In a recent NelsonHall blog, we looked at the key themes and investments being made across digital workplace services. The overarching themes were employee experience, AI-enabled digital support services, sustainability, and digital re-skilling (read more here). For this blog, we spoke to NTT DATA’s digital workplace leadership team to understand its key focus and strategic roadmap investments over the next 12 months.

The new NTT DATA Group is a much-enlarged firm with ~$30bn in revenues and 195k employees. The group comprises NTT DATA Japan, with ~$12bn in revenues, and NTT DATA Inc., the $18bn international business with integrated application, infrastructure, and network capabilities (read more here).

NTT DATA’s digital workplace services innovation is focused on four key investment areas:

• Generative Workplace: utilizing GenAI to provide personalized digital support services
• Experiential Workplace: using XLAs to support total experience
• Sustainable Workplace: includes sustainable device as a service (SDaaS)
• Smart Workplace: facilitating productive and safe workplaces with IoT-based services.

Utilizing GenAI to provide personalized digital support services

NTT DATA is investing in GenAI across all its digital workplace towers, including employee experience enablement through conversational AI. This provides the ability to mimic agent behavior and translate language in real-time. IT Service Desk use cases include incident creation/resolution, approvals and updates, request fulfillment, knowledge management, ticket details and self-service, access management, and password reset. The agent can also deliver other self-service and administrative tasks across other industry use cases including retail, financial and banking (FSI), airline and travel and more. NTT DATA has a single delivery team for GenAI in its high-performance delivery centers and consulting & advisory services and sales at a local level through its Glocal model approach. Below are examples of deployments.

NTT DATA deployed a conversational AI chatbot in partnership with kore.ai for a multinational food processing company with 150k employees. It further integrated specific LLMs, resulting in ~40% call deflection.

NTT DATA is also engaged in multiple Microsoft Copilot workshops, providing advisory and consulting services, readiness and deployment, organizational change management (OCM), and Copilot extensibility. Typical engagements include Microsoft 365 Copilot calling and meetings workshop, Copilot proof of value with NTT DATA Cloud Voice (Modern Work and Copilot Engagement Program), and Copilot Studio/Sales workshop. NTT DATA also offers a 3-week Copilot advisory workshop to assess Copilot readiness across all workloads, discover use cases, and ensure data governance and implementation roadmap and Copilot for Azure PoCs.

For a Spanish telco with 15m customers, NTT DATA provided consulting and advisory services supporting a 300-license pilot for Microsoft 365 Copilot. This included training in the transversal use cases of M365 Copilot and additional use case identification, including document summarization and creation, agent assist, outage and remediation notification, knowledge management, etc. In the pilot, 76% of users saw increased productivity, and 70% had a positive experience. The client is now entering a second phase, extending the licenses to 1k. A key factor in the adoption was NTT DATA’s change management approach to drive mindset change and generate interest in the pilot groups.

NTT DATA will continue embedding GenAI across its digital workplace offerings, leveraging IP LLMs and AI-powered Copilot for engineers and use cases supporting client experience and expert advisory. Using smaller LLMs and proprietary data to solve vertical or business-specific problems will increase moving forward. NTT DATA’s investments in OCM and Microsoft Copilot consulting services are also key as organizations seek to drive AI technology adoption. In particular, organization change management (OCM) and AI with OCM will play a key role in helping clients adopt GenAI technologies by driving a greater focus on personalization to expedite adoption, and we expect to see POCs and pilots moving strongly into production over the next 12 months. There will also be more emphasis on proactive experience centers supported by SRE teams that look at every aspect of experience and monitor users in real time as they engage across services.

Utilizing XLAs to support total experience

NTT DATA has developed Experience-as-a-Service (EXPaaS) with the aim of providing its clients with a total experience using persona-aligned services and XLA delivery supported by its experience management office (XMO) and dedicated DEX squads.

EXPaaS for EX focuses on operational, people, and technology experiences and combines them with CX assurance, services management, and analytics to enable total experience. NTT DATA aims to identify issues that impact UX and respond quickly to prevent issues, using its DEM platform to increase observability and visibility. It collects multiple telemetry info from devices, apps, networks, etc., in real-time, which it runs through its XMO and digital analytics fabric to derive insights and improve EX.  

NTT DATA uses its 5A framework to implement EXPaaS and enable XLA standardization. It starts with the initial Ask phase to understand the key stakeholders, the environment, the client’s experience aspirations, and what part of the scope is influenced by NTT DATA, the clients, or its partners. The next phases are Analyzing, Assessing, Acting, and Attuning and providing continuous monitoring and improvement of experience indicators through its dedicated XMO.

For a global airline client, NTT DATA implemented EXPaaS with its 5A framework and persona-based XLA dashboards, measuring multiple metrics parallel to SLAs. It utilized its DEM platform, OCM, and modern device management to support 30k devices. The client achieved an improved overall EX score of 9.5/10, using XLA-delivery and persona alignment, and reduced ~35% of service desk contacts through proactive automation.

NTT DATA’s focus on EXPaaS to drive its XLA approach along with its dedicated XMO capability are key, and we expect the company to continue to ramp its SREs in support of its SRE/agile POD-led approach to bridge the gap between operations and deployment.

In addition, NTT DATA’s Workplace Orchestration platform delivers consolidated client experiences across the workplace. For example, its digital twin capability built on Power BI looks to expedite the employee onboarding process from 4 weeks to less than a week, with accelerated Day 1 onboarding being a major element in the overall employee experience.

Infusing ESG into its Digital Workplace Services offerings

NTT DATA focuses on persona-aligned VDIs, rightsizing devices based on personas, and increasing remote technical support with AR/VR and digital humans to reduce carbon footprint. This also includes accessible devices, kiosks, inclusive meeting rooms, and remote device wipe services. A key offering is Sustainable Device as a Service (SDaaS), available per device per month or per user per month, with devices and peripherals aligned to the employee persona.

NTT DATA deployed this capability for a global biotech company with 54k devices, identifying opportunities for remote support and field dispatch avoidance. It also provided smart refresh by persona supported by 1E and Nexthink on a needs-only basis through a phased approach. It provided automated provisioning through Autopilot and streamlined the catalog to ensure the correct configuration for the user, for example, moving them to a VDI platform if more suited to the persona. The client achieved an ~85% increase in device provisioning time.

Adoption of NTT DATA’s Sustainable Device as a Service (SDaaS) is likely to increase in importance in support of clients’ ESG and sustainability goals.

Another key capability includes eSIM, which integrates personal and corporate telephony on one device with a single number for Teams and mobile phones.

In partnership with HP, NTT DATA offers re-manufacturing and refurbished device allocation at the end of three years, providing users with the same out-of-the-box experience. This approach will resonate with clients as they seek to lower their carbon footprint and sustainably extend the device lifecycle.

NTT DATA also helps clients optimize office space and improve energy efficiency using Workplace Orchestration platform employee intranet.

Providing smart workplaces

NTT DATA provides managed private 5G, SD-WAN, SPEKTRA platform for networks, IoT, and edge computing, infusing this into digital workplace services to create a smart workplace. This also includes its Private 5G Device as a Service, with a fully configurable device selection aligned to the user’s persona and a choice of lease versus buy. Industry use case examples include manufacturing (industry 4.0 and autonomous factories), healthcare (providing clinicians with access to patient data on any device), and automotive (providing visibility of the global supply chain). NTT DATA will increasingly invest in further industry use cases in support of its P5G Device as a Service offering.  

For a global construction and utility client, NTT DATA utilized Workplace Orchestration platform, conversational AI, and employee intranet to develop a mobile app to streamline physical bookings, corporate service access, and communications for employees and external collaborators. It also enables the optimization and management of common spaces and occupancy visualization. The client achieved several outcomes, including increased energy efficiency, reduced environmental footprint, and improved worker productivity.   

NelsonHall recently attended T-Systems’ Digital X 24 event in Cologne, the flagship event of its parent company, Deutsche Telekom. T-Systems provided an overview of its key portfolio focus areas across the cloud, including sovereignty, digital solutions, AI, including GenAI, and its array of strategic ecosystem partners.

T-Systems' headcount is ~26k, with Q2 2024 revenues up 2.3% y/y at €981m. Key target industries include automotive, manufacturing, public sector, health, public transport, retail and logistics, and financial services. T-Systems’ business units are comprised of advisory (Detecon), digital solutions, cloud services, and security in support of planning, building, and running.  It supports ~1k clients across these industries with major strategic delivery hubs in Germany, Spain, Hungary, Slovakia, and India.  It also has local business units across multiple countries, including North America, Mexico, Brazil, and the Nordics. T-Systems also has eight SOCs globally defending against 36m attacks per day.

While discretionary spending has been impacted across Europe, the cloud is still viewed as a critical enabler for digital transformation, and we expect budgets to improve further between Q4 2024 and Q1 2025.

In this blog, we look at some of the key focus areas and investments for T-Systems across cloud, AI, and workplace services, including:

• Cloud and mainframe transformation services
• Enhancing Sovereign Cloud capabilities
• Digital solutions, including AI and GenAI.

Supporting clients’ cloud transformation initiatives

T-Systems utilizes its Detecon consulting capability as the tip of the spear to engage clients in design thinking consulting-led engagements to understand client cloud maturity and business requirements.  It provides a Cloud Readiness Assessment, which runs alongside assessing the client’s business challenges and goals. It then provides a proposed application-led transformation solution outlining the target systems within a multi-cloud environment; and then supports migration through its Cloud Professional Services unit, enabling the client to leverage the potential of various cloud providers.  

