TBR releases exclusive webinar content from December 2021

HAMPTON, N.H. (Dec. 29, 2021) — Technology Business Research, Inc. (TBR) announces on-demand availability of its December 2021 webinars, featuring discusses on expectations for innovation and transformation centers in 2022, 5G over the next five years, hardware subscription services growth, and more.

The silver lining of downward pressures that innovation and transformation centers are facing

Members of TBR’s Professional Services team take an in-depth look at how innovation and transformation centers have evolved through the pandemic and what is expected from them in 2022

With IT services again enabling digital transformation, DeFi shifts blockchain into a higher gear

Members of TBR’s Professional Services and Digital teams deep dive into IT services vendors’ investments and activities in APAC as well as discuss beyond the hype of cryptocurrency and what’s next for decentralized finance

How hardware vendors are ramping up subscription services to drive growth

Principal Analyst and Practice Manager Angela Lambert and Senior Analyst Eric Costa discusses trends emerging among hardware subscription services, drivers and inhibitors expected to impact market expansion, TBR’s forecasted market growth, and more

5G market update: Entering the ramp phase of the global build cycle

Principal Analyst Chris Antlitz gives an in-depth, exclusive review of TBR’s 5G Telecom Market Landscape and 5G Telecom Market Forecast, including major developments in the 5G market and an assessment of where the 5G market is trending over the next five years

2022 expectations: Insights from TBR’s Professional Services team

TBR’s Professional Services team looks at which key metrics and markets to look for in early 2022 as indictors for leaders and laggards, how IT services vendors, consultancies and cloud vendors responded to changing customer demands in 2021, and more

TBR webinars include a 15-minute Q&A following the main presentation. To find out what we are discussing next month, check out the Webinars page of our website.

Interested in a one-on-one discussion with one of the above subject-matter experts or a private webinar with one or more of our teams?

Contact us today for more information on our free 60-day trial

Top 3 Predictions for Cloud Infrastructure & Platforms in 2022

As vendors embrace open, hybrid architectures, PaaS emerges as the source of differentation

Vendors adjust strategies as clients ask for open and flexible IT

Customer demand for more open, cross-cloud services will shape vendor investments through 2022. Vendors traditionally known for locking customers in to their technology, including IaaS incumbent Amazon Web Services (AWS), will likely re-evaluate their portfolios and go-to-market messaging in the coming year. This could have lasting impacts on peers such as IBM and Google Cloud, which use openness as a competitive differentiator. For example, this past year AWS took a big leap forward with the general availability of EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) Anywhere, which allows customers to create and manage Kubernetes clusters inside their data centers.

Along with Outposts, AWS markets EKS Anywhere as part of its hybrid portfolio, which is typically just an extension of AWS cloud services to on-premises environments. However, for many competing vendors like IBM and Google Cloud, hybrid cloud has come to mean supporting customers’ workloads not only on premises but also across competitors’ clouds. AWS could similarly go down this route to better compete and may surprise the market in 2022 by offering EKS on other public clouds. Oracle is another example of a vendor known for confining customers to its cloud stack; yet, as Oracle looks to position itself as the No. 4 cloud leader in 2022, it could slowly embrace deployment methods outside Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This trend is reflected in Oracle’s newer open-source application development and management platform, which is somewhat comparable to Red Hat OpenShift, and is expected to be deployable to third-party clouds.

2022 cloud infrastructure & platforms predictions

  • Hybrid remains the new norm
  • Bringing cloud to the customer: Distrubuted cloud moves from experiment to niche delivery method
  • IaaS is about scale; PaaS is about differentiation

Learn more in our webinar 2022 Predictions: Cloud

Download a free copy of TBR’s Top 3 Predictions for Cloud Infrastructure & Platforms in 2022

Telecom Business Research’s 2022 Predictions is a special series examining market trends and business changes in key markets. Covered segments include cloud, telecom, devices, data center, and services & digital.

