HCL Technologies (HCLT): IoT NXT Summit

/by

Working with leading technology vendors to develop emerging technology offerings in areas such as Internet of Things (IoT) challenges HCL Technologies (HCLT) to differentiate from peers. However, leveraging its deep engineering expertise integrated with vertical capabilities enables HCLT to be more competitive, driving business transformation for new and existing clients with IoT-based services solutions.

TBR perspective

HCLT’s IoT WoRKS business unit benefits from demand for IoT, primarily among existing customers. The company has some advantages in the IoT business and will continue to expand its IoT practice as it generates IP that will prove useful as IoT becomes an increasingly important part of both build and run services.

HCLT has a long history in electronics and mechanical engineering and continues to provide engineering and R&D services beyond the usual scope of IT-oriented companies. TBR has written extensively about HCLT’s engineering heritage and offerings, noting the company’s engineering and R&D expertise serves as a key differentiator within the broader IT services space. Our white paper HCLT’s Intelligent Sustenance Engineering Service Line Unit delivers data insights to extend the product life cycle discusses the impact of engineering and R&D expertise on the value of HCLT’s data analytics services through differentiation. HCLT’s history and continued use of engineering and R&D help the company navigate customers’ operations technology (OT) areas in both technical and cultural engagements, a necessity in IoT. Nevertheless, in IoT, the company engages primarily with customers’ IT organizations, and HCLT’s advantage in the IoT space enables it to efficiently implement IoT-driven solutions using more complex OT factors. However, as OT is far more diverse than IT, one type of OT expertise does not imply knowledge of another. Although HCLT’s established engineering experiences, combined with its IT services for IoT environments, provide an advantage for the company, adding OT skills would bridge any gaps within OT areas and create a simple but strong advantage. TBR believes that OT organizations will continue to initiate IoT solutions, but will evolve to integrate IT-based practices focused on security, scalability and manageability.

 

On Aug. 22, 2018, TBR attended HCLT’s IoT NXT Summit at the company’s recently opened IoT COLLAB innovation center in Redmond, Wash. The center is located on the same property as HCLT’s Lab 21, which was opened in collaboration with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) around artificial intelligence (AI) and Cortana Analytics in the Azure Cloud. The analyst event centered on HCLT’s 3-year-old IoT WoRKS business unit and featured demonstrations of HCLT’s IoT solutions and how the company works with its partners to develop IoT portfolio offerings as well as extensive discussions with HCLT’s IoT WoRKS industry leads. During the event, HCLT emphasized its focus on existing assets, enhanced by partners and vertical expertise, which, combined with growing demand for cloud-based infrastructure services, enables HCLT to transform clients’ business operations with IoT solutions, providing scale and speed at the edge.

Consultancies and IT services vendors face uncertainty in a shift to data and automation for 2019

/by

As we start the final three months of 2018, TBR’s Professional Services Practice (PSP) has begun wrapping up analysis on the year as a whole and thinking more about what 2019 will bring, specifically in the areas of healthcare IT services, data management and consulting. Top-of-mind issues for TBR’s clients and the PSP analysts reflect today’s driving trends and set the stage for the next few years.

Now: Cloud, competition and emerging tech uncertainty unsettle HITS vendors

TBR’s healthcare IT services (HITS) practice has noted rising interest in electronic health record (EHR) systems and other health IT solutions, for example, patient data storage and application hosting in the cloud, tempered only by ingrained concerns about data privacy and security. EHR-centric companies aggressively cross-selling emerging solutions to their existing installed base of EHR clients have simultaneously captured new EHR work in the vast white space of latent demand for EHR systems outside the U.S. Complementing those efforts, increased cloud adoption generates opportunities for systems integrators to digitally transform payer, provider and life sciences organizations alike. For example, community hospitals eager to digitize and better connect with other providers in the healthcare ecosystem have become a growth engine for many HITS vendors, a trend that favors small-scale EHR providers, especially those that have pivoted to cloud, compelling leading vendors to scale down flagship EHR platforms and adopt small- to mid-market deployment models.

TBR closely monitors and analyzes the impacts to the business models for key HITS vendors as new pressures compel a shift toward different clients and markets, including the following development:

  • Will cloud-based EHRs, infused with automation analytics for care and administrative processes, artificial intelligence (AI) for genomics-informed medicine, machine learning and telemedicine become more commonplace?
  • How will executives at HITS vendors approach retrofitting existing EHR systems with these emerging solutions, in addition to integrating human-centered design into new EHR platforms?

