TBR Weekly Preview: April 1-5

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As we start into the second quarter, we will be examining companies’ 1Q19 earnings as they release. For this week, look for more benchmarks and special reports.  

Friday

  • In our quarterly Healthcare IT Services Benchmark, we note that healthcare IT services vendors are finding it increasing difficult to scale revenues from existing provider clients simply on the coattails of prior health IT investments. Not only have health systems adopted a more judicious approach to their IT budgeting, but the burden is increasing on health IT vendors to deliver maximum ROI with every engagement. Pockets of growth do exist and new ones are emerging, even as the overall trend in health IT spend moderates. The benchmark scenario points out that the ground continues to shift beneath the feet of both health plans and their IT services vendors alike as digitization takes hold, mHealth tools are employed by increasingly tech-savvy health plan members, and the insights from data analytics become the new currency.
  • TBR’s 4Q18 Data Center Benchmark highlights the performance of key players in the data center infrastructure market. In our 4Q18 PowerPoint and Excel report bundle, technology spotlights include some recent developments in the quantum computing and high-performance computing spaces that will impact, whether directly or indirectly, the data center market landscape in the coming years. Additional highlights include the impact of the newly launched Lenovo-NetApp joint venture in China, the IBM Z product cycle, and the growing implications of political tensions on data center vendors’ financial performance. (Contact Stephanie Long for more analysis.)

If you missed the Accenture initial report from last week, see the TBR website.

Channel partner ecosystems evolve to support digital disruption

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Over the past several months, TBR has seen increased activity and interest around the topic of channel and alliance strategy across our 12 ICT industry coverage domains. While channel and alliance strategy is a pervasive topic, the intensity and tenor of the questions posed recently signal an increased focus around deploying industry-leading partnering strategies to pursue long-term growth.

Some of the common recent questions we’ve fielded from our clients include:

  • We’ve been partnering with global systems integrators (GSIs) for years, but our relationship in this emerging technology or service area is new. What is the right engagement model for this new area? What revenues can we expect? How do we establish a stronger relationship than our peers?
  • Our competition in this new portfolio area has stronger relationships than we do. How do we develop programs, incentives and recruitment strategies to secure partner engagement?
  • What are the right partners to engage with to achieve our objectives in this area? What type of programs, engagement models, incentives, benefits and management structure will resonate with those partners?

While these questions themselves aren’t entirely new territory, the systemic market forces that underpin them are certainly disruptive to partnering models for many ICT providers. The quote below, from TBR’s 1H18 Cloud Applications Customer Research, speaks to how the economics of cloud and digital IT consumption impacts the role of the services partner in applications deployment:

“Partners are still an integral part of almost every deal we do, but most deployments are no longer $10 million to $20 million to get it installed — now [it’s] just about $1 million. Many companies have shrunk their IT departments over time because of cloud, leading to skills gaps, so partners are so important.”

— Senior Director of Procurement, Telecommunications

Partners will continue to fill a critical role for enterprise customers and, by proxy, leading technology companies, but digital disruption will continue to shift how vendors think about partner roles. A few ways we are seeing technology disruption impact vendors’ partner programs and strategies include:

  • Self-developing Partner Ecosystems: Firms are creating formal programs and incentives to encourage partner-to-partner relationship development and joint go-to-market activity (i.e., a marketplace ISV engaging with a reseller to jointly support a customer).
  • Partner Stickiness and Specialization: Leaders use partners as a conduit to specialize by industry, use case or region, and are encouraging partners to expand portfolios and enhance industry and/or solution specialization (i.e., cross-training ISV partners as implementers in an industry).
  • Partner Journeys: Vendors are reconsidering traditional partner tier structures and aligning program tier requirements and benefits to reclassify partners around long-term value opportunity versus purely revenue generation.

I’ll be conducting a webinar on Wednesday, April 17 at 1 p.m. EDT that will dive into these trends and others in greater detail. Click here to register for the webinar. For questions on this or anything else, you can contact me at [email protected].

TBR Weekly Preview: March 25-29

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We’re in a slower earnings period, which means fewer vendor-centric reports and more benchmarks and market landscapes. And at the end of the week, Accenture gets the early jump on 1Q19, as we analyze the company’s cloud-centric portfolio and overall performance.