Top 3 Predictions for Cloud Applications in 2022

SaaS will see new vendors, bigger workloads and more customization

Consistent growth masks considerable change in SaaS during 2022

The expectations for what cloud can offer customers have shifted, and in no market is that more clear than with cloud applications and SaaS. The financial benefits of cloud, both the lower overall cost and the shift to an operating expense pricing model, were the early attractions as customers moved low-risk applications to the cloud. Now that more mission-critical enterprise applications are being moved, cost is still a consideration for major SaaS purchases, but it is no longer the sole driving factor influencing adoption decisions. The constant stream of innovation, more frequent updates, and ability to align cloud to changing business requirements have taken over as the most attractive elements of SaaS solutions.

That high-level value proposition will persist into 2022, making SaaS the largest cloud market in terms of revenue and one that will continue to grow in the double digits year-to-year. It may sound like the same old story, but a shifting set of trends will drive this growth. First, while large providers like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft remain the mainstays of the market, born-in-the-cloud providers have matured greatly over the past few years, best highlighted by Salesforce whose front-office SaaS portfolio aligned well with the adoption patterns of the enterprise, setting the vendor on a course to eclipse SAP as the largest enterprise application provider in terms of revenue by the end of 2021.

The success of Salesforce and other cloud pure plays like Workday has been recognized by a growing ecosystem of nontraditional ISVs that are entering the market to capitalize on the opportunity. Systems integrators, small managed services partners, and cloud platform providers will all package solutions that are sold as SaaS to end customers. Second, the larger, mission-critical services in the ERP category of workloads will see increased adoption. That shift carries significant dollar investments not only in the SaaS offerings being purchased but also in the associated services and technologies that support those environments. Third, the need for customization based on the business process, existing technology, and vertical industry increases the value of broad ecosystems that extend the core SaaS offerings.

This dynamic is supported by TBR’s 1H21 Cloud Applications Customer Research, which found that the value of ISV ecosystems was not just in filling gaps in vendors’ portfolios but also, more critically, in increasing the stickiness of vendors’ offerings within clients’ environments. This dynamic will result in PaaS capabilities becoming a key differentiator for vendors in the overall public cloud market. So while growth will continue in SaaS, it will mask big changes occurring in the market during the coming year.

2022 Cloud Applications Predictions

  • The SaaS opportunity attracts all kinds of new participants
  • Cloud delivery for mission-critical applications inches closer to mainstream
  • Customization becomes the standard for cloud applications

Learn more in our webinar 2022 Predictions: Cloud

Download a free copy of TBR’s Top 3 Predictions for Cloud Applications in 2022

Telecom Business Research’s 2022 Predictions is a special series examining market trends and business changes in key markets. Covered segments include cloud, telecom, devices, data center, and services & digital.

Proven capabilities in the U.S. enable Infosys to become a trusted partner one client at a time

North America client scale and longevity provides Infosys with a robust foundation for enabling trusted delivery transformation

North America is Infosys’ (Nasdaq: INFY) largest region, composing 61.9% of total revenue and growing 23.1% year-to-year in 3Q21. Accelerated growth momentum in the region — regional sales have rebounded from -0.5% on an annual basis in the peak of the pandemic in 2Q20 — is largely due to the company’s ability to balance innovation with securing foundational revenues enabled by cloud, which for Infosys means Infosys Cobalt.

Infosys’ ongoing expansion efforts in talent and capabilities in areas such as Adobe, Salesforce and product design continue to serve as a catalyst for transformation. Efforts are enabling the company to drive conversations in new areas as well as attract talent with multidisciplinary skills, evidenced by its network of innovation and design hubs in the U.S. Additionally, ongoing recruitment efforts provide a glimpse into Infosys’ culture of learning and development; hiring began in late 2020 with the goal of 25,000 additions over five years, and Infosys aims to hire 12,000 U.S.-based employees and 3,000 U.S.-based college graduates by 2022. Despite the ongoing war for talent, we expect Infosys to meet and likely exceed these targets. In 2017 the company announced its goal to hire 10,000 U.S.-based employees by 2019, then exceeded this goal by 3,000.

