Service Providers Archive

There is increasing skepticism and cynicism in the customer ranks in the hyper-competitive environment of the services world. As a customer commented to me, “Providers are like snowflakes. They all think they are unique, but they look just like everybody else. And if you put them under pressure, they all become the same thing.”

In our tracking of industry contracts and trends, we find that, in the infrastructure space, incumbent service providers now win recompetes 85 percent of the time. However, the ACV (annual contract value) is 27 percent less scope. This means that the incumbent must be able to add new new logos. The good news is

The Promised Land of SaaS and cloud models in the services world is clearly visible, but it’s frustratingly difficult for service providers to get there. The new models are the land for service providers’ growth and profits, but providers are finding it painful and frustrating as they try to move to the new models.

American country music artist Toby Keith’s hit song “I Want to talk about me” reminds me of a phenomenon in today’s services world — too many providers’ conversations with customers are unproductive. Service providers are very eager to grow their revenue in their existing accounts. As the market matures, this is clearly the fastest,

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

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

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

I’m watching with great interest the current change in leadership at Xerox. They just announced that Lynn Blodgett will retire at the end of 2014 and Robert Zapfel will join the firm on April 1 as president of Xerox Services and EVP of the corporation, reporting to the chairman and CEO. Bob has had

Here’s a blatant truth: Any company looking to procure outsourced services can get into a similar situation as the government faced with its healthcare.gov website before it switched the work to Accenture to fix the debacle. That’s because the RFP process is a breeding ground for “gotchas” that eventually can evaporate a deal’s ROI or,