Thursday

  • Accenture will kick off the 1Q19 earnings season for services companies. While we expect Accenture’s revenue growth to taper compared to the company’s year-ago performance, investments in platforms such as SynOps, which addresses key pain points such as augmentation of human labor through automation across IT operations processes, strengthen the company’s position for long-term digital transformation opportunities. Additionally, we continue to closely monitor Accenture’s relationship with its Big Six partners, such as the recent launch of Accenture Microsoft Business Group (AMBG). While AMBG is a natural extension of the relationship between Accenture and Microsoft, it raises questions about the future of Avanade. (See Boz Hristov for additional details on Accenture.)
  • In TBR’s 4Q18 Devices and Platforms Benchmark, we found that total benchmarked revenue declined 2.4% year-to-year to $142.6 billion as the device market ran up against global economic challenges, increased device saturation, and reduced consolidation opportunities. The biggest driver of devices revenue decline was sluggish sales for legacy smartphone vendors Apple and Samsung as the Western premium market becomes saturated and device life cycles lengthen. Outside Western markets, legacy smartphone vendors are being pressured by aggressive, more recent market entrants such as Huawei and OPPO, which are eroding share by offering aggressively priced midrange devices with premium features. Outside smartphones, the PC market grew despite silicon shortages. However, TBR predicts the Windows 10 refresh opportunity will begin to wane as PC vendors exhaust worldwide opportunities. Read more about the smartphone, PC, tablet and smart device markets, as well as the impacts of platform and solution trends, such as DaaS, in our full report. (See Dan Callahan for more.)

Friday

  • TBR’s Accenture Cloud report will highlight Accenture’s evolution around key investment initiatives such as Journey to Cloud, as well as the company’s managed services positioning within the infrastructure management domain. Additionally, we continue to asses Accenture’s relationships with cloud buyers through the use of standardized, price-competitive offerings supported by highly specialized and certified talent.
  • This month’s Digital Transformation Insights report focuses on two leading vendors, Accenture and IBM. Using TBR’s extensive coverage of these companies across IT services, management consulting, cloud, software, IoT, and even telecom, we stand these companies side-by-side to examine their financial performances, strategies, investments and approaches to the digital transformation market.

Once again, we have multiple TBR analysts traveling this week, so expect special reports on PwC and Accenture as early as next week.

Pivoting to industry offerings and managing disruption: Not everyone can keep pace

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Over the last two weeks, TBR has spent time with three leading IT services and consulting vendors, discussing their strategies for evolving digital transformation and hearing from their clients about what has worked and where frustrations remain. Two common themes came out of these discussions: industry-specific offerings and market disruption.

While we’ve frequently commented on the industry-centric culture and mindset of some leading IT services vendors and consultancies, we’ve typically seen their partnerships with technology vendors revolve more around horizontal solutions and emerging tech capabilities. One substantial shift of late has been a new focus on coinnovating, developing, and taking to market offerings and solutions designed specifically for industries, or even subverticals within an industry. This isn’t completely new, although the emphasis may be, and a sustained investment would solidify this trend. But the real implications, we think, will come for the IT services vendors amid their pivot to an industry focus. One of the leading vendors, a company as deeply ingrained with industry expertise as any of the Big Four firms, discussed its plans to roll out new industry-specific offerings with a leading software provider, noting that the companies together chose industries best suited to match their combined strengths. In contrast, we understand other large IT services vendors continue to struggle in pivoting to an industry-centric organization (never mind an industry-expertise culture). If these large vendors cannot identify their strengths and opportunities as well as their best-match software partners, they’ll fail to differentiate as the market moves to industry-centric digital transformations.

