Thought Leadership Archive

Capgemini’s announcement that they have an agreement to acquire iGate is the most recent evidence that the consolidation pace in the services market is picking up. Slowing growth, collapsing margins, and availability of capital with interest rates close to zero are only intensifying the M&A activity. How will the consolidation happen? And which service

EPAM, a midsize, $800+ million service provider, is growing faster than the market. And it’s achieving this notable status in a mature application space where others have struggled and also in a services world that favors scale and size. What is its secret for beating the odds and seemingly defying gravity? At first glance,

Rio Tinto, a global diversified mining company, recently announced a groundbreaking initiative they are undertaking with Accenture. This can best be described as moving Rio Tinto’s enterprise IT function into an as-a-service model. Game-changing benefits permeate this deal, and it’s an eye-opener for enterprises in all industries. Let’s look at what Rio Tinto gains

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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