Peter Bendor-Samuel

Many service providers are busy organizing along vertical industries and going to market with vertical solutions. As the services industry matures, it’s very clear that customers want to do business with companies that understand their industry. However, many providers find that verticalization doesn’t give them the growth acceleration they anticipated. So there are limits

Moving work from an enterprise data center to the cloud is not a lift-and-shift transaction. Cloud moves involve reengineering processes. The good news is that providers are emerging with innovative solutions for deploying to the cloud. We’re watching their progress, as we believe they will disrupt the traditional players in the services market. I

Comedian George Carlin commented that men are stupid and women are crazy — and that the reason that women are crazy is that men are stupid. My observation is that it’s a strikingly similar dynamic to what’s occurring in large enterprises’ spend decisions in the global services market today. Business stakeholders are “stupid.” They’re

Recently I had a conversation with an executive at a large software house known for its ERP. One of many things that struck me in our conversation was the change in whom the sales team targets. Their primary target is no longer the CIO; now it’s the CFO. Apparently, in today’s business outcomes-driven world,

CSC just went through another employee layoff, and it’s apparent that it might be as much as 5 percent of its total staff. This move comes within the backdrop of the impressive turnaround that CEO Mike Lawrie has been driving. Since he took over, the stock has done exceptionally well and is back up

In a recent blog I noted that there is a new wave of shared services activity. But don’t dismiss that news with an assumption that new starts in shared services just means taking a slice of business away from third-party service providers. Here are my tips for shifting this potential business loss to a

PwC announced last Friday that it completed its acquisition of Booz & Company — now named “Strategy&.” Why did Booz agree to be acquired and why did PwC want Booz? And what does this mean for the services industry? My opinion: It’s a bold move that has the signs of being a game-changer in

To date, the global services industry in 2014 has all the signs of being a “son-in-law.” As many parents will tell you about their prospective son-in-law: “He’s nice, but … I was hoping for something a little better.” 2014 arrived with so much promise, both in IT and BPO. Europe’s economy was improving. We

The service provider community is very fond of clever terms, and SMAC — standing for Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud — is a good example of that. However, if you’re a service provider looking to sell to new or existing clients, talking about SMAC may not be the most productive way to hold the conversation.

At the request of a BPO provider, we did a fairly exhaustive study of all vendor/provider-funded innovations and their impact on the business growth. The data were startling. Our study clearly revealed that the hundreds of millions of dollars that providers invested in innovation yielded very disappointing returns. Although they often succeeded in taking