This includes not just lifting and shifting but enabling applications to run in containers, making them scalable, and covering the entire 7R (e.g., rearchitecting, refactoring, etc.), enabling clients to take full advantage of the cloud. T-Systems also focuses on FinOps, full-stack monitoring and observability, and DevSecOps. This approach will resonate with clients as they increasingly seek to reduce the complexity of their hybrid multi-cloud environments, reduce costs in response to current macroeconomic conditions, and drive better predictability through full-stack monitoring. 

T-Systems provides a holistic portfolio of multi-cloud services with horizontal-based offerings, making these modular to combine industrial services for the vertical-specific needs of clients through its application-centric, ecosystem-driven, and multi-cloud platform approach, including security and sustainability. T-Systems’ key private cloud offering (with VMware) enables clients to bring IT systems together on one platform.  Its managed private cloud bridges the gap between legacy and on-premises systems and public and private clouds. Its future cloud infrastructure is offered in an as-a-service model, providing a highly secure private cloud environment with the look and feel of the public cloud. Clients can use it as a hybrid cloud in their own or in T-Systems’ twin-core data centers.

T-Systems offers managed services in support of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. As part of managed services, it integrates into the client’s DevOps, for example, taking part in daily sprints to understand the client’s environment and quickly fix potential issues through an SRE-led approach to cloud operations. We expect this approach will resonate with clients as they increasingly seek to improve the predictability in their IT environments through a co-innovation and co-collaboration approach with vendors.

T-Systems’ zFuture offering also supports clients who need to maintain and modernize their mainframes with next-generation IT infrastructure, hardware, and platform optimization. It provides consulting and advisory services through a mainframe migration to public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. T-Systems also uses GenAI, including automated code generation and translation with GitHub Copilot, with translation from COBOL to Java to modernize the application. It further utilizes GenAI tools to understand source code in legacy mainframe environments. This approach enables clients to expedite legacy transformation and improve the overall developer experience through GenAI tools.

Aiming to become DACH region’s #1 sovereign cloud leader

T-Systems Sovereign Cloud powered by Google Cloud, provides full compliance with German regulators while retaining the public cloud functionality of a hyperscaler. It also offers T-Systems’ Open Telekom Cloud, which is based on OpenStack as a plug-and-play solution offering private cloud security and providing IaaS from the public cloud with two dedicated data centers in Germany and one in the Netherlands. T-Systems is also developing capability with AWS when AWS’ European Sovereign Cloud is launched in Germany in 2025. Also, through open-source collaboration services, it enables GDPR compliance in a Microsoft public cloud through its Cloud Privacy Service and offers managed security for a fixed monthly fee.  

We expect further traction across Sovereign Cloud as clients increasingly focus on regulatory compliance, especially from clients across the DACH and Europe region. In addition, we expect to see more leverage of this capability across digital workplace services for clients operating in highly regulated environments.

Increasing emphasis on AI within its digital solutions unit

T-Systems’ digital solutions unit drives multiple AI, GenAI capabilities, and POCs across the organization. This includes conversational AI and virtual avatars with numerous industry use cases across public, utilities, HR/IT, health, and financial services. Example use cases include information system municipalities, utility appointments, HR bot, pharma information, and the ability to take out simple insurance. It aims to improve the employee experience with agent assist and CX through ease of engagement. It also has multiple GenAI POCs running with AWS across its primary industries, including predictive maintenance in manufacturing, passenger tracking in public transport, and fraud detection for telcos.  

Across AI, client outcomes include creating an automated quality assurance process for a German automotive client using AI to enable zero outages and significantly reduce errors. Another example is a faster MTTR through AIOps, which resulted in a 15-20% cut in operational costs. We expect T-Systems to continue to ramp its capabilities across AI and GenAI and in supporting skillsets, where it currently has ~1.6k dedicated AI specialists and IT architects, 700 scrum masters, and 300 agile coaches.

Outlook

We expect T-Systems to continue to expand its AI capabilities, including GenAI, and across Agentic AI, and build up its LLM hub across Open Telekom Cloud through the OpenStack approach. In addition, LLM capabilities will be increased across key hyperscalers, such as AWS, Azure, and Google. It will also need to focus on OCM to drive the adoption of GenAI, including greater use of AI in OCM to drive personalization.  

It has an opportunity to leverage its mainframe experience and use of AI to drive legacy modernization for clients and support hybrid multi-cloud initiatives. Its focus on FinOps and full-stack monitoring and observability, DevSecOps, and its ability to tailor cloud services aligns with client needs. We anticipate T-Systems will expand its cloud privacy and sovereignty services across BFSI, the public sector (including education), and midsize enterprises.

In support of digital workplace services, we expect to see more expansion of its Microsoft 365 CoE capabilities and the provision of an SRE-led approach across workplace and cloud operations. In addition, its commitment to 100% full circularity for technology and devices by 2030 will align with client strategies as clients seek to expand their Evergreen services and meet ESG agendas.

T-Systems’ strategic partner ecosystem approach will resonate with clients as they increasingly seek to leverage their existing tooling investments, as will its vertical cloud capability to drive specific business outcomes. Finally, we expect T-Systems to increase its focus on AI specialists, platform SMEs, and business-value leads and build SRE CoEs supporting delivery locations.

NelsonHall recently completed an in-depth analysis of advanced digital workplace 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 12-18 months.

The four overarching themes from this study were:

• Applying a human-centric approach with employee experience at the center
• Enhancing digital support through AI
• Increasing focus on sustainability
• Ramping digital re-skilling and up-skilling.

Employee experience at the center

Clients continue to utilize digital workplace services as an enabler for hybrid workplace transformation and to improve the overall employee experience. There is a greater focus on hyper-personalization through a consulting-led approach. This includes the implementation of DEX and DEM platforms to measure the experience by persona, including device and sentiment analysis. There is also more commitment to total experience (TX), a combination of employee and customer experience. Over the next 12 months, the focus on proactive experience centers will increase, supported by SRE teams looking at every aspect of experience and real-time monitoring of users as they engage across services.

We expect to see a greater focus on experience performance indicators (XPIs) supporting XLAs to measure experience outcomes. Vendor examples include:

• DXC Technology provides managed service experience and deploys XPIs in client engagements. Through its Experience Cube, DXC mixes experience, technology, and operational data, feeding this into reporting and analytics to understand perception and sentiment
• Compucom is also evolving XPIs into XLAs, working jointly with clients on business outcomes
• Infosys has developed a Key Experience Indicator (KEI) framework to help clients define XLAs through a five-step process over 15 weeks
• Unisys has also developed an experience governance board (XGB) with clients to manage the lifecycle of XLAs and, as the XLAs plateau over time, uses the XGB to focus on the next XLAs in line with business imperatives.

Enhancing digital support services through AI

The most significant impact on digital workplace services in the next 12 months will be AI and predominantly GenAI. Vendors are running multiple POCs with clients across Copilot for Microsoft 365 to augment service desk agent capability, create knowledge base articles, and identify gaps in KB articles. It also enables agents to focus on experience as opposed to tasks; in addition, providing expert connect capabilities in the field for problem management with AI-enabled root cause analysis and assisted insights with GenAI responses.

Examples include:

• Cognizant recently purchased 25k M365 Copilot seats for its employees with plans to deploy it to 1m users within their global 2000 clients across 11 industries
• TCS has launched TCS WisdomNext, a platform that integrates multiple GenAI services into a single interface to expedite adoption at scale
• Kyndryl recently partnered with NVIDIA on GenAI, integrating NVIDIA with its Kyndry Bridge platform to enhance AI and automation capabilities in support of digital workplace services.

We expect vendors to utilize smaller LLMs, using proprietary data to solve vertical or industry-specific problems. Vendors need to focus on organization change management (OCM), which will play a key role in driving the adoption of GenAI technologies and using AI with OCM to drive a greater focus on persona preferences. There will be a greater focus on AIOps and ML for intelligent event management and trigger automation to auto-remediate and fix issues and drive real-time insights and recommendations across the workplace.

Supporting clients’ ESG and sustainability goals

Vendors are deploying IP and third-party tools to support clients’ ESG and sustainability strategies through Evergreen devices and PCs as a service. ESG management and reporting with analysis through hyperscalers (e.g., ServiceNow) providing custom ESG analytics and dashboards. Vendor examples include:

• Infosys, which provides infrastructure in carbon-neutral regions, services, and resources with a low carbon footprint
• NTT DATA also offers open API integration into cloud carbon footprint data from hyperscalers
• TCS takes a two-pillar approach to sustainability, including Greening of IT (reducing IT's carbon emission and footprint across infra, platform, data, and apps) and Greening by IT (solutions to decrease emissions and resource consumption while allowing for growth)
• Atos is also contracting on decarbonization-level agreements.

Over the next 12-18 months, vendors need to increase the use of green apps and gamification to allow employees to measure and reduce their carbon footprint across the hybrid workplace.

Digital re-skilling continues at pace

We continue to see traction in digital re-skilling initiatives and hyperscaler certifications supporting digital workplace services. New skill sets are emerging, including machine coaches developing algorithms for AIOps and automation, AI architects supporting GenAI, and experience and innovation leads. Vendors are developing specific power programs to enable freshers to become full-stack engineers and up-skill industry-specific skill sets through domain SMEs, dedicated automation, and experience CoEs.

Vendors need to expedite resources building automation, GenAI use cases, and AI leads by client account. This includes developing industry and business-specific LLMs, both IP and open source. They must also enable a real-time data insights-driven approach supported by site reliability engineers (SRE) approving machine recommendations.

Outlook

The most significant impact over the next 12-18 months will be AI, with multiple GenAI POCs running across Copilot for Microsoft 365, for example, to augment agent capability, improve KB articles and conversational AI in the field, and GitHub Copilot to improve developer experience and drive legacy modernization. Also, there will be greater leverage of hyperscaler AI capabilities across ServiceNow, Amazon Q, Google Gemini, and Open Source LLMs. However, OCM will play a key role in driving the adoption of these technologies, with greater use of AI in OCM to drive personalization.