5G drives network transformation

/by

The shift from connecting people (pre-5G era) to connecting everything (5G era) will require an architectural overhaul of telecom networks. A true 5G network will not only leverage new radios but also be inherently cloud-native, virtualized, programmable and automated and provide near-limitless capacity at ultra-low latency. This will require transformation across the entire network, not just at the access layer.

Network transformation moves from industry buzz phrase to reality

The telecom industry has discussed network transformation for years, though its amorphous meaning is beginning to take shape and materialize. TBR is seeing communication service providers (CSPs) transform into digital service providers (DSPs) propelled by ICT convergence, NFV/SDN, cloud, 5G, big data and analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. These trends and technologies are helping operators evolve their networks from being rigid, slow, static, reactive and closed to being flexible, fast, dynamic and open.

Some of the trends contributing to this shift include moving from on-premises/physical networks leveraging black boxes to cloudified/virtualized networks leveraging white boxes. Hardware-defined networks were capex-driven, whereas the future of the network is software-defined and opex-driven. This evolution allows operators to more quickly and easily launch offerings for new revenue streams and reduce network costs over time.

Though NFV and SDN adoption has been slow, some Tier 1 operators are progressing with their plans and reaping benefits. Integrating NFV and SDN capabilities will enable operators to more effectively support network technologies that will become prevalent in the 5G era, such as network slicing and edge computing, which will play a pivotal role in supporting 5G use cases such as advanced Internet of Things (IoT). Operators are under pressure to invest in NFV and SDN to reduce total capex and opex spend as well as introduce new services and stay competitive in the data-driven digital economy, which is increasingly dominated by webscale and over-the-top players.

5G is taking up greater mindshare as commercial deployments begin

Operator networks must ultimately be overhauled to fully realize the potential 5G has to offer, though it will take operators many years to evolve their networks end-to-end. In the meantime, the current focus, and 5G-related capex spend, will be on 5G radios. The potential cost savings offered by 5G is spurring operators to accelerate their deployment timelines, pulling them forward by as much as two years. Efficiency gains remain the main driver to deploy 5G, as a viable business case for operators to grow revenue from 5G has yet to materialize (with the exception of fixed wireless broadband). 5G, which is expected to provide between four- and 10-times greater efficiency on a cost-per-gigabyte basis compared to LTE, will enable operators to more cost-effectively add network capacity to support the prevalence of unlimited data plans as well as continued connected device additions.

There are myriad ideas for new network use cases that 5G could enable, but ROI remains suspect. The most economically viable use case thus far for net-new revenue generation from 5G is fixed wireless broadband. In 2020-2025, which TBR believes will represent the “renaissance” phase of 5G, there will be a plethora of new use cases for the network, particularly in the areas of augmented reality (AR)/virtual reality (VR), smart city, IoT and robotics.

Realizing the full benefits of 5G requires significant investment across the network, not just in the access layer. Operators will invest in fiber, spectrum, massive MIMO (multiple input and multiple output), carrier aggregation, NFV/SDN and cloud RAN (C-RAN), which will provide opportunity for vendors. Though positioned well in key early 5G markets, incumbent vendors are threatened with disruption from NFV/SDN-centric firms, particularly firms in the areas of virtual RAN and mobile core. TBR estimates over 85% of 5G capex spend through 2020 will be driven by operators in four countries: U.S., China, Japan and South Korea. Most Tier 1 operators in these countries have aggressive 5G rollout timetables and intend to leverage the technology for fixed wireless broadband and/or to support their mobile broadband densification initiatives.

TBR covers these topics in depth in its operator, vendor, 5G, NFV/SDN and webscale research streams.

Four by four by four equals four

/by

Four straight weeks of traveling for work, to four different cities to meet with four different clients, brought out four thoughts about where the IT services and consulting markets stand as we move into the autumn rush of 2018.

First, the next few years will finally bring the shift in the consulting model that we’ve been anticipating for the last decade (when I worked Deloitte and the partners tasked our team with understanding the other Big Four firms’ moves back into consulting). Outcomes-based pricing won’t become the norm because clients want transparency or because consultancies readily put their own fees and reputations at risk, but because the technology around assessing, measuring and even metering outcomes has improved dramatically in the last couple of years. And asset-based consulting will become the norm because consultancies can finally fully marry their intellectual talent to repeatable, scalable, configurable solutions infused with more than just methodologies and industry knowledge.

