Service Providers Archive

There is an inconvenient truth in the global services industry: The growth rates in labor-arbitrage-based businesses are diminishing. Tied to that fact is an even more inconvenient truth: Service providers have overreached in moving to outcome-based platform models to compensate for the drop in arbitrage growth rates. Labor arbitrage is not going away. But

I talked recently with one of the biggest losers among service providers. They had just been through a competitive RFP process as the incumbent provider. They worked tirelessly to martial the firm’s resources to get both the external and internal sale and get executives lined up. Their sales team was engaged. There were a

When Bobby Pinson recorded his country & western song “Don’t Ask Me How I Know” dispensing bits of wisdom, I’m sure he didn’t realize he was providing advice to service providers. But my favorite line in the song is also great advice for today’s BPO providers — “Sell your truck while it’s still running.”

Over the last five years the story of growth in the global services industry has been one of the rich getting richer. In fact, the larger tier-one firms, especially Cognizant and TCS, are growing faster than the marketplace. But I think it’s more notable, at this time when markets are maturing and growth is

So you’re in an outsourcing relationship and so far you’ve achieved impressive results in meeting your objectives. Then you wake up one day to the unwelcome news that your service provider sold that line of business to another company and you’re now relegated to a provider you didn’t select. What should you do? Do

IBM is consistently more profitable than its peers in the global services market. Why are they succeeding and staying out in front of competitors? If you take a deep look at IBM’s impressive record of profit and growth, the reason behind its success becomes apparent: IBM has a clear strategic intent and makes hard

In the worlds of sports and business, there are many examples of teams coming from behind and winning big. Oracle Team USA’s exciting win over Team New Zealand in the 2013 America’s Cup yacht races last week is certainly a big one. There’s also a race happening among the global services providers in the

Once upon a time there was a cloud storage provider with a compelling offering.  Hundreds of small companies and prominent world-leading companies became its customers and reseller partners and moved their data to the provider’s cloud. Then bigger cloud companies offered services at lower prices and drove the storage provider out of business. Unfortunately

Industry buzz says companies can realize more value via outsourcing by moving away from the FTE or contract labor model and opting instead for managed services. The FTE model is dead, they say. But don’t believe everything you hear. The managed services model in outsourcing sounds great. It beckons with reduced costs and the

It’s earnings season for the outsourcing industry. So far, we’re seeing mixed results: modest growth in most companies (including Accenture, IBM, Infosys and Wipro ) and strong growth in a few. Notably, Cognizant and TCS are pulling away from the pack. Or as my old running coach would say, they are showing the competition