Vendors must focus on an experience management office (XMO) approach to drive and measure total experience across client organizations. Digital re-skilling will continue focusing on AI specialists, platform SMEs, and business value specialists. This includes building SRE CoEs in support of delivery locations.

Sustainability and ESG will be key drivers over the next few years, with clients utilizing Evergreen services, including DaaS, to manage device lifecycle, PCaaS, and circular computing. There will also be more focus on employee empowerment through gamification and green apps, and greater use of cloud to reduce carbon footprint and SMEs providing infrastructure in carbon-neutral regions. We expect vendors to increase their GTM and joint IP with hyperscalers and key ecosystem partners to support hybrid workplace transformation in the next 12-18 months.

NelsonHall recently attended Compucom’s Analyst and Advisor Event 2023 in Charlotte, NC. It provided an opportunity to meet the executive leadership team, which has evolved over the last 12 months. Kevin Shank was appointed CEO in December 2022, having served as a senior executive at Compucom for nine years. He was joined earlier this year by Matt Olson as COO, also a previous senior executive at the company.

Founded in 1987, Compucom supports digital experience management through device lifecycle services, digital support, field services, and modern device management. The company provides end-to-end digital workplace services for large enterprises and mid-size businesses, supporting 9m devices and handling 8m service desk contacts per annum. In December 2021, it was acquired by Variant Equity Advisors, providing new impetus and investment to its focus on improving the digital experience in support of hybrid working.

Compucom is aiming to enhance its clients’ workplace transformation programs by:

• Implementing single points of contact for clients to drive innovation and NPS
• Establishing a Customer Experience Office and Experience Level Indicators to drive XLA discussions
• Driving the use of automation and AIOps across its digital support services.

Implementing Single Points of Contact to Drive Client Innovation & NPS

Compucom has reorganized its account management approach to drive innovation within its clients in a more cohesive and client-centric manner. A program director in charge of sales, solutioning, and client resourcing for the account now becomes the client’s single point of contact. The program director is also responsible to Compucom for the account P&L.

Compucom has deployed this model across its top 65 accounts (~80% of total business), driving greater account opportunities and improved client NPS.

The company continues to utilize its end-to-end capabilities across product provision, professional services, managed services, and staffing services at scale to provide a continuous lifecycle approach for the client.

Establishing a Customer Experience Office & Experience Level Indicators to Drive XLA Discussions

Compucom has established a Customer Experience Office (CXO) to provide a centralized and holistic approach to continuous improvements, increasing service efficiency and customer experience across clients. It includes a dedicated team building automations and improving proactive resolutions through AIOps.

At the same time, Compucom has developed multiple Experience Level Indicators (XLIs), covering metrics such as device and application performance, to measure experiences across four key indicators through its DEX platform and to drive XLA discussions with clients. The four key indicators, each containing multiple XLIs, are:

• Technology choice: covering device performance, application experience, and employee productivity
• Workplace flexibility: covering network, device, and connectivity experience
• Self-sufficiency: covering self-service resolutions, knowledge usage, and self-service support experience
• Well-supported: covering onboarding experience, device lifecycle experience, and support experience.

These XLIs are supported by Systrack, or clients’ end-user analytics tools, putting multiple telemetry points into dashboards to identify opportunities for experience improvement.

In addition, Compucom has a dedicated analytics team that works closely with account management. It takes data from multiple points, including digital support, endpoint, lifecycle, field services, cloud, and security, collecting data via telemetry and metrics from services and sentiment.

The analytics team then utilizes AI/ML to identify actionable insights, which are solutioned to drive service or content improvements. Service enhancement use cases include performance-based refresh to understand if a device is not performing at the level an employee needs to do their job effectively. It also looks at software license optimization to understand usage and identify opportunities for cost-out, including applications on devices not being utilized. Compucom has developed several support interaction use cases, including quality enhancement, knowledge content, AI-chat content, and process improvement.

It also has the opportunity to further support clients’ ESG agendas through its device lifecycle services, immersive technologies, AR/VR, remote support, OEM partnerships, and by developing Green apps to help users monitor, track, and reduce their carbon footprint.

Driving Use of Automation & AIOps across Digital Support Services

Compucom is continuing to invest in digital support models with more automation, self-service, conversational AI chat support, and generative AI POCs with clients. It looks at different telemetry and events from the devices deployed across the workplace and aggregates this data to view patterns and deliver appropriate automation as required.

This includes using AIOps to trigger actions, propose preventative measures to predict, prevent, detect, and fix potential issues before they reach the service desk, and enable self-healing to increase autonomous remediation. It is developing a field technician mobile application to track, for example, ETA and routing automatically.  

Compucom will continue to increase this focus on AIOps and drive a real-time data insight-driven approach across the workplace supported by dedicated skills, including data scientists, automation and AI architects, and UX/EX leads. It will need to ramp up its digital re-skilling and hiring to ensure the requisite skillsets are in place, and this is underway as part of its strategic roadmap.

The company is also investing in Microsoft IaaS and PaaS capabilities, and taking advantage of and securing technologies including Microsoft Copilot to enable GenAI use cases. In addition, there will be greater use of Intune, including Autopilot and cloud-based managed services in support of modern management.

Cybersecurity is also a key focus for Compucom, and it is investing in new cybersecurity tools and standards. The increasing client shift to SaaS is increasing the number of devices that require network connectivity and bringing new security and networking challenges to edge locations. It also provides the intersection between IoT, operational technology, and the workplace in support of hybrid working environments.

Outlook

We expect Compucom to expand its customer-centric approach across key accounts to drive innovation and overall experience.

Compucom is increasingly focusing on how its offerings can support specific client outcomes, and we expect to see contractual XLAs being deployed through its XLI-based approach in support of client outcomes.

We also expect to see increased tailoring of its services by industry, including a more persona-based focus on frontline workers and industry-specific roles across the workplace and via its GTM with key ecosystem partners and hyperscalers.

NelsonHall recently attended Unisys’ Analyst and Advisor Event 2023 in New York. The tagline for the event was ‘Imagination to Realization’ and reflective of the new Unisys branding.

Mike Thomson, President, and COO, started the event with Unisys’ new NetZero Goal by 2030 and its vision to provide a single pane of glass for clients to manage their ESG and sustainability goals. The company supports ~11m end-users and claims a >90% renewal rate and an average tenure of ~20 years across its top 50 clients. Thomson highlighted Unisys’ focus on next-gen solutions across its four business units, including:

• Modern workplace experience
• Digital platforms and applications
• Specialized services and computing solutions, including IP SaaS-based product delivery 
• Micro market solutions.

Unisys aims to increase its mix of next-gen revenue to 45% by 2026 (as a percentage of ex-L&S revenue), up from ~35% in 2022, through alignment with high-growth markets (e.g., smart workplace, IaaS, app modernization, next-gen compute (inc Quantum AI), hyperautomation, and digital mortgage processing). Its traditional solution focus includes technology support services, infrastructure management, classical compute, and BPS.

In addition to targeting large-deal pursuits, Thomson highlighted that Unisys will also target the U.S. mid-market, focusing on enterprises with revenues of $2-5bn. The target industries in this mid-market include insurance, manufacturing, energy & utilities, travel and transport, and healthcare. Unisys sees an opportunity to expedite enterprises’ digital transformation initiatives, utilizing its industry expertise, partner ecosystem, SMEs, and focus on client intimacy.

Focusing on digital workplace 2.0

Joel Raper, SVP of Digital Workplace Services (who joined Unisys through the Unify Square acquisition in 2021), highlighted Unisys’ focus on automation, proactive monitoring, experience, and making their clients' employees more productive. Raper reiterated the foundational tenets across DWS, including:

• Workplace business insights
• Frontline services (inc. field technicians)
• Next-generation service desk
• Enhanced employee experience.

Unisys continues to invest in AI, automation, and analytics to support the modern workplace and the foundational tenets above. These include its PowerSuite (AI-powered data analytics and insights engine),  and through its PowerSuite Insights Center it applies real-time data insights to different scenarios, including driving correct automation or identifying which devices to remediate. Other use cases include RTO efficacy across hybrid, enabling remote and in-office employees to communicate in productive and collaborative ways. Another example includes Smart PC refresh and providing clients with intelligent guidance on PCs that matter, extending device lifecycle (also utilizing DEM tools to identify degradation), reducing cost, and addressing ESG and carbon reduction requirements.

Another key investment includes InteliServe vNext multi-platform automation library to drive the fastest means of issue resolution by identifying the most common automations across clients. It can expose automation through a self-serve chatbot, for example. More importantly, it can expose automation to L1 service desk agents, empowering them with the tools to enable remote endpoint troubleshooting and remediation. Key use cases include user onboarding experience, M365 service automation, and field service dispatch integration.

Expanding Experience Management Organization (XMO)

Unisys utilizes its XMO to support a data-driven workplace, enabling clients to move from reactive to proactive and then predictive workplace services. It allows a data-driven employee experience through XLAs that directly relate to the experience.

Unisys was awarded a contract to provide XM by a global manufacturer with a proactive approach to experience management focused on the client’s business goals and key personas within the organization critical to these goals. Unisys identified personas for the client R&D team, given their criticality to business goals. Results to date have included higher engineering output and a 15% NPS increase. Unisys also jointly developed an experience governance board (XGB) with the client to manage the lifecycle of XLAs. As XLAs plateau over time, Unisys uses the XGB to focus on the next XLAs and business imperatives to start addressing higher-priority issues and finding a fix.