Retaining talent will be equally as important, especially as attrition continues to climb. Infosys reported voluntary attrition in the last 12 months for IT services was 20.1% in 3Q21 up from 13.9% a year ago. Examples of Infosys’ investments in expanding its addressable market and building trust with a new generation of workers include: a recently announced training facility in Indianapolis; virtual training platform Infosys Wingspan; recruitment outreach for nontraditional talent including high school and community college graduates and midcareer transition professionals; a dozen partnerships with U.S.-based universities; a Reskill and Restart program; and Infosys Foundation that supports K-12 teachers. Infosys is already seeing some of these investments pay off. For example, the attrition of its Community College Pathway program is about one-third lower than overall turnover. Creating personal connections with such recruits while providing a clear upward career progression sustains Infosys’ growth.

Financial Services acts as the cornerstone of Infosys’ U.S. go-to-market strategy

While Infosys’ North America client footprint is diversified, the financial services (FS) industry presents the largest opportunity. Global FS revenue was $1.3 billion growing at 21.8% year-to-year in 3Q21, and Infosys’ North America FS revenue was $802 million, increasing at 30.8% on an annual basis in 3Q21.

We attribute the impressive FS North America growth to two factors. First, Infosys is ramping up cash inflows from its mega deal with Vanguard, signed in 2020. Second, Infosys capitalizes on its established footprint and trust with nine of the 10 top U.S. banks and its ability to grow its regional banks’ roster.

Following Infosys Leadership Forum in Europe, the company hosted over 120 clients and two dozen analysts and partners for in-person and virtual sessions for the one-day Infosys Americas Leadership Forum, held at Madison Square Garden and culminating with the New York Knicks versus Orlando Magic game. While many of the themes and messages of the Americas event were consistent with the London event held in October, nuances, particularly around client stickiness and trust, stood out as the fundamental pillars of Infosys’ regional success and pivot toward becoming a platform-enabled solutions broker known for its strong execution capabilities.

PwC Procurement on Demand Services: Making procurement less painful

A proven strategy: Start, test, build, evolve internally

In early November, TBR spoke with PwC’s Procurement on Demand Services team, including Scott Boruff, Becky Mackin, Michael Giguere and John Fafian, to better understand how their offering has evolved and what challenges they are facing as 2022 approaches. According to Boruff, PwC’s internal procurement professionals implemented a version of the firm’s procurement solution over five years ago, then continually refined it before rolling the solution out to clients over the last 18 months. In TBR’s view, numerous PwC peers have successfully deployed this customer zero approach, particularly as consultancies and IT services vendors have drifted into the software space.

When pressed if implementing a solution internally resonates with clients, Boruff, Giguere and Fafian confirmed that PwC’s clients appreciate this approach and that the firm included former PwC procurement professionals in the Procurement on Demand Services team. Fafian noted that the range of spend categories within PwC’s procurement team — for example professional services, facilities management, software and hardware — reassured clients PwC’s solution could withstand massively scaled deployments.

In explaining why PwC launched Procurement on Demand Services, Boruff noted that the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted long-standing tensions between procurement officers seeking the best quality and conditions and internal customers, who often bring different priorities to a procurement process. Solving the people problem — the dissatisfaction with each other and with the process — requires developing, cementing and sustaining trust across an entire enterprise, a theme that resonates with PwC’s overall strategic shift.

In addition, by leveraging PwC’s products and accelerators for its clients, Boruff said his team has “the people and the technology” to help clients “jump the line” on turning around their procurement processes, improve outcomes and satisfaction, and drive hard value to the bottom line. An enterprise trying to transform its procurement function, in Boruff’s assessment, would need 12 months to find qualified staff and 12 more months to build the technology, before finally realizing the value — an overall timeline Boruff said PwC could reduce to three months. In TBR’s view, the combination of a pandemic-induced appreciation for procurement challenges and a robust, tested solution currently operated globally by PwC made for excellent timing. As we discuss below, execution becomes the new challenge.

Meeting the vast variety of clients’ needs requires PwC flexibility

Detailing the PwC offering, Boruff explained that PwC’s clients look for three kinds of services: 1) curated tech enabled-services in a specific functional area that support upskilling and progression of maturity of the entire procurement function; 2) managed services, with PwC taking full responsibility for category management, analytics and any ongoing procurement issues; and, 3) enhanced staff augmentation, typically around a specific spend category, an acquisition assimilation or a major sourcing event.

