sounds great. But there’s a danger. The problem with transaction pricing is that providers essentially commoditize their offerings. Never

Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. However, what the eternal bard did not say but easily could have is that it would not have sold as well. The rose that’s catching fire now in the marketplace is as-a-service offerings. But service providers are confusing the market. As-a-service offerings

Observing service providers’ much talked about efforts to provide new levels of value and create new growth opportunities through big data and analytics reminds me of a quote often attributed to Yogi Berra, the great NY Yankees coach. “In theory it’s simple, in practice it isn’t.” Yogi captures, as only he can, the timeless

I recently had the privilege to sit through a two-day session with IBM’s senior executive team in services. I’m someone who tries not to drink the Kool-Aid. Even so, I came away truly impressed by the work that IBM has done to position itself to be relevant and a major player in the future

The Q2 earnings reports for Syntel and TCS show not only a strong performance for both companies but, surprisingly, show stronger earnings growth than revenue growth. We’ve seen stronger earnings than revenue results with other providers in the past, but this is surprising. That’s because it reverses a trend the industry has been experiencing.

Accenture appears to be picking up its pace of acquisitions and making a series of big moves. This is not a new tactic for Accenture; historically nearly every time you turned around there was another Accenture acquisition. But clearly the pace has quickened and the size of the acquisitions has increased. It’s important to

Out of 22 outsourcing stocks, a few have outperformed the S&P to date this year: EXL Service, Global Payments, Star Tek and UEPS. But 18 have underperformed by an average of 9 percent so far. Why is this trend happening? First, investors are always forward looking, and stock disappointments or exuberance are relative to the