Unisys is utilizing ML/AI to support predictive endpoint health, self-healing, persona insights, and hybrid worker capabilities across the workplace. It is also prototyping use cases in generative AI across DWS to address market opportunities. These include humanized and frontline chatbot, service desk assist, developer acceleration, and insights query reporting. It is ingesting knowledge bases into Unisys to provide a more curated experience.

Driving application and infrastructure modernization

Manju Naglapur, SVP of Cloud, Applications, and Infrastructure Solutions (CA&I), highlighted business/client opportunities with hybrid infrastructure clients looking to utilize multi-cloud management and move to an SRE/DevSecOps model to transform its existing client base. It aims to accelerate through a cloud-native digital-first approach, automation, and microservices framework.

Unisys continues to invest in its cloud solutions through M&A (e.g., CompuGain) and its IP CloudForte Asset Suite across cloud, applications, data & AI, and automation. CloudForte AIOps seeks to reduce incidents through self-healing and automation and drive insights through AI/ML to prevent outages using proactive analytics, anomaly detection, and automated resolution. In support of DevSecOps, it is focused on an SRE-enabled agile model and utilizes Stealth to provide a cloud-managed security solution. Unisys is investing in AI use cases, including generative AI, continuous delivery through AIOps, and applied AI supporting CA&I.

Increasing BFS market presence

Unisys’ Financial Services practice accounts for ~$600m in revenues across 230 global clients. It is building on its BFS market presence to deliver new services for banks across three pillars of service: 

• Core renewal: Unisys is partnering with core platform vendors to modernize client platforms. Typical uses cases include enhancing the digitalization of processes, AI, and data management
• Branch: digitalizing branch services and integrating them with third-party services vendors
• Digital: Unisys is developing AI-based offerings for:
  • Portfolio optimization: analytics to mitigate portfolio risk 
  • AML/Fraud mitigation: enabling dynamic risk assessments
  • Customer acquisition: assessing partner risk using quantum annealing techniques.   

The launch of the first product is anticipated to be in Q2 2024, and these offerings will target regional and local banks.

Outlook

Unisys is focusing more on using a consulting-led approach to support client outcomes, and we expect to see a further increase in dedicated business consultants. Across client services, it focuses on personalized attention, innovation, and a proactive partnership approach. It is also bringing in CTOs across accounts to bridge the gap between business and technology.

In parallel with its large-deal pursuits, its mid-market approach in the U.S. should provide easier access to decision-makers, expedite RFPs, and enable Unisys to leverage its client-intimacy approach and industry SMEs to support the enterprise’s digital transformation initiatives. Unisys will apply its learnings from large-deal pursuits to mid-market opportunities. It also has the opportunity to utilize its dedicated BFS offerings across target markets, in particular across tier two and three banks and insurance.

We expect bolt-on acquisitions supporting CA&I across automation, analytics, AI, and joint IP and GTM offerings with key hyperscalers. Across digital workplace services, we expect to see greater utilization of generative AI as current POCs mature. We expect continued investment across PowerSuite, InteliServe vNext, and AI-based OCM.

Through its XMO, we expect to see an increase in XLAs across clients through a hyper-personalized approach, and in its experience governance board to evaluate and evolve client XLAs continually. This investment aligns well with market demand for experience parity across hybrid work. We also expect Unisys to utilize its field services capabilities further to target frontline worker opportunities, and greater use of immersive technologies, including AR/VR.

Finally, we expect Unisys to increase, train, and up-skill its resources across AI/ML engineers, cloud architects, data scientists, and automation engineers to support a platform engineering approach and increased focus on automation.

NelsonHall recently completed an in-depth analysis of cognitive & self-healing IT infrastructure management services, researching the capabilities of leading IT services vendors and the requirements of their clients. This blog looks at the investments vendors need to make to meet client demand, and how the market will evolve over the next 12 to 18 months.

While there is an increasing focus on utilizing AI and automation to deliver value across every business function within an enterprise including, for example, providing CFOs with contractual commitments to automation-led savings, the use of automation and AI is arguably most advanced in IT infrastructure management.

This increased use of automation and AI within IT infrastructure management is leading to:

• Increasing demand for SRE-led operations to support greater predictability across the full-stack
• A massive ramp-up in digital reskilling and the emergence of new skill sets
• Increased focus on sustainability and ESG.

Increasing demand for SRE-led operations to support greater predictability across the full stack

To achieve a NoOps environment, enterprises need to adopt a real-time data insights-driven approach, with SREs approving self-heal solutions and machine recommendations and developing algorithms for AIOps and automation use cases.

AIOps is already being deployed to trigger automation to auto-remediate, fix issues, detect anomalies, and reduce noise across operations. End-user outcomes typically achieved so far include ~40% improvement in MTTR, ~50% reduction in P1 incidents, and ~65% of incidents autonomously resolved. However, there is scope for more.

AIOps needs to support both full-stack monitoring and accommodate existing enterprise investments. It enables the accommodation of rapid infrastructure changes across hybrid, private cloud, and on-premise; and in addition, the full-stack monitoring of resources in the cloud and on-premise. Enterprises also want modular, plug-and-play AIOps platforms utilizing vendor IP and third-party tools across their ecosystems. The modular approach is important for supporting the existing brownfield automation investments made by enterprises.

There will be increased investment in automation and IaC to enable developer-centric models that extend from DevOps to DevSecOps to NoOps in an agile manner and use DevSecOps to support cloud-native applications. Vendors will continue to expand their use cases and focus on hyper-automation to enable client transition to a future NoOps environment. This involves continuing to develop libraries of AIOps use cases to manage operations across the full stack and achieve 40-50% reusability of assets.

In addition, over the next 12 months, vendors will increasingly focus on dedicated experience centers, supported by SRE teams that look at the performance and experience aspect of IT service delivery and proactively monitor end-users’ sentiments as they engage across services and XLAs (and increase client-specific XLAs by persona). At the same time, there will be greater standardization of XLAs in support of a NoOps environment.

Massive ramp-up in digital reskilling & emergence of new skill sets

The investment in digital reskilling and new partnerships continues at pace. We continue to see traction in digital re-skilling, hyperscaler, and ecosystem partner certifications along with AI architects, cloud-native SMEs, and business value specialists. All vendors are ramping automation academies, proactive experience centers, AI, and Cloud CoEs to monitor performance through a data-driven approach. They enhance what SRE and automation teams learn from operating cloud and infrastructure environments.

In addition, newer skill sets are emerging, including machine coaches developing algorithms for AIOps systems, data modelers, and domain SMEs to support unified business semantics. For example, Kyndryl is developing higher-level skill sets at L2/3, including automation assessment architects and client success engineers. TCS is using its cloud units as a catalyst for change across the organization, enabling infrastructure specialists to become full-stack architects. The company is also expanding its Cloud Service Reliability teams and service reliability engineering approach to operations supported by SRE CoEs, and expanding its value builders within TCS Cognix, to enable autonomous operations through AIOps and MLOps. Likewise, Infosys is developing SRE automation skill sets supporting its Polycloud platform across ~96k employees in the cloud and infrastructure services unit; and Cognizant has developed an automation-in-a-box self-service playbook for account delivery teams. Plus, DXC Technology has developed an automation roadmap by capability persona, with 90 big plays across ITO and cloud to improve each persona.

We see more focus on intelligent OCM to drive digital adoption and device and sentiment insights to inform training methodologies and technology adoption rates. Unisys, for example, applies AI to its OCM engine to target and tailor technology adoption and updates, training, and enhanced experience by persona.

We expect increased investment in AI-based platforms, strategic ecosystem partnerships, and a greater focus on joint IP and GTM with hyperscalers.

Increased focus on sustainability and ESG

Investment in cognitive and self-healing IT infrastructure management services will continue at pace, focusing more on SRE-led operations by default. This in turn will lead to an increased focus and investment in sustainability and ESG, helping clients reduce carbon footprints. TCS, for example, through TCS Cognix for agile infrastructure, adopts a sustainability-by-design approach to drive configurable, composable, and automated infrastructure to adapt the cloud to ESG needs. DXC Technology has developed an ESG data intelligence and reporting solution. In addition, Infosys is rapidly expanding its sustainability practice to support enterprises’ ESG agendas.

Outlook

Investment in cognitive and self-healing IT infrastructure management services will continue to ramp, focusing more on SRE-led operations, including full-stack organizational structure for delivering digital transformation through productized offerings.

Vendors need to focus on automation and cloud academies, AI-enabled learning assistants, and platforms to expedite training. We expect to see expansion in the developer community for automation use case development and deployment; and finally, more focus on hyper-personalization, including developing industry-specific personas and creating AI solutions and use cases to fit key business requirements.

NelsonHall recently attended Compucom’s Analyst and Advisor Event 2022 in Paulsboro, NJ.  As in-person meetings and events resume, it was great to engage with Compucom executives, including CEO Mick Slattery, face-to-face once more.

Founded in 1987, Compucom provides end-to-end digital workplace services for enterprises, midsize and small businesses. In December 2021, it was acquired by Variant Equity Advisors, giving new impetus and investment to its focus on improving the employee experience in support of the future of work.

Digital workplace services are becoming increasingly important in driving the overall employee experience, and organizations continue to invest in digital workplace services at pace. In a recent NelsonHall study of multiple IT stakeholders across industries, 91% identified digital workplace services as highly important in improving the employee experience and supporting hybrid ways of working across the enterprise. In addition, 93% rated greater personalization of services as key to improving collaboration in support of hybrid working.

Compucom is aiming to enhance its clients’ employee experiences by:

• Assisting clients to move beyond XLIs to XLAs
• Using its CXO office to drive improved resolution
• Accelerating its investment in automation of its digital support processes.

Moving beyond XLIs to XLAs

As hybrid working becomes the norm, a key goal for Compucom is to provide a holistic employee experience, enabling its clients to achieve experience parity between working from home, office, and other locations in support of hybrid working collaboration.