Second, the word “maturity” has started creeping into conversations about emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, enhanced analytics, Internet of Things and even blockchain. The smart consultancies have recognized the buzz around emerging tech has produced clients that have enough experience, both good and bad, to think of themselves as more than just novices needing consulting help to understand the emerging new-world customer and employee. These clients don’t want to be amazed by cool tech. They want their experience to be acknowledged and built upon, and they want to move faster. Recognizing maturity means talking about deeper, more lasting — and more expensive — engagements, much to the benefit of consultancies.

Third, I anticipate an era of internally splintered consultancies competing with globally managed firms, creating a weird market with nominally global players drifting toward highly localized operations, while a couple of large consultancies maintain centralized, uniform cultures and organizations. Mirroring the political, economic and demographic forces behind the recent rise of populism and nationalism, some global consultancies could see local and regional practices pressured by trends in data sovereignty and cybersecurity, combined with a spillover from political populism and accelerated by agile technologies that can be spread rapidly and customized for micro-differences more quickly than before. If this trend develops, the consultancies opting to go all-in on one approach or the other will succeed. Those slow to decide or trying to muddle through a middle-ground arrangement will see the market surpass them.

And fourth, I come back repeatedly to leadership, a topic I’ve written about extensively in our analysis and in a couple of blog posts and special reports. Leading a consulting or IT innovation or systems implementation team today requires mastering new technologies, understanding a client’s industry and their position within it, and navigating shifting centers of budget and decision making. None of that differs greatly from previous generations of IT, except that today the diversity of talent demands more capable leaders and the speed of technological change demands increased humility and adaptability, plus a greater willingness to form, manage and lead flexible teams. Companies I see that recognize the talent shift, including changes brought on by millennials, and understand the impact on their leaders — and the company’s imperative to train and equip those leaders — repeatedly stand apart from the pack.

Lenovo optimizes to gain share in a market poised for fragmentation by use case

/by

TBR perspective

At Lenovo’s Transform 2.0 event, Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang (“YY”) laid out the Lenovo strategy crisply in his opening remarks, relying on multiple proof points from analyst firms in the process. The company has been gaining share in a market in the aftermath of consolidation, and it sees nothing but brighter days ahead. The source of Yang’s optimism rests on scale, a traditional lever that has pulled commodity component manufacturing to Asia for decades. How Yang believes Lenovo wins stems from the company’s supply chain best practices, where it can optimize the full stack of compute to serve the full stack of instances on the one hand and create a vast array of endpoint devices for humans and machines alike on the other.

The tight partnership with NetApp (Nasdaq: NTAP) was the biggest news at the event. The venture essentially melds the Lenovo and NetApp product lines in a manner similar to the scale advantage amassed when the former Dell and EMC merged to form Dell Technologies (NYSE: DVMT). The two companies have also created a joint venture in China, with Lenovo having 51% ownership as required by Chinese law, and plan to develop a line of storage products to meet the unique requirements of customers in China while leveraging Lenovo’s scaled manufacturing footprint in region.

Supply chain alone cannot help vendors differentiate, as many past Asian manufacturing giants have come to learn as overlapping channels confused markets and compressed middleman margins in the bygone era of transaction selling. Services selling requires an equally as deft and varied set of commercial offers to fit the financial strategies of the business entities Lenovo targets, and the seeds of these early “as a Service” commercial offering wrappers have been in flight for several years.

Commercial flexibility, while lagging the supply chain competencies, remains far ahead of the professional services wrapper commodity components required in the pivot to selling outcomes or solutions. Lenovo’s partnerships with leading systems integrators will be imperative for enterprise adoption as the business translation and advisory services increasingly relegate the compute and device acquisition to a derived decision.

 

 

Canonical’s growth play: Make customers’ and partners’ lives easier (and more economical)

/by

TBR perspective

At Canonical’s 2018 Analyst Day, CEO Mark Shuttleworth laid out a very compelling construct for Canonical’s vision of being the link between the operating system (OS) layer and the cloud control planes. Canonical has Ubuntu OS versions to run from the largest high-performance computers with NVIDIA graphics processing units to the smallest device OSes at the heart of offers from niche vendors such as Rigado. Throughout the event, Canonical stressed multicloud interoperability through Kubernetes. The big unknown on the horizon is how to provision infrastructure for edge analytics, which sits at the heart of the strategic relationship Canonical has with Google Cloud as Google donates Borg to ensure Kubernetes does not challenge Borg the way Hadoop forked from MapReduce.

