Sitel’s announcement on 18 June to enter an agreement to acquire all outstanding shares of SYKES stock further consolidates the global CX services leaders. It also highlights the market shift to large-scale, multinational, and financially strong players able to make the needed investments in consulting, CX technology, and automation. Here is a short analysis of the deal. The[...]

  The last two years have challenged employees and HR teams in ways we could never have imagined, and many now have a new outlook on what “work-life balance” means. 2020 and 2021 have seen heightened resignation levels, and companies are only now starting to reflect on the impact of burnout on their employees. While vaccines are being rolled out, and with the threat of loca[...]

  Banks are accelerating their move to the cloud to respond to the pandemic, enable greater operational agility to reduce time to market, and develop open banking capabilities. At the same time, performance dispersion (the operational variance across institutions within the industry) has increased significantly. Cloud delivery can change operational performance and hyperscale busine[...]

  We recently talked to Infosys Validation Solutions (IVS), Infosys’ quality assurance unit, and discussed its continued investment in AI to automate testing and validate chatbots and AI models. AI-Based Analytics from Test Case and Defect Data The primary AI use cases in QA are around analytics: QA and development produce a vast amount of data that can be used for guiding [...]

  One of the impacts of the pandemic has been a broad acceleration in enterprise digitalization initiatives, and organizations are looking for strategic partners to assist them in their digital transformation journeys. While digitalization is now top of mind even in procurement, historically there have been challenges in applying intelligent automation to procurement, including budget [...]

  While the CX services industry is anxiously following the situation in India and its surge of COVID-19 cases, the start of 2021 mainly brought positive news. In this blog, I look at the strong performance across the industry and the extent to which the current growth is sustainable. 2021’s record start The three months ending 31st March 2021 was a record quarter for many [...]

  IBM recently announced its acquisition of Salesforce Platinum Consulting partner, Waeg. The company, whose name means “wave” in old English, expands IBM’s Salesforce service presence in Europe and is IBM GBS’ second Salesforce services acquisition in 2021, following 7Summits in the U.S. It is also GBS’ fifth acquisition since IBM announced the intended s[...]

  The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital transformation across all industries, and in the financial sector, operational transformation has grabbed the top spot in the priority list for investment and spending. At the same time, performance dispersion (the variance across institutions within the industry) has significantly increased. So, how can banks make their transfo[...]

  2020 further accelerated transformative trends in the mobility space. Changes include electric vehicle adoption and the shift to mobility as a service and mobility on demand. Auto manufacturers, car rental firms, ridesharing providers, and public transport operations are all responding to this new market and, in support, the underlying model is changing from product to service to cus[...]

  Coforge, the former NIIT Technologies, recently briefed NelsonHall about its Salesforce capabilities. In 2019, the company acquired Whishworks, which became the foundation of its Salesforce activities. Whishworks, one of MuleSoft’s top five strategic partners globally, services clients across sectors, with BFSI being its most significant target market. London-headquartered W[...]

  The value of automation using tools such as RPA, and more recently intelligent automation, has been accepted for years. However, there is still a danger in many automation projects that while each project is valuable in its own right, they become disconnected islands of automation with limited connectivity and lifespans. Accordingly, while elements of process friction have been remov[...]

  This is the final part of a three-part blog series covering my perspectives on the payroll market based on NelsonHall’s latest annual market analysis, Payroll Services: Globalization and Digitalization. Part One features the payroll buyer perspective, with Part Two looking at the managed payroll service providers currently pushing the pace of innovation. Here I focus on the out[...]

This is Part Two of a three-part blog series covering my perspectives on the payroll market based on NelsonHall’s latest annual market analysis, Payroll Services: Globalization and Digitalization. Part One features the payroll buyer perspective, including the buyer view of the impact of innovation available today. In this part, I look at the managed payroll service providers currently pu[...]

  NelsonHall recently published a market assessment and forecast report on Intelligent Automation in Banking: Transforming Operations. We found that financial institutions must automate their operations if they are to compete successfully in a rapidly evolving marketplace. Currently, they operate with manual processes using a heterogeneous set of platforms, acquired over many years of [...]

NelsonHall has published its annual payroll services market analysis, Payroll Services: Globalization and Digitalization. The report includes an analysis of two dozen payroll vendors, their offerings, and their buyers' perspectives. The project provided 'behind the curtain' access to many of the major payroll solutions enabling the market today and shaping its path forward. This[...]

  As we have previously written, cloud services overall are poised to be the fastest growing area of IT services in 2021. The changing nature of cloud adoption, from non-production and non-critical applications to core business applications means that SAP environments will be no exception. In our recently published SAP Cloud Migration Services market analysis, NelsonHall estimates d[...]

  In November 2020, Atos unveiled its strategy for OneCloud, which focuses on key partnerships with the hyperscalers, and also includes three ISVs: SAP, ServiceNow, and Salesforce. We recently talked to Atos' Salesforce practice to discuss its growth plans and recent acquisitions. Atos has been a long-standing SAP partner and recently reignited its Salesforce practice, making tw[...]

  Part 1 of this blog focused on Capgemini’s structured approach to workforce motivation and upskilling when transitioning to a Frictionless Enterprise that leverages a digitally augmented workforce. This second part looks at how, when adopting a digitally augmented workforce, it is critical to ensure optimized routing of incoming queries and transactions between humans and machi[...]

  This is Part 1 of a two-part blog looking at Capgemini’s Intelligent Process Automation practice. Here I examine Frictionless Enterprise, Capgemini’s framework for intelligent process automation that focuses on the adoption of a digitally augmented workforce. Digital transformation has been high on enterprise agendas for some years. However, COVID-19 has given the driv[...]

  We recently talked to IBM GBS regarding its acquisition of 7Summits. After years of limited GBS M&A activity, IBM has been increasing its investment level in this business. With the planned divestment of most of its GTS business, GBS is core to IBM Services. Since October 2020, GBS has made five transactions across cloud, payments, SAP, and Salesforce. The 7Summits acquisition[...]