BPS Archive

Management consultant and bestselling author Peter Drucker wrote, “The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.” That is, indeed, true for service providers, as new technologies increasingly adopted this year are a catalyst for change in nearly all aspects of the services business. Here are four

A widely quoted phrase these days is “software eats everything.” It refers to the great value that software delivers. I believe it also applies to the profound impact it’s making in the services world. Software is disintermediating the industrialized labor arbitrage model and also infrastructure services. Let’s look at the huge implications for the

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is becoming a big deal in the services industry. For the last 10 years, the Indian IT industry attempted to affect pricing by breaking the link between FTEs and the services they provide. They tried outcome-based or transaction-based pricing. As I have blogged in the past, although this is interesting

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.

Wipro just hired Abid Ali Neemuchwala as COO and group president. Clearly the provider is setting up a succession plan for him to take over Wipro from current CEO, TK Kurien, who has been driving the firm’s transformation. This is an intriguing move as Wipro appears to be succeeding in the turnaround. So it

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

Much like Jonathan Swift proposed an outrageous, over-the-top suggestion that the Irish eat their children as a way to accommodate themselves in famine and over-population, I have a modest proposal for Infosys. It’s over the top, but it’s intended to highlight an issue. My modest proposal is that Infosys keep its platform IP business,

There’s a big move underway, especially among the Indian firms, to rebrand away from outsourcing and BPO. The industry now prefers to use a variety of other terms such as BPM, BPS and managed service. But the immediate impact of changing the terminology on a provider’s website is that the website disappears from the

We at Everest Group have been exploring robotics and understanding its potential. What we’re seeing is that it’s relatively easy and cheap to implement. Where it has been implemented to date, it results in somewhere from a 15-20 percent reduction in critical shared services or BPO functions, depending on the transactional nature of the