Accordingly, Compucom is increasing its focus on XLAs (Experience Level Agreements) and contracting on risk/reward in the areas it can control to support business outcomes. Heather Lockhart, Chief Marketing Officer, showcased Compucom’s new branding and reiterated the company’s focus on employee experience and the direct correlation between EX and, ultimately, CX for clients.

Compucom seeks to be the key enabler for XLA development across its client base and evolve Experience Level Indicators (XLIs) into XLAs working jointly with clients on business outcomes.

Current XLIs developed by Compucom include:

• Technology issues: age of devices and browser usage
• Self-sufficiency: self-service, knowledge use, and contacts per user
• Support quality: sentiment, response times, and onboarding
• Flexible workspace: cloud utilization, VPN usage, and peripheral access.

These XLIs will further translate into XLAs linked to contractual engagements to improve business processes and outcomes. The company will continue to expand these across its client base.

Compucom will increasingly focus on how its offerings can support specific client outcomes, and we expect to see more focus and investment in providing end-to-end experience across the workplace. Its persona-based approach will enable it to define personas by industry further and develop personalized experiences across the workplace.

In addition, digital workplace services have a key role in clients’ ESG agendas. This includes using remote support, immersive technologies, and Advanced Exchange to reduce onsite support to benefit carbon emissions and utilize Green apps to give end-users visibility of their carbon footprint.

Using its CXO Office to Drive Improved Resolution

Compucom has established a Customer Experience Office (CXO) to provide a holistic approach for continuous improvements, increasing service efficiency and customer experience.

It created the CXO office to look across its clients and enable more analytics and automation to drive a faster resolution or increased self-help. It has dedicated teams building automations and improving proactive resolutions. Through ITSM, it seeks to improve customer experience efficiency by driving SLA attainment, incident resolution, and reducing MTTR and contact volume while driving a knowledge management program to assist operations and improve customer experience through metrics including FCR and knowledge consumption.

Compucom’s CXO includes a single-pane view to track employee sentiment and performance across clients’ investments in end-user analytics tools such as 1E Tachyon, NexThink, Systrack, Medallia, and Qualtrics. This further enables the measurement of UX across devices, applications, networks, and home office WiFi environments.

Accelerating the Automation of Digital Support models

Compucom is investing in digital support models with more automation, self-service, and predictive AI-powered, natural language support options. This includes remote technician support, swapping deskside for remote support, and dispatches with remote and Advanced Exchange; in addition, looking at different telemetry and events from the devices deployed across the workplace and aggregating this data to view patterns and deliver appropriate automation as required.

This also includes triggering actions to propose preventative measures to improve configurations and predict, prevent, detect, and fix potential issues before they reach the service desk. Compucom also provides a catalog of automation, including scheduled maintenance for core applications and a simple interface for single-click resolutions and requests for assistance. Through analytics and telemetry, it is helping clients move from a group policy administration model to an Autopilot-driven approach that enables greater device choice.

Outlook

Compucom is ramping up digital re-skilling and hyperscaler certifications, and we expect it to continue investing in AI-based platforms and tools to enable a self-heal framework and increase autonomous remediation. In addition, we anticipate that Compucom will shift from a traditional L1/1.5/2/3 mindset to a real-time data insights-driven approach supported by site reliability engineers (SRE).

In general, we expect to see newer skill sets emerging, including machine coaches developing algorithms for AIOps systems, business value specialists, automation and AI architects, and experience and innovation leads. It will be important for Compucom to continue to ramp up its digital re-skilling, hiring, and retention initiatives to ensure the requisite skills are in place to meet future clients’ requirements and support business outcomes.

In addition, Compucom recognizes that the ever-increasing shift to SaaS and the increasing number of devices that require network connectivity is bringing new security and networking challenges to edge locations and continues to enhance its capabilities on the edge along with security. 

We also expect to see more emphasis on partner ecosystem and hyperscaler GTM initiatives and a greater focus on how Compucom’s offerings can support specific client outcomes.

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 increasing focus on utilizing the cloud to deliver value across every business function within an enterprise; for example, improving security, compliance, and governance for the CSO and enabling HR to drive positive employee engagement and experience. In addition, cloud management and FinOps provide CFOs with greater visibility and management of the cloud ecosystem to control and optimize cloud costs and greater utilization of AI and automation to enable CIOs to focus beyond TCO. Vendors are creating cloud-native industry-specific solutions to support LOB heads and expedite enterprises’ ability to create and develop new products and services by sector.

The three overarching themes from this study were:

• Enhancing hybrid cloud management and employee experience
• Ramping digital re-skilling and empowering end-users
• Increasing focus on AIOps and cloud-native capabilities.

Let’s look at these three focus areas in more detail.

Defining and measuring cloud journeys through co-creation

Vendors need to take a collaborative design thinking approach to cloud transformation to co-create and innovate with clients to support business outcomes. This includes utilizing AI and analytics in the initial cloud advisory and assessment stages to improve the overall cloud transformation roadmap. This takes a three-phased approach, including:

• Advisory and assessment: enabling data-driven insights to provide deep discovery of infrastructure and application assets. Also, cloud architecture analysis and identifying the right cloud type (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and approach (private, public, hybrid). Then developing cloud maturity roadmaps including OCM to deliver the desired client outcomes through the identification of business needs and driving digital adoption
• Migration and modernization: identifying application modernization opportunities, including monolithic architecture implementation and deployment. Then deploying a migration factory approach with templates, repeatable tasks, and agile squads. This includes landing zone and platform build, including cloud-native and adoption of DevOps and serverless architecture. An example includes Capgemini’s Cloud Migration Factory, providing a highly automated and industrialized approach to application and infrastructure migration. This includes providing end-to-end migration from package to production using an automated release pipeline and a migration management portal. It also provides an assessment tool for cloud cost optimization for clients that have already migrated to the cloud
• Operate and manage:  Clients want to manage hybrid, multi-cloud environments through a single CMP console with self-service and automated provisioning with a single click. This also includes the integration of private cloud and edge. There is also a greater focus on cloud-native PaaS support, including microservices and containers. This includes a more open approach to orchestration, including cloud-native provisioning with cloud APIs. In addition, integration of third-party monitoring and visualization tools to tag, monitor, and optimize spend based on usage patterns, with automated reporting and chargebacks to business units through FinOps. 

Over the next 12-18 months, we expect vendors to rapidly increase the utilization of Cloud CoEs, labs, experience centers, and Digital Transformation Centers to help clients prototype and co-create cloud-first solutions to facilitate this approach.

Vendors need to identify and measure employee experience, define industry personas, and personalize experience services across the enterprise. They need to continue to invest in end-user analytics tools to measure employee sentiment and performance, with typical tools including 1E Tachyon, SysTrack, Nexthink, and Qualtrics. These measure UX across devices, applications, and networks.

Digital re-skilling continues at pace

We continue to see traction in digital re-skilling, hyperscaler certifications, and new skill-sets, including machine coaches developing algorithms for AIOps systems, automation, AI architects, cloud-native SMEs, data analytics, and business value specialists. Also, vendors are ramping cloud academies, experience centers, and site reliability engineers (SRE) to monitor cloud ecosystems’ performance through a data-driven approach and building capabilities and enhancements based on what SRE teams learn from operating cloud environments for clients. For example, across cloud operations, TCS takes a service reliability engineering approach with dedicated teams resolving issues and platform and architecture teams automating activities and enabling greater self-service.

TCS also uses its cloud units as a catalyst for talent change across the organization, enabling infrastructure specialists to become full-stack architects. In addition, developing industry-specific skillsets across cloud delivery resources by utilizing TCS’ industry SMEs.

Vendors are now hiring beyond STEM and across tier 2/3 cities in India, with Tech Mahindra recently opening a delivery center in Coimbatore. Vendors are further utilizing AI-enabled learning assistants and platforms to expedite training. For example, Infosys utilizes its Wingspan learning platform to support cloud training, and its talent strategy focuses on emerging technologies, with 350 learning paths and 46 digital skill tags.

Over the next 12 months, the focus on dedicated experience centers will increase, supported by SRE teams that look at the experience aspect of IT service delivery and proactively monitor end-users’ sentiments as they engage across services and XLAs (and work with clients to create specific XLAs by persona). We also expect to see more focus on end-user empowerment using low code/no code platforms and managing, for example, M365 through the Microsoft Power Platform.

Expanding AIOps use cases to meet client-specific requirements

AIOps are being deployed to trigger automation to auto-remediate and fix issues, including utilization of resolver bots (L0, L1, and L1.5 functions). Also, to detect anomalies, reduce noise across operations, and use ML and diagnostics engines to manage L2/L3. End-user outcomes include ~40% improvement in MTTR, ~45% incident elimination, and ~65% of incidents autonomously resolved.

We expect vendors to expand their use cases to enable transitions to future no-ops. Vendors look to orchestrate tasks using AI and automation and use recommendation engines to provide the best-fit SOP for the issue through one-click automation. There is increased focus on standardization through template-based provisioning of environments and standardized monitoring and data collection frameworks. NTT DATA, for example, adopts a data bias in support of cloud transformation where it makes decisions based on data insights to influence new application features, developments, and architectural improvements.

Vendors must build libraries of standard AIOps use cases to meet clients’ business outcomes, manage operations across the full stack, and achieve ~40-50% reusability on standard assets through enterprise bot stores. This includes increasing the use of cloud architects and administrators to develop infrastructure and industry-specific cloud blueprints, including templating application blueprints. They need to focus on developing service patterns that provide repeatability through a combination of hyperscaler technologies and vendor IP to address specific industry and client requirements. In addition, they need to integrate with and utilize client toolsets where required through an agnostic approach. Also, taking a modular approach to reflect clients’ Brownfield automation capabilities.

