We recently talked to Testbirds, the largest Europe-headquartered crowdtesting firm, founded in 2012. We found Testbirds upbeat after the pandemic. The company had an excellent year in 2020, achieving revenue growth of 30% as organizations, challenged by closed offices, turned to Testbirds to conduct crowdtesting of their digital initiatives. This was followed by another excellent ye[...]

  The pandemic stress-tested many supply chains beyond previous expectations, identifying and magnifying any process shortfalls. The current economic downturn and additional disruption of supply chains by geopolitical factors have further exacerbated the difficulties enterprises face in their day-to-day supply chain management. Accordingly, enterprises are typically seeking increase[...]

  Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) has become an important focus for HR in recent years and is increasingly part of organizations’ core business strategy. This blog takes an in-depth look at ADP’s current DE&I strategies, both internally and as relates to its client service and offerings. ADP’s Corporate Social Responsibility ADP currently has ~6[...]

  We recently talked to Cigniti about its digital ambitions and its acquisition of RoundSqr. While remaining focused on quality engineering, Cigniti has quietly expanded its capabilities to RPA over the past three years. This extension is logical: RPA shares much with testing, relying on creating and maintaining bots or test scripts. This is the start: Cigniti has broad ‘digit[...]

ESG is a hot, but poorly defined, topic. Many firms and investors have started ESG programs, but recent allegations of “greenwashing” and ineffectiveness have undermined confidence in them. So, what are the components of an effective ESG program? ESG is a wide set of dissimilar goals (e.g., carbon emissions reduction is very different than social inclusion). By focusing deeply[...]

  NelsonHall recently completed an in-depth analysis of end-to-end cloud infrastructure management services, in which we spoke to multiple leading IT services vendors and their clients. This blog looks at some of the key themes from this research, the investments vendors need to make to meet client demand, and how the market will evolve over the next 12 to 18 months. There is an inc[...]

  We recently talked to Qualitest regarding its acquisition of ZenQ. ZenQ is the latest in a series of recent acquisitions by Qualitest, under the ownership of PE BridgePoint. The company acquired four firms in 2021: QA InfoTech (QAIT) in Bangalore, doubling Qualitest’s presence in India Olenick in the U.S. Telexiom in Germany Comply, an Israeli company that added [...]

  Capgemini has launched a new digital transformation service, One Operations, with the specific goal of driving client revenue growth. One Operations: Key Principles Some of One Operations’ principles, such as introducing benchmark-driven best practice operations models, taking an end-to-end approach to operations across silos, and using co-invested innovation funds, are r[...]

  Analytics has often been run as a series of periodic and siloed exercises. However, to respond to their customers in the smartest, fastest, most efficient manner, WNS perceives that organizations increasingly need to run their analytics always-on, in almost real-time, and on an enterprise rather than siloed basis. To do this and become ‘insights-led enterprises’, organiza[...]

  There is a big divide between IT sustainability and quality engineering (QE). In IT, sustainability is emerging from a carbon emission niche, expanding from a consulting to an execution phase. In QE, the focus remains primarily on functional automation with continuous testing/DevOps and AI as primary drivers. In short, the two have little in common. As such, we had not anticipated[...]

  I recently attended the EY Managed Services Analyst Summit. EY’s managed services business just finished a gangbuster year, growing 30% over the prior year, with some sub-segments growing at rates up to 150% y/y. Managed services is EY’s fastest growing line of business, justifying EY’s 12-year-long commitment to this business. Here I look at EY’s managed serv[...]

  NTT DATA recently announced the long-planned merger of its international business with NTT Ltd., the overseas ICT unit of Japanese telecoms giant NTT. The combined NTT DATA and NTT Ltd. will have revenues of ¥3.5tn (~$26.2bn) and 180k personnel. With this move, NTT unites its two ICT units into a single entity, driving its vision of One NTT. The merger will remove some overlap[...]

  On June 14, 2022, Atos announced the unexpected separation of its IT infrastructure services unit, Tech Foundation, from its BDS and Digital units. With this move, Atos has aggregated its high-growth and high-profitability units into a new company, Evidian. Its infrastructure services capabilities will stay in legacy Atos, with the objective of stopping the revenue decline and improv[...]

  Machine translation has been one of the fastest developing areas of AI in the last five years and has quickly become a target investment for CX services players. As the technology evolves from statistical analysis to the use of neural networks, CX services companies start to benefit at scale. Webhelp has been active in the space for several years, initially through partnerships with [...]

  NelsonHall recently attended Unisys’ Analyst and Advisor Event 2022 in Boston, MA. As IRL meetings and events begin to resume, it was great to engage with Unisys executives face-to-face once more. The $1.2bn sale of its Federal business to SAIC back in February 2020 is being partly used to fund acquisitions and portfolio investments for Unisys’ digital workplace and cl[...]

  Following a year in development, IBM’s Talent Transformation division and EY’s Organization & Workforce, Mobility, Payroll Operate and HR Transformation division have announced a strategic alliance. The alliance enables the two organizations to co-create talent solutions and offers a new Center of Excellence for Talent, which could be a game-changer in terms of the HR[...]

  The war in Ukraine has brought EPAM Systems (EPAM) under the spotlight. Although headquartered in Newton, PA, EPAM has a delivery network heavy in Central and Eastern Europe. It was founded in 1993 in New Jersey and specializes in service development, digital platform engineering, digital product design, and custom software. However, with its first offshore development center opening[...]

  NelsonHall recently attended the ‘Infosys Cobalt World Tour’ conference in New York and, as the world begins to open up again, it was great to engage with Infosys executives face-to-face. Infosys presented its Cobalt Cloud strategy and use cases to increase awareness of the benefits to the marketplace and highlighted that its cloud approach is focused on achieving busi[...]

  There is history behind this merger. Known as India’s first hostile takeover bid in the IT sector, Larsen & Toubro (L&T) acquired a 60% stake in Mindtree in July 2019, despite the opposition of Mindtree’s founders and board members. LTIMindtree will be the sixth largest India-headquartered IT services vendor Since then, a merger of both these firms has [...]

  The world of quality assurance (QA) is continually evolving, alternating between cycles of centralization and decentralization. QA became part of testing CoEs in the 2000s, driving process standardization, test coverage and automation. More recently, in its latest organizational model, it has become part of the agile development structure and is spread across agile projects. Quality [...]