Across those three areas, according to Boruff, PwC can bring the right procurement subject matter experts, particularly for specific spend categories, and scale up to meet clients’ demands. In addition, PwC’s flexibility around the consulting business model allows the firm to bring a blend of services, including procurement strategy, project management, contract negotiations, metrics and reporting, risk management, and even a SaaS procurement platform. In TBR’s view, while this offering does not sit within PwC Products, the evolution through internal development and deployment and the approach to bringing this to clients reflect the firm’s commitment to PwC Products and to a full pivot to business models that more fully support their clients’ transformation needs.

While PwC’s Procurement on Demand Services offering currently exists in the “walk” stage across the crawl-walk-run spectrum, the firm has begun exploring what comes next, beyond simply greater scale. Mackin noted the current procurement analytics package within some clients’ deployments allows PwC to anticipate and explore opportunities for additional client savings through enhanced procurement strategies and services. In TBR’s view, as more managed services clients permit PwC to monitor existing deployments and analyze trends, the firm will develop an increasingly robust procurement offering, accelerating the flywheels of value to clients and revenue for PwC. Looking further ahead, Boruff called blockchain “aspirational” in the procurement space, noting that too many client contracts have not been digitized from paper. Boruff also acknowledged the firm may need to complement existing talent and capabilities with acquisitions of both intellectual property and procurement-trained professionals to meet PwC’s internal growth targets over the next few years.

Top 3 Predictions for Management Consulting in 2022

The who, what and how of management consulting keeps changing and stays the same

Managing talent and restructuring and building decarbonization credentials will drive management consulting in 2022

Management consultancies traditionally stood at the top of the IT services pyramid, delivering advice, road maps and business cases for other vendors to follow, reaping the rewards of high margins and brand prestige. Pre-pandemic, disruption upended every business model across the technology spectrum, while consulting appeared to move along, unchanged since the first corporate board listened to advice from McKinsey & Co. In actuality, management consulting had been shifting from slides to software for years, with the pandemic accelerating those changes. The 2021 drivers and trends pushing change included managing and upskilling talent, restructuring to meet new client demands and bring new capabilities to the market, and jumping on the sustainability bandwagon. 

A note of caution: Even with all the changes in consulting since the spread of digital transformation, TBR believes most management consulting engagements center on traditional deliverables: road maps, business cases and strategic advice. In recent months, TBR has heard from consultancies and their clients about a resurgence in strategy consulting, perhaps stemming from a post-pandemic push to reorient to the future having made the operational and organizational changes necessary to survive 2020 and 2021.

Concurrently, IT services vendors and cloud and software giants have increasingly pushed into the consulting space, sometimes supplanting established management consultancies engaged in implementations and managed services. TBR does not believe this trend will result in significant management consulting market share being earned by the likes of Microsoft or Infosys, but the large-scale implementation and managed services engagements may include a wider mix of ecosystem partners delivering to the end client. In 2022 the management consultancies that navigate the rough and changing partnering landscape will outperform peers.  

2022 management consulting predictions

  • Expanded capabilities require expanded skills, leading consultancies to increasingly invest in education
  • Restructuring throes and woes will continue to constrain some management consultancies abilities to execute consistency
  • Sustainability booms for consultancies poised to measure, benchmark and report client progress

Download a free copy of TBR’s Top 3 Predictions for Management Consulting in 2022

Telecom Business Research’s 2022 Predictions is a special series examining market trends and business changes in key markets. Covered segments include cloud, telecom, devices, data center, and services & digital.

Red Hat Analyst Day 2021: Aspiring to make infrastructure a nonevent

Red Hat aspires to be the technology glue for the digital enterprise

Red Hat rose to prominence simplifying technology stacks, with a mission to break the chokehold proprietary operating systems had on the enterprise via Enterprise Open Source, then extending that out to the various cloud developer platforms through its products. For this product strategy, Red Hat developed simple monetization strategies that have been replicated throughout the industry in what are now commonly called “as a Service” business models.

Red Hat recognizes it needs to do more to solidify its position as the glue, or virtual mortar, for digital business. The march to edge, driven by ubiquitous, economical compute, means that Red Hat has to expand beyond its horizontal strategy, which caters to the IT developer community, to also incorporate a more nuanced strategy that provides the requisite workflow and industry wrappers to simplify developer remits even further.