Outlook

Investment in end-to-end cloud infrastructure management services will continue at pace, with a greater focus on developing a full-stack organizational structure to deliver cloud transformation through productized offerings. We expect to see increased focus and investment in sustainability and helping clients reduce carbon footprints. This includes continuous monitoring through cloud management platforms, green apps, and observability tools. TCS, for example, adopts a sustainability by design approach to drive configurable, composable, and automated infrastructure to adapt the cloud to environmental, social, and governance needs.

There will be an increase in modernization accelerators and methodologies to enable clients to modernize legacy applications and take advantage of the latest hyperscaler technologies. This includes modernization factory, CoE, and dedicated squads deploying an agile approach and making recommendations for modernization. Application modernization investments will focus on microservices, service mesh, API factory development, and serverless functions.

It will be important to ramp digital re-skilling, hiring, and retention initiatives to ensure the requisite cloud skills are in place to meet specific client requirements and support business outcomes.

Expect vendors to ramp cloud-native services and practices to provide complete end-to-end hybrid services for containerization and move containers off datacenters to the cloud. Also, to provide a unified view of observability, management, and deployment across containers and expand their mainframe as a service capability.

Finally, we expect increased investment in AI-based platforms and tools to enable a self-heal framework, increase autonomous remediation and an SRE-led approach to cloud operations, and a greater focus on joint IP and GTM with hyperscalers.

Find out more about NelsonHall’s ‘End-to-End Cloud Infrastructure Management Services’ market assessment report here or contact Guy Saunders.

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 cloud & infrastructure solutions businesses. Unisys has made three acquisitions to date: two have enhanced its digital workplace services capabilities, the third its cloud and infrastructure management services capabilities.

Unisys has well-established capabilities in cybersecurity, particularly Stealth and digital workplace services. There is now an increasing emphasis on cloud-native applications and taking a more consultative-led approach across Unisys.

There has been a nearly total refresh of the senior leadership over the last 18 months, with new appointments for CFO (Debra McCann; former CFO Mike Thomson is now COO), CTO (Dwayne Allen), CMO (Teresa Poggenpohl), CCO (Maureen Sweeny), and new heads for Digital Workplace (Leon Gilbert), Cloud and Infrastructure Solutions (Manju Naglapur) and Enterprise Computing Solutions (Chris Arrasmith). All are external hires (Naglapur came with CompuGain, acquired in December 2021). We note much greater diversity in the senior leadership.

The tagline for the event was ‘what’s next – accelerating success’. CEO Peter Altabef focused on Unisys’ new emphasis of driving outcomes that enable enterprises to be more profitable with supporting hybrid, cloud, and multi-cloud environments playing a pivotal role.

Digital workplace solutions: focus on the proactive UX

Leon Gilbert, SVP of Digital Workplace Solutions, highlighted the traction gained since his appointment in February 2021 and the increased focus on driving proactive experiences across the workplace and helping clients transform through next-gen capabilities. Unisys has enabled all existing clients with the latest technology, including journey analytics, at no charge. It also exited some non-strategic DWS contracts in 2021. Unisys claims to be enabling ~1.4m end-users with proactive experiences, up from 50k just 18 months ago.

Two recent acquisitions enhancing Unisys’ digital workplace services capabilities are:

• Unify Square, acquired last June for $150m, whose cloud-based PowerSuite solution for Enterprise Communications and Collaboration captures an individual's experience and can operationalize and improve that experience in real-time through analytics. Unify Square also brought in ~50 digital workplace consultants who can support Unisys’ consulting-led approach
• Mobinergy, a much smaller acquisition last November, has enhanced Unisys’ UEM capabilities and its positioning around modern device management.

There is an ongoing emphasis on VDI (Dell, VMware, Azure) and cloud-native VDI services to support secure and modern workspace environments and AIOps in support of first-time fix across field services, AR, and automation in service desks. Again, there have been several recent senior hires supporting these capabilities.

Priorities for Unisys’ digital workplace services include aligning offerings by geography, optimizing hybrid working models, and driving more outcomes-based engagements.

Driving application modernization and containerization

Unisys is also investing in its cloud and infrastructure business and recently acquired CompuGain, bringing 400 employees with capabilities across cloud-native, application modernization, and data analytics.

Unisys continues to invest in its CloudForte portfolio, including CloudForte CMP AIOps for AI-led operations. In addition, CloudForte Containers automate the end-to-end container infrastructure, application modernization, and DevSecOps deployment processes. This enables applications to be brought quickly into production and provides automation across the entire lifecycle, including security. It is also investing in Stealth and its hybrid cloud-managed security solution (MDR), providing AI-enabled threat response.

Unisys continues to ramp its investments across automation, self-healing, and AI/ML capabilities in support of cloud services.

Outlook

Unisys has overhauled its senior leadership team and is looking to pivot to a business-unit-led organization to increase traction in selected markets and geographies. There will be a stronger focus on using a consulting-led approach and on driving client outcomes: expect to see a further increase in dedicated business consultants. Also expect to see additional bolt-on acquisitions in support of application and data modernization capabilities, plus further developments in its CloudForte container services roadmap, and a greater focus on DevSecOps and automation enablement across the entire lifecycle. We also expect to see more joint-IP and GTM offerings with key hyperscalers.

With digital workplace services, expect to see greater traction across Unisys’ XMO organization, proactive experience, dedicated XLAs through the PowerSuite platform and partner ecosystem, and expansion of modern device management with Mobinergy capabilities. This should enhance field services, including AR/VR and immersive technologies. We also expect to see further acquisitions supporting digital workplace transformation advisory and a greater focus on AIOps and SRE-led operations.

Unisys will be rebranding this year: expect to see a greater emphasis on how Unisys’ offerings can support specific client outcomes.

John Laherty and Rachael Stormonth

NelsonHall recently completed an in-depth analysis of advanced digital workplace 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.

The three overarching themes from this study were:

• Applying a human-centric approach and placing employee experience at the center of everything
• Enhancing digital support and increasing predictability of services
• Ramping digital re-skilling and empowering end-users.

Let’s look at these key focus areas in more detail.

Employee experience is paramount

In addition to the recent market analysis, NelsonHall carried out a study of multiple IT stakeholders across industries. Here, 91% identified digital workplace services as highly important in improving the employee experience and supporting new hybrid ways of working across the enterprise. In addition, 93% rated greater personalization of services as key to improving collaboration in support of hybrid working. Within employee experience, the main sub-themes we identified included:

> Identifying and measuring employee experience and establishing roadmap (includes the use of analytics and dedicated experience centers)

Vendors need to support their ability to drive the customer experience by continuing to invest in end-user analytics tools to measure employee sentiment and performance, with typical tools including 1E Tachyon, Nexthink, SysTrack, and Qualtrics. These measure UX across devices, applications, networks, and home-office WiFi environments. We expect to see more use of Microsoft Viva through APIs to measure employee HR, wellbeing, cultural sentiment, and combining this with sentiment analytics and measuring across dedicated experience frameworks.

Over the next 12 months, focus on dedicated experience centers will increase, supported by SRE teams that look at the experience aspect of IT service delivery and proactively monitor the sentiments of end-users as they engage across services and XLAs (and work with clients to create specific XLAs by persona).

> Delivering employee experience (through personalization and holistic experience)

Here, vendors should look to enable a hyper-personalized approach at the start of client engagements to understand clients’ business and customize solutions accordingly. Also, it is essential to define personas by industry and personalized experience services across the workplace and wider enterprise ecosystem.

Also, it is important to focus on providing a holistic experience in both physical and virtual environments to drive location-independent collaboration in support of hybrid working. This will increasingly involve the deployment of AR/XR, including Microsoft Mesh Services and HoloLens.

Overall, it is now critical for organizations to provide a holistic employee experience, with experience parity between working from home, office, and other locations in support of hybrid working collaboration.

Other key investment areas include building XLAs to support business outcomes (e.g., automation effectiveness, virtual agent effectiveness, accurate technical resolution, chat uptake, self-service, and knowledge article first-time resolution).

> User training (use of MarTech and Microsoft Viva)

We expect to see more investment in MarTech, used for contextualizing the workplace for users, targeting ads to an end-user in an enterprise for training and adoption services, and continuing focus on OCM to drive digital adoption. User learning will be further enhanced by greater utilization of Microsoft Viva and targeting installed M365 client bases with Viva to improve productivity and UX.

Driving predictability across the workplace through digital support services

Vendors are increasing investments in proactive and predictive support services, including AI-led service desks, to facilitate the move to a fully automated ‘zero-touch’ service desk capability. They need to provide end-users with access to digital support through a single touchpoint (e.g., Teams). Within self-serve, vendors need to increase the resolution capability of virtual agents and integrate self-heal capabilities to enable greater self-remediation of issues. It includes self-heal scripts and self-help libraries, including one-click automated solutions, knowledgebase articles, and targeting self-healing at L0, L1, and L1.5 incidents. This is supported by utilizing data from the log files of the different devices deployed across the workplace and aggregating this data to view patterns. This is used to trigger actions to propose preventative measures to improve configuration and predict, prevent, detect, and fix potential issues before they reach the service desk.

Automation is key in:

• Direct automation of incidents, driving continuous transformation through a data-driven approach and automating the bulk of L1 incidents
• User support, extending AI virtual agents across the enterprise (e.g., in HR for onboarding and offboarding), facilities management, and procurement functions.

Over the next 12 months, we anticipate more focus on AIOps and the interoperability with existing and new environments through a catalog-based service and bot store for reusable automation assets. As more insights are gained across the end-user environment through analytics, ML, and AI, it enables greater adoption of self-healing technologies and auto-remediation capabilities. It will improve predictability across IT environments, rectify issues before an end-user realizes they have an issue, and support the transition to a future No-Ops model.

