NelsonHall recently talked with Eviden, Atos’ consulting and application services business, about its QE practice, Digital Assurance. Digital Assurance has 5k quality engineers, 65% offshore, reflecting a high leverage in North America (due to its Syntel heritage) counterbalanced by Atos’ large European public sector client base. The practice has aligned its service po[...]

  During the summer of 2023, we met with Mohammed Sijelmassi, Sopra Steria’s CTO and Digital Transformation Office head and discussed how Sopra Steria was deploying internally and helping clients externally with GenAI and LLMs. Earlier this month, we met with Mr. Sijelmassi again to assess Sopra Steria’s progress on its transformation, its work with clients, and use cases. [...]

  2023 was a year of disruption after the 2021-22 digital catch-up. As the year unfolded, IT services spending slowed down, initially in the U.S. in the financial services, telecom, and high-tech sectors. We expect 2024 to be a year of transition with a modest rebound in IT services spending, continued consulting interest in GenAI, a rebound in cloud infrastructure adoption after a [...]

  The CEO of Atos’ Tech Foundations business recently updated industry analysts on its transformation program. We have commented about the turbulent period Atos Group is going through in splitting into two businesses (Tech Foundations and Eviden). The planned sale of Tech Foundations to Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky’s EP Equity Investment (EPEI) vehicle is going ahe[...]

  NelsonHall recently wrote a PoV on the current disconnect between GDP growth and IT services spending[1]. In October 2023, the IMF refreshed its GDP growth predictions; these include better 2023 GDP growth in the U.S. (+2.1%) and Japan (+20%) than the U.K. (+0.5%) and the Eurozone (+0.7%). Unusually, the IMF's predictions are not in line with our observations of IT services spend[...]

  Sopra Steria is the latest vendor to announce a significant investment in GenAI/LLMs and its incorporation into its software engineering platform (Ingine). We recently met with Mohammed Sijelmassi, who holds two roles at Sopra Steria: CTO and Digital Transformation Office. We discussed how Sopra Steria is deploying internally and helping clients externally with GenAI and LLMs. [...]

  Cognizant's non-U.S. business, Cognizant Global Growth Markets (GGM), recently held an analyst and advisor day and discussed its regional priorities. New CEO Ravi Kumar has initiated a restructuring plan ('NextGen Program') to reduce Cognizant's cost base to fund investments. While Cognizant had guided on flat topline growth in 2023, Q1 saw a 9% y/y growth in LT[...]

  We recently talked with TCS’ Salesforce practice about its verticalization initiatives. Product verticalization has been one of Salesforce’s key strategies (along with Customer 360/cross-selling and geographic expansion) since 2014, when it launched its Industries business unit. Like SAP, Salesforce acknowledges that organizations spend time and effort customizing thei[...]

  Atos recently held its Capital Market Day for Tech Foundations. It is a year since the company announced its intention to spin off its high-growth units into a new company, Eviden, and keep its historic IT infrastructure services (and U.K. BPO capabilities) in an entity called Tech Foundations. Alongside the spin-off, Atos initiated a massive €1.1bn restructuring plan for Tech F[...]

  The IT services industry has entered a new growth cycle, with increased emphasis on portfolio management and vendors increasingly divesting their low-growth, low-margin businesses. IBM was an early example of this trend with its Kyndryl spin-off. Several of its competitors are also following this pattern, including Atos. At the same time, in the Nordics, Tietoevry will go one step[...]

  We recently talked to Qualitest about its latest acquisition, Q Analysts, its sixth since 2019. Qualitest has been on an accelerated transformation journey under the ownership of PE BridgePoint. Q Analysts further strengthens Qualitest’s capabilities in next-gen digital QA, with expertise in testing AI-based devices such as AR/VR/MR headsets and generating data for training AI [...]

  A New Focused Division  BT has announced the merger of its two ICT services units, Global and Enterprise, into a new division, BT Business. The new division will have pro-forma revenues of £8.5bn and an EBITDA of £2bn. The current CEO of Global will lead BT Business. With this move, BT wants to unify its B2B market and focus its capabilities on connectivity, u[...]

  We recently talked to Tata Elxsi, the engineering and R&D services vendor headquartered in Bangalore, India. We discussed where the adoption of AR/VR is currently among enterprises, how the metaverse differs from AR/VR, and which B2B use cases enterprises will prefer in the short to medium term. The current demand for virtual reality (VR) is primarily driven by the gaming indu[...]

  We recently talked to Cognizant about its Salesforce Marketing Cloud capabilities. Within the Salesforce portfolio, Marketing Cloud, along with Commerce Cloud, is a high-potential product that will eventually outgrow the more mature Sales and Service Clouds. More than any other Salesforce product, Marketing Cloud has grown through M&A, notably ExactTarget (that came with B2B m[...]

  Software testing continues to be an industry of contrasts: the primary activity, functional testing, remains a human-intensive activity, despite the accelerated adoption of continuous testing (i.e., bringing functional automation as part of DevOps). But testing has also grown in a highly specialized set of activities, earning the name of Quality Engineering (QE), ranging from supp[...]

  We recently talked to ValueMomentum about its QE approach to product-centric development and testing. The company is helping its insurance clients improve the quality of their applications using agile best practices and DevOps tools. In support of this, ValueMomentum has refreshed its automation approach and created a continuous testing platform articulated around design (shift-left)[...]

  TCS recently briefed NelsonHall on its approach to site reliability engineering (SRE) in the context of quality engineering (QE). SRE emerged almost a decade ago as part of the shift-right move, targeting production environments beyond traditional IT infrastructure activities such as services desk and monitoring activities. While no definition of SRE has fully emerged, TCS points [...]

  We recently talked to NTT DATA about its pending acquisition of Apisero, announced last month. NTT DATA has been through significant changes recently with its merger with NTT Ltd. NTT Ltd. grouped a wide range of network and connectivity services, hardware and related services, data center hosting, IT infrastructure services, and resales. The resulting NTT DATA is now a giant with[...]

  We recently talked to Infosys about how its Engineering and R&D services portfolio addresses sustainability and the circular economy, given the strong client interest in sustainable product design. Infosys has accordingly evolved its sustainability engineering offerings from a series of capabilities into a portfolio that is articulated along three product lifecycle phases: des[...]

  We recently talked to TCS about the company’s involvement in connected plants, TCS’ terminology for digital manufacturing. TCS has a broad connected plants portfolio, ranging from manufacturing IT systems, MES, Industry 4.0 and connected supply chain, to industrial control systems, and automation. The development of this portfolio currently emphasizes further specializ[...]