Existing virtualization economics has stalled, with premium pricing models emerging from the major and better-established competitors Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and VMware (NYSE: VMW). The Canonical play further compresses the economics of the infrastructure abstraction and OS components, where parts will be provided for free and the services and update provisions will become the basis for the monetization model. Akin to how free Android disaggregated the device OS space and gained share against Microsoft, Canonical bets on market projections showing devices used/owned per person growing from two to three devices today to as many as 20 devices within the next five years.

It is from this vantage point that one open-source Linux distro, Canonical’s Ubuntu, was taking direct competitive aim at another (Red Hat), while likewise suggesting VMware’s time as the market maker would quickly start to fade as more and more app modernization efforts move code from virtual machines (VMs) into lightweight Kubernetes containers (clusters).

 

Canonical hosted its 2018 Analyst Day in New York City on Sept. 20, 2018. The event featured presentations from the top leadership at Canonical, including Shuttleworth, Finance Director Seb Butter, SVP of Global Data Centre Sales Jeff Lattomus, and VP of Global Sales, IoT & Devices Tom Canning. Canonical focused on business and go-to-market updates as well as key presentations by partners, such as Paul Nash from Google Cloud, outlining how Canonical has accelerated or added value to their businesses. At this year’s event, there was a noticeable blurring of the lines between cloud and IoT discussions in comparison to years past where there were more definitive tracks. Regarding both Canonical’s own strategy and its conversations with customers, it is exceedingly difficult to have a discussion about one and not the other, which is reflected in the broader IT landscape as of late.

Federal initiatives around IT modernization translate to revenue growth for public sector services providers

/by

Growth opportunities across defense and civilian agencies uplift vendor performance

The results of TBR’s 2Q18 Public Sector IT Services Benchmark demonstrate clear top-line benefits for services providers as government agencies accelerate IT modernization initiatives. Revenue for the 16 benchmarked vendors improved 5.3% year-to-year, which does not even factor in General Dynamics IT essentially doubling in size through its acquisition of CSRA. Including the impact of the acquisition, revenue grew 13.5% from 2Q17.

 

Industry consolidation remains a prevailing theme in the market as the near-term opportunities tied to U.S. federal budget growth and the pursuit of innovation create a sense of urgency for vendors to capitalize. Scale advantages, complementary capabilities and broadened customer relationships make consolidation a compelling tool to facilitate near-term deal capture. Consolidation will remain a prominent strategic concern, evidenced by the announcement after the close of 2Q18 that SAIC (NYSE: SAIC) plans to acquire Engility (NYSE: EGL). However, in the long run, TBR anticipates the importance of scale will diminish as rapid technological change disrupts legacy business models.

TBR believes that the door is open for industry stalwarts to be disrupted if they elect to ignore the prevailing signs that the federal government, in particular the U.S. Department of Defense, seeks change in how it procures and fields technology.

 

TBR’s Public Sector IT Services Benchmark examines the key strategies, investments and performance metrics of leading government consultants, systems integrators, and IT and professional services providers. The benchmark examines 16 vendors across three groups: services units of aerospace and defense firms, U.S. federal government pure play vendors, and public sector verticals of commercially led IT services companies. We mix qualitative analysis of key investments and strategic initiatives with quantitative analysis of financial performance to uncover the drivers of business success for vendors that offer services to government customers.

Telecom vendor revenues trend upward as operators pull forward 5G investment

/by

According to Technology Business Research, Inc.’s (TBR) 2Q18 Telecom Vendor Benchmark, revenue growth improved for the largest vendors as they capitalized on early 5G investment but saw reduced spend in China. Operators, particularly those in the United States, are pulling forward investment in 5G and deploying small cells to densify networks. However, the RAN market will decline in 2018 as operators in China reduce spend significantly following the conclusion of LTE coverage deployments.

TBR believes Ericsson has staked an early lead in 5G, but Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Huawei can leverage their end-to-end portfolios to regain share. In 4Q17 and 1Q18 Ericsson (Nasdaq: ERIC) aggressively priced its Ericsson Radio System (ERS), which is software-upgradeable to 5G, undercutting competitors to gain market share ahead of commercial 5G build-outs. Nokia and Huawei remain well positioned in 5G due to their ability to leverage end-to-end portfolios as a one-stop shop for network transformation in the 5G era.