Digital re-skilling continues at pace

We continue to see traction in digital re-skilling initiatives and hyperscaler certifications supporting digital workplace services. We are seeing a shift from traditional L1/2/3/mindsets to a real-time data insights-driven approach supported by site reliability engineers (SRE) approving machine recommendations. New skillsets are emerging, including machine coaches developing algorithms for AIOps systems, business value specialists, experience and innovation leads, automation, and AI architects.

Over the next 12 to 18 months, we expect to see more focus on end-user empowerment using low code/no-code platforms and managing M365 through the Microsoft Power Platform. Vendors also need to expedite resources, building automation use cases and system capability by industry to meet clients’specific business needs. There is also an opportunity for vendors to hire from a much larger digital skills pool than previously, driven by remote working.

There will also be more focus on Evergreen-as-a-Service, and supporting SMEs enabling clients to keep up to date with the latest features and updates from hyperscalers and the provision of advisory services through Evergreen CoEs to help clients adopt new features and transform the way end-users work. This includes greater utilization of modern management to provide a centralized solution for all devices, including PCs, tablets, IoT devices, smartphones, and Macs, bringing all endpoint management together into a single unified service to manage all devices from one solution. Invariably, cloud-based management toolsets will manage the full lifecycle of all endpoints from onboarding to retirement.

Outlook

Investment in digital workplace services will continue at pace, driven by the need to enhance the employee experience and the opportunities created by digital support services, SaaS (M365 and Intelligent Collaboration tools), VDI, and AR/VR. We anticipate increasing adoption of fully-cloud-based digital workplace platforms driven by ongoing hybrid remote working requirements.

In addition, we expect to see more investment in decarbonization measurement, including reducing onsite support to benefit carbon emissions and utilizing Green apps to give end-users visibility of their carbon footprint. This will also include avoiding costs related to unused hardware and engaging and educating employees to influence sustainable practices.

5G, edge technologies, and IoT-enabled solutions, including health testing and biometric building entry, and voice and gesture control, have a key role in facilitating a safe return to the office. These technologies are often integrated with third-party platforms, particularly the ServiceNow safe workplace suite.

Overall, the transformation of digital workplace services will be underpinned by increased uptake of Windows 365 Cloud PC, Windows 11, Apple DaaS, and modern management toolsets. In addition, there will be more focus on joint IP and GTM initiatives with hyperscalers in support of hybrid working environments.

Find out more about NelsonHall’s ‘Advanced Digital Workplace Services’ market assessment report here or contact Guy Saunders. 

We recently spoke with Infosys on its sustainability strategy, where its philosophy is to ensure its business, clients' businesses, and ecosystems are all sustainable. It approaches sustainability at the enterprise level across Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) dimensions.

Infosys started its sustainability journey in 2008 and says it became carbon neutral in 2020, some 30 years ahead of the 2050 timeline set by the Paris Agreement. Recent achievements include a 55% reduction in per capita electricity consumption compared to the 2008 baseline and 50% of electricity coming from renewables. The company has achieved 60 MW of total installed solar capacity and a 64% reduction in consumption of water across campuses. Overall, Infosys has achieved an 83.6% reduction in Scope 3 emissions, including reductions from business travel, employee commute, upstream leased assets, waste, and work from home. Infosys claims by 2022, for every project, there will be a sustainability aspect for clients.

We have also seen recent ESG developments from other IT services vendors, including Capgemini's commitment to achieving carbon neutrality for its operations no later than 2025 and its ambition to be net-zero by 2030. Also, Atos announced end-to-end decarbonization capabilities to enable clients to accelerate their journeys to net-zero. Atos invests in decarbonization measurement, including reducing onsite support to benefit carbon emission and utilizing the Atos Green app to educate and give end-users visibility of their carbon footprint.

Infosys capabilities and IP

Infosys is positioning itself to be clients' end-to-end sustainability partner, combining IP and a consulting-led approach. Key capabilities include its ESG platform (ECOWatch), powered by Microsoft applications in Azure to enable data capture and analysis of sustainability KPIs and ESG metrics, IoT-based energy, water, and waste management solutions, and KRITI 4.0 for asset maintenance. Additional Infosys capabilities include integrated command and control center (AR/VR in the field), Smart Spaces platform, and PLM and circular commerce material compliance. The Infosys Wingspan Platform is used for knowledge and change management, and Infosys Meridian for sustainability events and communities.

Infosys has recently announced a strategic partnership with The Economist Group to enable and accelerate sustainability solutions and drive impact through a business-to-business model and unlock long-term sustainability thinking across global enterprises, and is aiming to deliver the following benefits to its clients:

• Making an impact on the triple bottom-line of people, profit, and prosperity
• Attracting a new wave of sustainability-minded clients, supply chain partners, and employees
• Enhancing ESG attractiveness to investors and brand reputation
• Securing resiliency in uncertain conditions.

Infosys sees six distinct aspects to clients' sustainability journeys: sustainability plan, growth plan, digital & physical assets, addressing the supply chain, offset strategy, and sustainability-first culture.

Focus on smart buildings capability

From an ESG perspective, buildings account for 40% of GHG emissions. Consequently, we are seeing a number of vendor capabilities in support of smart buildings and offices using workplace safety platforms and IoT-enabled wayfinding solutions. This includes providing health testing and biometric building entry, including voice and gesture control to facilitate a safe return to the office for clients. These services are often integrated with third-party platforms, particularly the ServiceNow safe workplace suite.

Here, Infosys is partnering with several global hyper-scalers to offer its Smart Buildings and Spaces offering, managing the lifecycle of solutions, including pathfinder and visitor management. In addition, Infosys offers Azure health and wellness platform focused on occupancy wellbeing and health and safety. Also, Infosys has capabilities to enable the physical workplace to become digital by installing and managing IoT devices, beacons, sensors, and wayfinding solutions. Employee-centric solutions include AR/XR experience, intelligent workplace platform/return to the workplace, employee experience, and touchless experience. These solutions are complemented by an integrated command center, IoT-enabled occupancy analytics, connected field services, Infosys intelligent workplace solutions, and low-carbon eco spaces. From a sustainability perspective, key capabilities include water management, carbon monitoring & control, solid waste management, energy assessment and consulting, and Greenfield building consulting (LEED).

Infosys enabled RXR Realty, a leading real-estate owner, investor, operator, and developer with a commercial portfolio of 26 office buildings in and around NYC, to deploy an Azure-based health and wellness platform focused on occupancy wellbeing and health and safety, incorporating Face Mask Detection, Social Distancing, Indoor Air Quality, Monitoring Occupancy, Energy Management, and Remote Operations.

Additional capabilities across decarbonization include smart metering, smart grids, renewables, electric cars, IoT sensor deployment, command centers, and predictive analytics (including predictive maintenance) across utilities, focusing on optimizing machinery, facilities and operations to reduce costs and overall energy and resource use.

ESG vision 2030

Through its Sustainable Business Practice, Infosys has launched its ESG vision and ambitions for 2030, which include:

• Environment: includes leveraging technology to support the transition to a low-carbon world and support climate change, maintaining 100% water recycling each year, and ensuring zero waste to landfill
• Social: extending digital skills to 10m people, including employees, clients' workforces, students, teachers, and communities by 2025. Empowering 80m lives through tech for good programs and having 45% of women in the Infosys workforce (currently 38.6%); also, delivering 33% of work through flexible/remote work options and driving employee wellness and experience
• Governance: includes building sustainable and responsible supply chains, adopting leading data privacy standards across global operations, and upholding the digital trust of stakeholders.

Summary

Infosys became carbon neutral in 2020, has a clear ESG strategy through 2030, and estimates that it has enabled clients to achieve a 30% reduction in per-capita energy consumption and a 20% improvement in operational efficiencies. 

We expect Infosys will increase its industry-specific capabilities in support of clients’ ESG and carbon-neutral strategies. Across Digital Workplace Services, there is a greater focus on supporting clients’ ESG and carbon-neutral agendas through Evergreen services, including the use of AR/VR in the field to reduce onsite field visits, remote working and onboarding, smart buildings, and use of Green apps to notify users of their carbon footprint. There is also a clear focus on employee experience and wellness and digital re-skilling to support ESG agendas. Here, we expect Infosys to see increased traction across its Wingspan learning platform, where it currently has ~2m users, as clients seek to train, re-skill, and educate employees to support future sustainability initiatives.  

As the world begins its slow emergence from the pandemic, cloud adoption is seeing its already rapid growth accelerate. NelsonHall forecasts overall cloud services to grow by 8% in 2021, with a CAAGR of 5.9% through 2025, both significantly higher than overall IT services market growth of 2.7% in 2021 and 3.6% through 2025. 

This forecast cloud growth also doesn’t reflect related services that project high growth thanks in part to the cloud, such as platform application services, which is driven by Salesforce and SAP S/4HANA in the cloud (projected to grow 5.4% CAAGR through 2025) and data & analytics which is a key beneficiary of cloud’s variable storage and compute capabilities (9.0% CAAGR through 2025).

As both hyperscaler and hybrid cloud offerings mature, the breadth of cloud-based offerings expands, and clients become more comfortable with the ability of cloud environments to meet security and regulatory requirements, the types of organizations adopting cloud continues to grow. To ensure that they are well-positioned to meet this growing demand, IT service vendors are increasingly pivoting their cloud offerings from a supporting capability to an umbrella offering in which the various tracks for cloud adoption are organized and managed as a cohesive capability.