The second theme, disruption, is something that everyone is talking about. No analyst event, client meeting, or tour of an innovation, immersion or experience center passes without the discussion turning to how disruption in the market forces quicker decision making and faster actions. What emerged during my discussions with all three vendors these past two weeks was the clear distinction between internal and external disruption and the role an IT services vendor or consultancy can play in assuaging one and stoking the other. Clients spoke at length about the role their IT adviser played in ensuring core systems and operations would not be disrupted, even as the enterprise itself, including IT, went through a digital transformation. The three companies we met with described their role in providing trust, assurance, hyper-care attention to issues and problems, and everything from the road map to the running-at-speed implementation for clients both ready to change and nervous about the risks involved. Clients also expressed their fears of external disruption from traditional and nontraditional competitors, technology partners unable to deliver, and market forces moving faster than their systems can manage. While IT services vendors and consultancies haven’t created these fears, TBR can appreciate that a little uncertainty isn’t such a bad thing.

We will explore both issues in greater detail in our upcoming Management Consulting Benchmark as well as in the monthly deliverables in our Digital Transformation Insights portfolio. Stayed tuned.        

TBR Weekly Preview: March 18-22

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In addition to this week’s vendor analysis, TBR Senior Analyst John Caucis will host a webinar Wednesday, March 20, sharing his insights on the state of the healthcare IT services market and the 2019 HIMSS mega-event. 

Furthermore, TBR analysts will be attending several events this week, so be on the lookout for special reports on Accenture, SAP and Oracle as early as next week.

Monday

  • Despite its top-tier innovation and optimistic messaging, Oracle struggles to find incremental growth outside its cloud ERP portfolio. While traction around autonomous database builds, these ERP inroads present an opportunity for Oracle to more effectively craft a story across its integrated cloud applications and platform capabilities. TBR’s initial findings can be accessed today, but read more on the subject in our 1Q19 Oracle Cloud full report publishing in April. (Meaghan McGrath leads TBR’s analysis of Oracle.)

Wednesday

  • HP Inc. delivered corporate growth of 1.3% year-to-year, a significant slowdown after five quarters of double-digit growth. During the company’s 4Q18 earnings call, executives discussed challenges within HP Inc.’s profitable print supplies business, but slowed growth in its commercial printing and overall PC businesses indicates the problem is broader. Slowing consolidation opportunities and rising opposition from its peers in the PC market will increasingly challenge HP Inc., whose PC business composes most of its top line. In addition, the CPU shortage has been more impactful to HP Inc.’s wider portfolio. Read our full report to find how HP Inc. will navigate these challenges throughout 2019, including growing its Device as a Service portfolio and supporting its sales channels to build a bulwark for upcoming PC share wars. (See Dan Callahan for more analysis.)

Thursday

  • According to TBR estimates, Dell Technologies achieved $23.8 billion in revenue, up 8.6% year-to-year in 4Q18. Gross profit increased 20.7% year-to-year, highlighting Dell Technologies’ successful improvement in overall profitability. In TBR’s 4Q18 full report on the company, we will dive into the performance of key business units. Within Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), TBR believes aggressive market share expansion in both servers and storage will be a key focus for at least the first half of 2019, which will result in investments in direct sales, ISG’s channel partner program and portfolio enhancements. In Client Solutions Group, Dell Technologies will continue to benefit from shrinking memory prices as well as the CPU shortages, which will drive profitability up during 2019. From a corporate perspective, 2019 will see tightened integration between the vendor’s strategically aligned companies. (See Stephanie Long for more analysis.)
  • In this quarter’s analysis of Dell EMC Services, TBR will highlight how Dell Technologies integrating preconfigured services solutions around core infrastructure technology competencies enables Dell EMC Services to attach profitable and recurring services revenue streams. (Kevin Collupy leads TBR’s analysis of Dell EMC Services.)
  • In 4Q18 Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) reported corporate revenue of $7.6 billion, down 1.6% year-to-year. TBR estimates total cloud revenue reached $1.9 billion, up 3.1% year-to-year, as HPE continued to invest in its cloud portfolio and capitalize on customer demand for hybrid IT solutions. HPE’s leaner business and ongoing restructuring efforts through HPE Next allow HPE Cloud to focus on and invest further in its core areas of strength, namely hybrid infrastructure and edge computing for IoT and telecommunications use cases. (Cassandra Mooshian leads TBR’s coverage of HPE Cloud.)
  • VMware’s top-line growth continues to outpace that of its software peers in TBR’s Infrastructure Management Software Vendor Benchmark. In 4Q18 VMware experienced its strongest quarter since 3Q14, with revenue growth of 16.4% year-to-year to $2.6. Revenue growth was buoyed by strong adoption across VMware’s emerging product lines, with vSAN revenue growing 60% year-to-year and Hybrid Cloud and SaaS revenue growing 35% in the same time period. Further, the company is successfully packaging solutions around hybrid management to increase deal sizes and reported a company-record 23 deals in excess of $10 million during the quarter. (Cassandra Mooshian leads TBR’s coverage of VMware.)
  • Huawei is taking a prominent role in setting standards for 5G and launching solutions to help operators implement 5G services, which has led to key early commercial 5G-related contracts in EMEA and APAC. While security concerns around 5G will persist, Huawei will continue to grow revenue in 2019 largely due to its Consumer and Enterprise business units, which are taking share from incumbents.(Michael Soper leads TBR’s coverage of Huawei.)

