Thought Leadership Archive

As we work with service providers across the industry, a theme we hear increasingly is the buyers’ unrelenting pressure on providers to reduce price. The pressure is exacerbated by the growth slowdown in the industry. I believe this pricing pressure will soon show up in providers’ financial performance with decreased earnings per share. The

The contact center outsourcing (CCO) marketplace is mature. It’s a large market, and companies across a wide number of industries and geographies use the services. The market is now $70-75 billion, which is approximately 20 percent penetrated by third-parties vendors and 80 percent by in-house captives. Now that this space is mature, what will

The BPO segment of the services marketplace has been undergoing significant change in its growth trends. As we lean into 2015, here’s a look at how and where BPO is experiencing the biggest growth. Industry-specific offerings lead growth, and horizontal BPO growth comes from newer segments.  Industry-specific segments The industry-specific segments are growing significantly

The cowboy song by Rhett Akins, “That Ain’t My Truck,” where he discovers his girl has left him for another guy, reminds me of the anti-incumbency bias occurring in today’s global services marketplace. What’s causing clients’ infidelity to their incumbent providers? I believe many incumbent service providers find themselves displaced today because of three

The 16th century political theorist Machiavelli wrote that there is “nothing more dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than to attempt to introduce a new order of things.” I think we should remember his words as we embark on the journey to embrace the next-generation solutions entering the services marketplace. Next-generation options are now

Right now Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) service providers are enjoying explosive growth as they take share from asset-heavy players. The labor arbitrage market is disintermediating or successfully attacking the traditional asset-heavy infrastructure space. But in every boom are the seeds of undoing. It reminds me of the story of Joseph in the Biblical book

The fact that enterprises are making a strategic intent shift to cloud and as-a-service models changes more than the service delivery model. It also changes the value proposition and therefore causes implications for provider’s sales strategies. For starters, the focus turns away from the provider’s capabilities. Sure, those capabilities are still important. But with

Businesses today actively seek — and happily find — a different kind of service provider. Like the fairy tale Goldilocks sizing choices among the three bears, they find some providers are too large, some are too small, but others are just right. The just right players are growing spectacularly. But I believe it’s mainly

The current enterprise shift in strategic intent toward cloud services has major implications for the outsourcing market. I’ve blogged about the implications for the infrastructure outsourcing market. Clearly the strategic shift will also affect application development outsourcing. We see three major implications for this market. Everest Group is working with large enterprises as they

IBM is taking some bitter medicine right now in its series of divestments. Big Blue recently exited the chip manufacturing business by spinning off that division to Globalfoundries. The move comes on the heels of having exited its server business and voice and transaction BPO business. There’s a lot of media attention to “IBM’s