ZTE was banned from sourcing components from the U.S. for part of 2Q18, which drove the company to essentially cease operating, leading to drastically lower revenue and a deep operating loss. The company is once again operating, but its reputation was tarnished, particularly in Western markets.

 

 

TBR’s Telecom Vendor Benchmark details and compares the initiatives and tracks the revenue and performance of the largest telecom vendors in segments including infrastructure, services and applications and in geographies including the Americas, EMEA and APAC. The report includes information on market leaders, vendor positioning, vendor market share, key deals, acquisitions, alliances, go-to-market strategies and personnel developments.

Increased market clarity drives 16.1% year-to-year growth in commercial IoT revenue

/by

Technology Business Research, Inc.’s (TBR) 2Q18 Commercial IoT Benchmark recorded revenue growth of 16.1% year-to-year, to $10.3 billion, in 2Q18, among the 28 IT and operational technology (OT) vendors we benchmark. The revenue growth is largely a result of continued implementation of Internet of Thing (IoT) and growth of installed IoT solutions.

The dousing of rampant IoT hype, which only served to confuse and overwhelm customers and vendors, is helping drive the growth of installed IoT solutions. As the hype dies out, a wave of increased clarity and maturation is forming with vendors rationalizing their go-to-market strategies and messaging, leading to customers better understanding how to apply IoT and vendors learning how to assemble solutions. Packaged solutions are emerging as vendors cooperate, focusing on their strengths, and assemble components sets that solve verticalwide challenges. TBR believes these factors are driving tactical business-focused IoT projects to supersede overambitious projects stuck in proof-of-concept limbo.

However, while easier than in the past, IoT design and implementation are still a challenge. TBR does not expect a huge explosion of revenue beyond midteen growth going forward.

Total 2Q18 commercial IoT benchmarked gross profit increased 16.6% year-to-year to $5.1 billion. Reduced complexity in IoT due to increased knowledge around building and applying IoT as well as the streamlining of portfolios as a result of increased partnering is improving vendor profitability. Also, vendors are leveraging specialized tools, such as artificial intelligence (AI), to justify higher pricing.

 

TBR’s Commercial IoT Benchmark highlights current commercial IoT revenue and gross profit for vendors. TBR leverages financial models and projections across a diverse set of IT and OT components. Additionally, the benchmark outlines the major vendor drivers and trends shaping the market.

Ending consulting roulette: BXT evolves from grand idea to engaged approach

/by

Aspirational ideas while executing on BXT

Flight delays and cancellations spark anger in travelers and cost the airlines, in both revenue and brand, making predictive maintenance an easy sell to airlines looking for help. Delivering on the promise of being able to predict when a plane needs to be serviced, the positioning of the necessary technicians and parts, and how to best streamline, analyze, and improve the entire process requires an intricate understanding of an airline and its operating environments, the disparate data sets, and the regulatory complications requiring strict compliance. Most importantly, a consultancy needs to bring trust — deep, proven and sustained levels of trust — something PwC explicitly maintains it delivers, as the firm has stated, “We trade in earned trust.” PwC’s airline-based predictive maintenance case study demonstrates the firm’s ability to attack a client’s business problem, understand the user experience and apply a technology-infused solution, in addition to highlighting three of PwC’s current strengths: 1) earned confidence that the firm understands clients’ industry, regulatory and business intricacies, 2) client expectation that the firm will bring “aspirational ideas,” not simply routine consulting suggestions and solutions, and 3) evidence that the firm’s Business, Experience, Technology (BXT) approach has grown from a well-conceived goal to a functioning, well-engrained way of doing business.

 

Over two days, PwC hosted 50 analysts in its New York City offices, providing opportunities to meet PwC leaders and consultants from nearly every aspect of the firm’s advisory practice. In contrast to recent events, PwC opted to hold its Global Analyst Day sessions in somewhat traditional office spaces, rather than one of its dedicated Experience Centers, subtly reinforcing the message that its BXT approach permeates the entire firm and is not something that is practiced only at special locations. In addition, PwC discarded the traditional analyst day playbook, instead requiring attending analysts act as consultants while PwC professionals acted as clients, giving the analysts a better feel for PwC’s challenges and solutions.