Friday

  • According to TBR’s 1Q19 Telecom IoT Market Landscape, TBR estimates global communication service provider (CSP) IoT revenue rose 25.6% year-to-year to $22.3 billion in 2018. Despite sustaining strong revenue growth, TBR estimates global CSP IoT revenue accounted for only 1% of consolidated global CSP revenue in 2018, which is insufficient for most service providers to offset erosion within challenged segments such as legacy network services. To maximize IoT revenue opportunities long term, CSPs are focusing on attracting customers by implementing more cost-efficient network technologies such as NB-IoT and LTE-M, targeting high-value contracts in areas such as smart cities and healthcare, and by positioning to support next-generation IoT solutions integrating technologies such as 5G and edge computing. (Steve Vachon is TBR’s lead analyst covering the Telecom IoT space.)

IBM makes major strides in quantum with Volume and AI

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  • IBM Quantum Volume creates a new way to assess a quantum computer’s capabilities as a whole system, rather than just based on its number of qubits.
  • IBM unveils research into the intersection between quantum computing and machine learning.

IBM, ever present in the development of cutting-edge technology, is a leader in the quantum computing space and brought its IBM Q System One to market in January. This came after the company provided access to three of its quantum systems through the cloud. TBR notes that providing access to actual quantum systems, and not simply quantum simulators via the cloud, differentiates IBM’s capabilities from those of peers. Currently, a key purpose of providing access to these quantum systems through the cloud is education. IBM is learning from past challenges by getting out ahead of innovation and making internal and external learning and development a priority. This will ensure that trained internal personnel are in place once IBM Q achieves commercial application and research viability as well as help accelerate the rise of IBM Q by educating those outside IBM who might be involved in developing technological advancements, at least at the algorithmic level.

Quantum Volume assesses quantum capability of a whole quantum system

IBM unveiled Quantum Volume, which is a way to measure the capabilities of an entire quantum system, including qubits, software and overall functionality. IBM aptly demonstrated the value in measuring the functionality of a quantum system by more than just the number of qubits. Qubits are very complex, and factors including the quality of the qubit and the impact of unwelcome external stimuli need to be assessed as qubits are highly sensitive to environmental influences.

Aspects such as gates, connectivity, algorithm errors and compilers are all assessed by Quantum Volume. The capability of the computer is then determined, and it is categorized with a number, which serves as a rating of sorts. This rating is a key to the entire quantum computing market, TBR believes, because it provides a relatively unbiased way to measure the capability of a quantum computer. The current process, in which the number of qubits is used to measure capability, omits essential factors.

More significantly, IBM contends it has discovered a metric for quantum advancements comparable to Moore’s Law for classical computing advancements. Given quantum computing will be adopted essentially algorithm by algorithm, this new metric could help guide the broader user community about when a given algorithm will be ready to move to quantum computing based on the advancements in the technology and the complexities of the algorithm in question. This information can then be used to optimize the deployment layer based on mapping the algorithm to the known performance of the different qubits within the systems.