Red Hat quite correctly cites its dominance in the enterprise, with over 90% of the Fortune 500 using Red Hat products and solutions. This share dominance positions the company well for legacy application modernizations for an inside-out expansion strategy. Legacy vendors increasingly expose internal data through a series of different use cases and business constructs, whether it be to deploy internal data for marketing initiatives or to modernize the transfer of permissioned information among other business entities in a multi-enterprise business network.

But outside-in data utilization from customer-facing applications, often built cloud natively, is a different story. Many of the technology startups targeting those business use cases have become enamored with hyperscaler marketplaces as a key attribute when settling upon their development strategy. While developers may still be king, customer parliaments have greater and greater influence over the way the business policies are determined. Simple add-to-cart trials can trump the developer efficiencies associated with writing once in OpenShift to deploy anywhere.

Red Hat has moved to fill that gap by stating it will meet customers where they want to buy. IT procurement, Red Hat rightfully argues, is being consolidated on hyperscaler marketplaces, and Red Hat is developing — across much of its portfolio — more co-selling situations with Microsoft Azure (Nasdaq: MSFT), Amazon Web Services (AWS; Nasdaq: AMZN) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOGL) around OpenShift, SQL and SAP technologies.

Red Hat makes the last-mile connection to the workflow seamless

Red Hat can mask the technological complexities of the hybrid multicloud world. Through Ansible OpenShfit and the Red Hat portfolio, the company can also streamline the DevSecOps processes to allow software development to focus on the business value, while Red Hat addresses the infrastructure deployment layer that will become increasingly important as edge deployments proliferate.

Presently, Red Hat has honed its offers for telco, financial services and what is broadly defined as Industry 4.0. Red Hat’s telecommunications and financial services market share has been a solid underpinning of the company’s install base for decades. Similarly, these two verticals are also pushing hard for edge build-outs to bring compute and networking functionality as close to their end customers as possible.

Through Red Hat’s automation and open-source curation competencies, the company is able to create what it calls validated patterns for the edge. The validated patterns will consist of publicly available reference architectures Red Hat certifies for its various version releases. Validated patterns, in essence, shorten the development time for the broader Red Hat community by addressing the underlying infrastructure connections and interactions necessary to work in the hybrid multicloud world.

At Red Hat’s virtual Analyst Day event, held on Nov. 18, company representatives delivered a rapid-fire presentation on Red Hat’s three-year vision and the company’s efforts to pivot its initiatives to a more vertically focused set of go-to-market motions. The presentation was led by a succession of Red Hat senior vice presidents, including Mike Ferris, Corporate Development and Strategy; Ashesh Badani, Products; Stefanie Chiras, Partner Ecosystems; and Marco Bill-Peter, Customer Success, in addition to Global Partners and Alliances leads Terri Hall and Maryam Zand and Global Industries Chief Strategist Ian Hood. Rounding out the event was a customer testimonial from Deloitte Senior Manager Ashley D’Souza on the ways Red Hat technology enabled Deloitte’s healthcare solutions for the state of Washington.

Top 3 Predictions for Digital Transformation in 2022

In the end it is all about business outcomes

Digital is dead; long live business transformation

Although the term “digital transformation” has served an important purpose of focusing the attention of business leaders and the IT services and consultancies working with them, it has been among the most overused phrases of the last 10 years in technology. At the start of 2022, no one will need to be reminded that technology — digital — can drive transformation. Business transformation is returning to the forefront for enterprises as a result of the pandemic, the advantages of emerging technologies, and the generational shift in the C-Suite, with newly promoted decision makers fully soaked in all the possibilities of technology.

The shift from digital transformation to business transformation will accelerate in 2022, amid the change in buyers and as digitally mature businesses are more inclined to bring technology talent in-house. These trends, along with the return to in-person workplaces and a resurgence of innovation and transformation centers, will create opportunities for leading IT services vendors and consultancies to separate from the pack by expanding managed services, returning clients to in-person creative sessions, and shifting away from technology-first mindsets.

2022 will be a pivotal year for digital transformation … perhaps its last. 

