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[...]

  We recently talked to passbrains, the crowdtesting pure-play with dual headquarters in Hamburg and Zurich that has just been acquired by German IT service and VAR vendor, msg. The acquisition is timely for passbrains. Its founder died in the summer of 2020 at a critical time, as the firm was developing the 2.0 release of its crowdtesting platform and diversifying its client base[...]

  As the rapid rise of the pandemic demonstrated in early 2020, a company’s ability to react and respond to the changing business environment is a critical capability. Even prior to the pandemic, a NelsonHall survey of ~1k IT service buyers showed ~60% placing high importance on increasing the agility of existing core productions applications. Companies are looking for agility in[...]

  The following is a discussion between Nagendra (Nag) P Bandaru, President, Wipro Limited – Global Business Lines-iCore, and John Willmott, NelsonHall CEO, covering lessons learned in 2020 and success factors for 2021. Nag is responsible for Infrastructure and Cloud Services, Digital Operations and Platforms, and Risk Services and Enterprise Cybersecurity – three key [...]

With a new Chairman appointed 15 months ago and a new CEO in place for the last four, Wipro has seen a significant changing of the guard – much has been made of the fact that Thierry Delaporte is Wipro’s first non-Indian CEO appointment. The announcements made in a recent event for financial analysts (its first such event in five years) reveal some major shifts happening within the[...]

  As clients begin to adapt to the new normal post-Covid-19, we see a paradigm shift in the approach to cloud adoption. Previously cloud adoption was driven mainly by cost reduction and improved agility; the trend is now toward market responsiveness, personalized experiences, real-time insights, innovating at scale, expanding into new markets, and launching new products and services. C[...]

  We recently talked with Wipro regarding its 4C acquisition. Wipro accelerated the development of its Salesforce practice with the Appirio acquisition in November 2016. Indianapolis-headquartered Appirio was an essential move for Wipro, paying $500m for the firm, its second-largest acquisition ever. As well as a Salesforce business, Appirio brought in a Google practice, crowdsourcing [...]

  We recently talked with CSS Corp about its investments in QA, in particular its new Digital Assurance offering. Digital Assurance targets UX QA, an area that has not had the attention it deserves. Clients have prioritized investment in continuous testing & automation While many large organizations have devoted considerable time and effort to continuous testing and func[...]

  QA pure-play Qualitest recently briefed NelsonHall on a new AI-based offering the company launched in 2019. The testing services industry began to deploy AI-based offerings about three years ago, starting with AI-based analytics use cases, looking at where and what to test better. Since then, the focus has shifted to AI-based automation, looking initially at the automated creation[...]

  As financial results that reflect a full quarter in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic are being released by IT service vendors, one of the key themes is that while discretionary budgets are being hard hit, clients’ investment in migrating to the cloud is not slowing. For vendors, clients’ cloud adoption has acted as a mitigator of other areas where clients have delayed [...]

  We recently talked to crowdtesting specialist firm Testbirds about how the firm has adapted to COVID-19 and the macroeconomic conditions. In the past two years, the crowdtesting industry has realigned its capabilities around agile testing, primarily providing services for mobile apps and websites along with chatbots and connected devices/wearables. The realignment has been success[...]

  We recently talked to Cognizant about two planned Salesforce-related acquisitions: Code Zero and EI Technologies, which the company announced in Q1 2020. Cognizant Strengthens Specialized Billing Capabilities with Code Zero Code Zero is a U.S. Salesforce CPQ and billing specialist with experience in providing services to manufacturing firms expanding their business from selling[...]

  As with all industries, utility companies are responding to the ever-changing requirements related to COVID-19. In this short blog, we take a look at the macro and value chain impacts of COVID-19 on the utilities industry, how utilities are adjusting their business and IT priorities, and how Infosys is supporting utilities in their ongoing response. Macro-level and value chai[...]

  Digital experience consulting has been a critical focus area for IT services clients over the last several years. NelsonHall estimates that digital experience consulting services revenues grew by 15.8% globally in 2019, and projects a CAGR of around 12% from 2021 through 2024, after the COVID-19 pandemic eases. However, with COVID-19 still spreading, digital transformation project[...]

  Capgemini’s Sogeti recently introduced a new TMAP book, Quality for DevOps Teams., which is a direct successor to its TMAP NEXT book published initially in 2016. TMAP NEXT has remained one of the methodology bibles that guide QA practitioners in structuring their testing projects. Sogeti has added regular updates around agile/scrum development, IoT, and digital testing that [...]

  We recently talked to Shishank Gupta, the practice head of Infosys Validation Services (IVS), about how the practice is adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic crisis. Of course, the initial focus has been on employee health, helping clients, and enabling its employees to work from home, getting access to tools, applications, and connectivity. The QA practice i[...]

  NelsonHall was recently invited to present at NASSCOM Technology & Leadership Forum 2020, one of my last foreign trips for some time, I suspect. While in India, in addition to presenting, participating on panels and conducting interviews, we had an opportunity to sit down with leaders from across the IT services landscape as well as venture beyond the Grand Hyatt Mumbai to delive[...]

  User experience and user interface (UX/UI) consulting and design has traditionally been focused primarily on external, customer-facing web properties. However, the scope and focus of experience design services has expanded as companies realize design thinking and experience-centric design has greater applicability than solely in interfacing with users. In this vlog, David McIntire pr[...]

  We recently had an update from NTT DATA regarding its Salesforce services activities across the different countries it operates in. At a global level, the company’s priority is to scale up its Salesforce services capabilities, with recruitment as a priority. Salesforce keeps making horizontal M&As at a fast pace while verticalizing its software products. NTT DATA is mirr[...]

  In a recent blog, we highlighted how Cognizant approaches the testing of connected devices. Testing connected devices brings new challenges to QA at two levels: conducting hardware testing and automation. Cognizant’s TEBOT IP is based on a combination of traditional test automation (mostly based on Selenium test scripts) and hardware powered by a Raspberry Pi, triggering physic[...]