IBM evaluates the parallels between quantum computing and machine learning

IBM published some of its research, in which it evaluated the applications of quantum computing in conjunction with AI and machine learning to address additional emerging demands. Further details regarding this research can be found in an article published in Nature titled, Supervised learning with quantum—enhanced feature spaces. At its core, AI is simply the evaluation and analysis of massive data volumes that help train a system. In classical computing this process can be time-consuming, but when digital transformation is added to market offerings such as connected cars, time is of the essence and cannot be squandered performing these types of tasks. Quantum computing would not only reduce time to insight but also improve the accuracy of the insights gathered.

Quantum computers can analyze and evaluate data much faster than a classical computer and can also process more complex data sets. These increased levels of speed and complexity will enable machine learning to be more insightful and, therefore, more applicable to more complicated use cases. Key use cases that IBM highlighted for these capabilities initially are model training, pattern recognition and fraud detection. These use cases are fundamental to a connected world, where bad actors would have the potential to cause great harm if they tamper with systems, as would machine malfunctions. If data can be evaluated and extrapolated into real-time applications faster, the potential dangers of an increasingly connected world can be mitigated more quickly.

The market implications of quantum developments are vast and will be rapid

Although individually these announcements may seem small in the scheme of quantum computing, when combined with IBM’s existing breakthroughs in the technology, they demonstrate the breadth of the market IBM’s quantum capabilities will be able to impact once quantum advantage is achieved. Quantum Volume enables IBM to determine use-case efficiencies for quantum computers once commercial availability is attainable. The ability to combine the capabilities of quantum computing with AI will accelerate digital transformation dramatically and launch society into the next technological revolution much faster, as more rapid time to insight will open new avenues of exploration.

Genpact adapts its service delivery model to help customers succeed with their digital transformations

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Internal shift positions Genpact to capture digital demand

Genpact hosted approximately 50 analysts on March 13 in Boston’s Seaport district to provide an update on its business and transition to the digital age. Additionally, the company highlighted its service design capabilities and how it’s differentiating from peers. Genpact continually invests in its business and delivery model to align with changing client demand for emerging technologies, such as IoT, digital and cloud, and has initiated its fourth major companywide evolution in the last 20-plus years, this time to embrace digital. Building out AI and automation-enabled services strengthens Genpact’s core capabilities around business process services with an outcome-based approach, to provide clients with the tools and technology necessary to streamline and automate lower-value tasks. Genpact’s approach to digital transforms clients’ traditional workflows to address their challenges. This approach includes identifying digital tools and technologies that allow clients to improve operations and customer satisfaction by eliminating pain points and bottlenecks associated with manual tasks.

During its presentation, Genpact noted that less than 50% of its approximately 98,000 employees are based in India. Building talent throughout the U.S., Australia, LATAM and Europe increases Genpact’s client touchpoints and enables it to work more closely with clients around transformation and drive business value and insights for clients. Also, the expanded global client base improves Genpact’s position as a global professional services vendor and helps the company move beyond the perception of being a low-cost BPO provider.

Three years later: PwC’s Miami Experience Center led the way

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Three years ago, almost to the day, we went to Miami and saw something truly new, an “Experience Center” that PwC built to physically embody its emerging idea of coalescing consulting engagements around business, experience and technology. Saying we were impressed would be an understatement. Here’s what we said in our March 2016 special report on PwC Digital Analyst Day: “In addition to obtaining the right people and managing them well … the firm built an innovative office for the Experience Center team. PwC leadership explained the office design fosters collaboration, sparks creativity, celebrates success yet encourages failures along the way and upholds the firm’s values all in a comfortable environment — so comfortable that leadership hopes employees are more comfortable at work than they are at their own homes.”

Since that March 2016 visit, we’ve been to PwC Experience Centers in Frankfurt, Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo and Toronto. And with every visit, we have chronicled the way PwC’s BXT framework has evolved, leading to our assessment that PwC has stopped playing “consulting roulette” as “BXT evolves from grand idea to engaged approach.”

We haven’t just visited PwC’s digital transformation immersion innovation centers over the last few years; we’ve visited centers with SAP, Accenture, EY, Capgemini, Atos, NTT and IBM. We’ve noted similarities and huge differences, as well as shared unknowns, like how to best determine the value these centers bring the consultancies and their clients. We continue working to understand the three pillars of these centers — clients, talent and partners — plus all the small-but-critical elements that make the differences between success and average vanilla “blah.” We’ve spent a tremendous amount of time discussing leadership, for example, and the impact on talent, culture and clients.