2022 digital transformation predictions

  • As clients graduate beyond digital transformation, vendors scramble to stay relevant
  • Funky chairs only matter if you can physically sit in them: The resurange of innovation and transformation centers
  • New generation of business leaders expect business transformations, not digital ones

 

Download a free copy of TBR’s Top 3 Predictions for Digital Transformation in 2022

Telecom Business Research’s 2022 Predictions is a special series examining market trends and business changes in key markets. Covered segments include cloud, telecom, devices, data center, and services & digital.

devices, data center, and services & digital.

Hyperscalers are poised to disrupt the private cellular networks market over the next few years

Hyperscalers are poised to disrupt the private cellular networks market through their ecosystems, platforms and marketplaces

Hyperscalers (especially Amazon, Google and Microsoft) intend to standardize, modularize and verticalize private cellular networks (PCN)-related solutions inside their ecosystems, platforms and marketplaces, especially as it pertains to 5G and edge computing. Hyperscalers are focused on hiding the complexity of private networks and edge computing, enabling end users to more easily procure and consume these resources and unlock the value of data.

Enterprise and government consumption of networking resources will ultimately come to resemble how IT resources are consumed via the cloud, and solutions will be outcome-based. Early manifestations of this trend can be seen with Microsoft’s packaging of its 5G core with Azure Private Multi-Access Edge Compute (MEC) to enable and drive enterprise digital transformation with on-premises private 5G MEC. Microsoft is also building a range of vertical-specific use case solutions spanning smart factory, defense, retail transformation, and healthcare. Amazon and Google are following Microsoft’s lead in this domain.

Ultimately, TBR believes a large portion of activity in the private cellular networks and edge computing markets will be conducted inside hyperscalers’ ecosystems. CSPs and vendors will increasingly have to play inside hyperscalers’ ecosystems in some way to stay relevant in the market as it evolves.

Private 5G Network Revenue by Provider Type 2020-2025E

TBR’s Private Cellular Networks Market Landscape deep dives into the market for private cellular networks. This global report covers enterprises that are investing in private cellular networks as well as all of the major vendors and some nascent players that supply infrastructure in this space. The research includes key findings, key market developments, market sizing and forecast, regional trends, technology trends, vertical trends, use cases, and key customer deals that are occurring in the market. TBR’s Private Cellular Networks Market Forecast, which is global in scope, details private cellular network spending trends among enterprises and governments, particularly as it pertains to 5G. This research includes current-year market sizing and a five-year forecast of several private cellular networks market segments and geographies.

Top 3 Predictions for Global Delivery in 2022

Robots hire robots, talent uproots to anywhere, and TikTok takes on TCS

Fallout from the pandemic will lead to the most disruptive year in global delivery since the start of outsourcing

TBR anticipates sea changes on three fronts in 2022. First, accelerated adoption and sustained refinement of automation will lead to AI-enabled platforms determining the automation tools needed to optimize an increasing number of processes. And those AI-smart platforms will make procurement decisions independently. In short, robots are hiring robots, with all the implications on talent, productivity, KPIs and pricing.

Second, the pandemic proved IT services can be delivered from anywhere. In 2022 that reality will shift compensation models, as vendors begin to eliminate disparities based on location. Smart IT services vendors will hire talent anywhere and reward professionals who find ways to meet their colleagues in person. Lagging IT services vendors will cling to now-outdated compensation models that pay a professional in Boston more for doing the exact same job as someone in Bangalore, India.

Third, the rise of enterprises that are outside the software and IT services realm but differentiate based on software and IP will exacerbate the ongoing war for software developer talent. Is that too many mentions of “software” in one sentence in an IT services predictions paper? Yes. But the large IT services vendors with business models built around skilled developers will start losing talent to the likes of TikTok and Tesla, and may also eventually lose business to those new competitors.

We are not exaggerating: By the end of 2022, global delivery will be a different game. 

2022 global delivery predictions

  • The robots will hire each other, complicating the people part of global delivery
  • Get paid for what you do, not for where you live goes global, with business model and business culture implications
  • Software developers defecting to TikTok challenge IT services vendors’ talent models

 

Download a free copy of TBR’s Top 3 Predictions for Global Delivery in 2022

Telecom Business Research’s 2022 Predictions is a special series examining market trends and business changes in key markets. Covered segments include cloud, telecom, devices, data center, and services & digital.