One more quote from three years ago, because this one jumped off the page, knowing what we know now: “By operating on a more global level, evidenced by its employees being encouraged to connect with their colleagues to bring alternative perspectives to address clients’ specific business needs, the firm works smarter. PwC shares success stories across its Experience Centers, slightly varies the talent mix at each center, and encourages mobility between the centers to further diversify the teams.” 

We’ve met PwC folks who’ve migrated from Miami to other Experience Centers, bringing that special sauce with them, and suspect this approach will be replicated by PwC’s peers as they continue building out their own cadre of experience-innovation-immersion-digital transformation center professionals.

TBR Weekly Preview: March 11-15

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We’re going all over the technology space this week, with reports spanning U.S. federal government IT services to long-established hardware and data center providers, plus a couple of European-centric companies.

Wednesday:

  • Talent continues to be the constraining factor on ManTech’s bright revenue growth outlook. Focus in defense and intelligence segments of the U.S. federal market on innovation creates healthy demand for ManTech’s labor-based technical services offerings, such as R&D, testing and evaluation of emerging technology. As a smaller competitor compared to many of its large prime peers in the federal sector, ManTech acutely feels the resource impacts of the security clearance backlog and overall tight labor market. TBR’s 4Q18 ManTech report, written by Senior Analyst Joey Cresta, will explore how ManTech uses adaptive learning, continuous monitoring software and new leadership hires to address the human capital challenges associated with scaling up its labor base to meet robust client demand.

Thursday:

  • As detailed in our initial response, Lenovo achieved its sixth consecutive quarter of year-to-year revenue gains, reporting $14 billion in revenue in 4Q18, up 8.5% from the year-ago compare, even as consolidation opportunities cool in the PC market. Despite these high notes for Lenovo exiting 2018, the company will still face hurdles over the next two years. Its PC and Smart Devices businesses will have to deal with challenging and shifting PC environments. Data Center Group continues to deliver on its promises, but it remains in the red despite improvements to its bottom line. Lenovo’s Mobile business is still teetering in profitability. Read our full report by Analyst Dan Callahan to find how Lenovo will navigate these challenges and tee up for a seventh consecutive quarter of revenue growth in 1Q19. 
  • Our detailed assessment of Atos will note that the company’s Digital Transformation Factory portfolio accounted for 30% of revenue in 2018, up from 23% of revenue in 2017, positively affected by increased activities with clients in areas such as orchestrated hybrid cloud, Digital Workplace and cybersecurity. As Senior Analyst Elitsa Bakalova will report, Atos’ efforts to position as a trusted partner for clients’ digital journeys are starting to pay off, and the new digital services strategy will shape the company’s activities over the next three years.
  • As reported in our initial response, Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) revenue fell 1.6% year-to-year to $7.6 billion. While revenue growth is always a goal, TBR believes HPE is more focused on improving profitability in the near term before it shifts to boosting revenue growth. In our full report Analyst Stephanie Long will dive into the long-term strategy of CEO Antonio Neri and how it will impact 2019. Key cost-cutting initiatives and strategic investments, such as in high-performance computing and the edge, will be likely highlights in 2019.
  • Analyst Kelly Lesiczka will be reporting that T-Systems’ portfolio and organizational investments continue to improve its ability to gain wallet share in newer areas and stabilize revenue growth in 2018. Building out its emerging technology portfolio offerings, such as for IoT using DT’s product offerings, enables T-Systems to provide more comprehensive and personalized solutions to clients and generate larger-scale engagements to accelerate growth.

As promised, we published a new report last week by Senior Analyst Boz Hristov on Accenture Technology, and today published a report on TELUS International from Boz as well as a report on Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2019 by Principal Analyst Chris Antlitz.

While we do not have a webinar scheduled for this Wednesday, the next one will be on March 20 featuring Senior Analyst John Caucis talking about healthcare IT services.

TBR Weekly Preview: March 4-8

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As we start winding down beginning-of-the-year earnings calls, here’s what you can expect from the TBR team this week:

Tuesday:

  • In 3Q18 TBR noted Salesforce built on its industry-specific strategies by releasing Financial Services Cloud for retail banking and by expanding its target audience for Education Cloud. Salesforce’s ongoing innovation to address vertical use cases and ability to understand customers’ business needs enabled the vendor to execute multiproduct deals in 4Q18. TBR expects Salesforce will close 4Q18 with $12.2 billion in annual revenue, keeping the vendor on track to attain its $21 billion to $23 billion annual revenue goal in 2021. (See Jack McElwee for more analysis.)
  • Google Cloud’s hiring of Thomas Kurian as CEO (replacing Diane Greene) is meant to attract enterprise customers and facilitate stronger competition at scale with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft; Kurian, former Oracle president of Product Development, brings deep understanding and detailed messaging on the technical and business impacts of cloud. TBR’s 4Q18 report will detail Google Cloud’s continued innovation among its core AI and ML portfolios while partnering and leveraging Kurian’s clout to gain enterprise mindshare, which will be increasingly critical to long-term success. (For everything Google and cloud, see Cassandra Mooshian.)

Thursday:

  • Cisco continues to grow revenue as it transforms itself through acquisitions, divestments and new product releases that enable the company to reduce its reliance on hardware — a commoditizing market — and embrace software. TBR’s 4Q18 Cisco report will include deep dives on Cisco’s most recent acquisitions, including Luxtera, which will help Cisco attract more webscale spend and improve the performance of its proprietary-based solutions, as well as Ensoft and Singularity Networks, which will broaden Cisco’s software capabilities in the service provider space. (Mike Soper leads TBR’s analysis on Cisco.)
  • TBR will also report on Cisco Services and the company’s expansion around software and next-generation solutions, which has created advisory and implementation opportunities that enabled Cisco Services to accelerate growth in 2018. An increase in software-related services as well as adoption of next-generation secure and intelligent platforms and products that support clients’ digital business will create attached services opportunities for Cisco Services, driving revenue expansion throughout 2019. (For more on Cisco Services, see Kelly Lesiczka.)
  • TBR’s latest report on Perspecta will provide an update on how the fledgling company is managing the task of integrating three legacy organizations into a unified whole. In past reports, we have talked about how the company’s innovation incubator, Perspecta Labs, underpins its long-term position in the federal services landscape. Our 4Q18 Perspecta report will dive more deeply into how the company introduces Perspecta Labs to its biggest client, the U.S. Navy, in advance of the recompete of Perspecta’s largest contract, which entails managing the Navy Next Generation Enterprise Network. (Joey Cresta heads up TBR’s Public Sector practice.)
  • As reported in our initial response, NetApp earned $1.6 billion in revenue in 4Q18, representing a 1.6% year-to-year increase. Strong 1H18 revenue momentum enabled the vendor to achieve solid year-to-year revenue growth for 2018, demonstrating the success of some of NetApp’s strategic moves during the year. Our full report will dive into the 2018 establishment of a cloud infrastructure business unit that will enable NetApp to pivot its portfolio further in 2019, as the company, one of the few major pure play storage vendors left in the market, transforms itself to establish its brand as one that enables customers’ digital transformations. (See Stephanie Long for more analysis.)

Friday:

  • Utilizing its technology expertise and ability to address clients’ business challenges, Capgemini reached its 2018 revenue growth and profitability goals and is confidently moving into 2019. Capgemini’s bookings reached their highest level since 1Q17 in 4Q18. In the latest full report, TBR will note how the increase in bookings, combined with Capgemini’s unified go-to-market approach; enhanced offerings around digital, cloud and industry-specific solutions; and reinforced expertise via training and reskilling, will enable the company to sustain revenue growth. (Elitsa Bakalova covers Capgemini for TBR.)

Be on the lookout for additional analysis from TBR, including assessments of Accenture Technology and TELUS International. TBR’s next webinar will be held March 20 and feature Senior Analyst John Caucis talking about healthcare IT services.