As part of TCS’ Cloud Analyst Day event, NelsonHall spoke with TCS leadership about how the company is transforming internally to be better positioned to support their clients on an enterprise cloud transformation. Here I look at three aspects of TCS’ end-to-end approach to the cloud: its strategy and consulting capability to help clients define their cloud journey, the hyperscaler-dedicated business groups that have been stood up, and how digital workplace services are being transformed with the cloud.

Developing a Cloud Strategy

As clients have matured in their understanding of the cloud, an increasingly important focus is on the upfront cloud strategy and roadmap planning to balance migration risk and optimize the future state cloud environment. TCS is currently seeing six business drivers for its clients’ cloud adoption: M&A activity, application modernization needs, enabling a broader ecosystem, innovating business models, increasing agility & flexibility, and improved regulatory compliance.

To address these needs, TCS positions its cloud strategy across three key pillars:

• The first is focused on building the digital core for the enterprise. This activity focuses on modernizing the legacy application environment, including ERPs and data, and migrating these capabilities to the cloud. This represents the largest portion of its cloud work to date
• The second key pillar is innovating the business model. This uses the digital core as the foundation of an operating model transformation such as defining and moving to the retail bank of the future or identifying how analytics can transform healthcare delivery
• The final pillar is transforming and growing around a purpose-led ecosystem. This builds on a composable IT landscape with AI/ML at its core to move beyond business model changes and look at cross-industry ecosystems to build new business models. For example, rather than looking to increase the use of analytics in healthcare this would instead fundamentally rethink healthcare service delivery: what would an Uber for healthcare look like?

TCS’ cloud strategy and transformation delivers these services to its clients leveraging its Value Engine model that uses a cloud-agnostic approach to build the vision & strategy, business case, transformation roadmap and value realization plan tied to the specific value drivers for the client and its industry. The organization has four key capability areas: strategy & vision, multi-cloud advisory, data & analytics advisory, and cloud transformation office.

Once a strategy is defined, TCS focuses on translating this strategy into an executable plan. It combines assessments of the current state maturity with a broad portfolio of offerings including pre-configured SaaS offerings and migration assets to develop a roadmap of activities.

Centralizing Hyperscaler Capabilities for Business Transformation

Once a strategy and roadmap are developed, TCS has built dedicated full-stack capabilities to partner with its largest hyperscaler cloud partners to execute the cloud migration: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. These dedicated groups provide a single concentrated unit to support AWS, Azure or GCP adoption regardless of the migration path.

As an example of the scale of these groups, the TCS AWS Business Unit has employees possessing ~7k certifications, ~200 AWS architecture blueprints, ~4k rules for migration assessments, and ~21 pre-configured solutions. These solutions span four key areas: migration & modernization, core on cloud (migration of core business functions such as ERP to cloud), user experience, and business solutions (pre-built TCS applications for specific industry use cases). It estimates it has helped ~200 clients migrate to AWS and has industry offerings pre-built across eight industries.

Enabling the Workplace of the Future

TCS has dedicated cloud practices supporting the digital workplace, including AWS, GCP, TCS cloud infrastructure unit, and Microsoft. The Microsoft practice leverages its domain knowledge across industries and a global talent pool of ~50k engineers trained on Microsoft technologies (of which ~20k are Microsoft Certified on Azure) to help clients utilize AI, automation, cloud, and new technologies in the Microsoft stack to drive growth and transformation journeys.

TCS  Cognix for Workspace helps enterprises create an intuitive, immersive, and intelligent workspace: a key to improved employee experience. It drives silent IT operations, augments support teams with meaningful insights, and enhances user experience through digital channels that are future-ready, agile, and resilient. In addition, it utilizes XLAs, knowledge management, enterprise social & gamification, and employee wellness.

TCS utilizes its Secure Borderless Workspaces Solution (SBWS), to provide a unified cloud workspace through its Digital Workplace Studio. It can be hosted on-premise, TCS private cloud, AWS, Google, Azure, Citrix Cloud, and VMware Workspace ONE. Key capabilities include consulting, unified collaboration, virtual service desk, and return to work offerings. SBWS also encompasses a wide range of human functions, including infrastructure, talent management, and employee engagement; processes, tools, and governance mechanisms; and collaboration and engagement practices to enable companies to realize the potential of the new world of work, today and in the future.

TCS has further created ignio AI.Digital Workspace, a self-healing, end-user experience management capability that proactively detects, triages, and remediates endpoint issues for a secure, highly productive and satisfying digital workspace experience.

TCS Positioning as an End-to-End Cloud Partner

Despite years of hype, the momentum for cloud adoption doesn’t appear to be ebbing in the foreseeable future. As clients become more sophisticated and strategic in their cloud adoption approach, it is imperative for cloud services vendors to develop holistic end-to-end offerings, specialized capabilities across hyperscaler partners, and differentiated assets that accelerate client time to value.

Through investments in assets that accelerate cloud adoption and provide differentiated business value, and an approach that places cloud at the core of its services, TCS is building the capability required to guide its clients to maximize the value from cloud migration. 

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. Covid-19 has seen clients accelerating migration to hybrid multi-cloud environments to support increased demand, flexibility, scalability, resiliency, and security to support business continuity. This includes migration of on-premise infrastructure to hybrid cloud, including legacy application modernization to cloud-native systems, or re-architecting for scalable private cloud deployment.

A NelsonHall survey of over 1,000 IT services buyers globally conducted earlier this year shows that just over a third of large enterprise infrastructure landscapes are housed in the cloud today. However, buyers indicated they expect to house 42% of their infrastructure landscapes in the cloud by 2022. As of 2022, buyers expect public cloud adoption to increase by 5% to reach 23% overall, with private cloud increasing 3% to reach 19% overall, and on-premise decreasing from 66% of overall infrastructure landscape in 2020 to 58% in 2022. This growth is only partially driven by public cloud adoption, meaning hybrid cloud is still the default option and will remain the dominant cloud adoption strategy in the future.

Infosys Cobalt enables clients to create new products and services

Infosys views the cloud as the foundation for broader digital transformation and is looking to drive grassroots-level innovation on industry cloud solutions and platforms. It has recently launched Infosys Cobalt, which includes a set of services, solutions, and platforms to enable cloud-powered enterprise transformation. This includes a set of IPs (e.g., Polycloud Platform, Infosys DevOps Platform, Infosys Innov8, Wingspan, and Infosys Enterprise Service Management Café), and ~200 business assets (across oil & gas, BFSI, telecom, media, healthcare & insurance, manufacturing, and retail sectors). In addition, third-party services, solutions, and platforms to accelerate enterprises’ cloud journey.

Infosys Cobalt enables businesses to redesign the enterprise from the core (DC modernization, app & ERP modernization, mainframe and legacy transformation, and technology standardization) and build new cloud-first capabilities (APIs, data and analytics, CX, industry 4.0, IoT, CX, and AI/ML-driven business and systems) in public, private, and hybrid cloud, across PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS landscapes. Infosys aims to combine the art (working with clients to identify and solve business problems) with the science (modernize the core and build for cloud-first) as the overarching framework for Infosys Cobalt.

Increasing innovation, speed to market, and security

One of Cobalt's key components is Infosys’ Cobalt Cloud community, which works from the grassroots level upwards across industries, organizations, functions, and technologies to develop reusable cloud assets to solve business problems. It includes technology and business innovators, partnering with clients and technology partners to help expand innovation. If required, it will co-create these solutions with partners and clients. Building on Infosys’ Be the Navigator program pioneered a few years ago, it seeks to replicate this with the cloud. In essence, everyone in Infosys trained and certified in the cloud can contribute to the Cobalt Cloud community in the form of solutions, accelerators, and building assets to help solve the client’s business problems.

Currently, the Cobalt community includes Infosys, its partners, and Infosys’ clients with plans to expand to startups, academic institutions, gig workers, and cloud developers. For example, Infosys has partnered with Rhode Island School of Design to improve UI/UX. Also, in partnership with Purdue University, Infosys is training 3k cybersecurity professionals over the next three years, who will go through Purdue training and certification, and then join Infosys as part of the program to create its own talent.  

Developing industry-specific blueprints

Infosys’ growing Cobalt Cloud Community currently provides a catalog of 200 industry cloud-first blueprints, curated from 14k cloud assets. Here, Infosys has created blueprints (reference architecture) across multiple industries. It takes these to clients to enable them to pick and choose from these components and then deploy to the wider market. 

These cloud assets are classified under four broad categories, which include:

• Business assets: include platforms, solutions, and services focused on industry verticals and sub-verticals. In addition, horizontal business capabilities and cross-industry business assets
• Engineering assets: platforms, frameworks, services, AI/ML models, and bots (e.g., Infosys Polycloud Platform, Infosys DevOps Platform, Cloud Native Development Platform, Infosys Wingspan, and ESM Café)
• Knowledge assets: includes frameworks, solution capability models, reference architectures, and process models for project implementation. These could consist of project documents, proposal templates, case studies, and large deal submissions
• Learning assets: learning modules as videos, playgrounds, quizzes, assignments, and assessments on technology, hyperscalers, and business solutions delivered through Wingspan. This enables Infosys to train and re-skill resources on cloud technologies.

These assets are made available on the Infosys Cobalt Cloud Store, providing a one-stop-shop for platforms, IP assets, offerings, and solutions. It operates on a marketplace model that enables clients to add their assets and solve their specific business challenges and pick and choose the services and capabilities they want.

Infosys further provides Cobalt Labs and Cobalt Playground at its global digital centers to help clients prototype and co-create new cloud-first solutions rapidly, utilizing its partner ecosystem. The assets, including solutions, platforms, knowledge, and accelerators, enable enterprises to move to the cloud and manage a hybrid multi-cloud environment through Infosys Cobalt's Polycloud platform (multi-cloud management platform with orchestration, brokerage, and AI-Ops). Polycloud allows a client to be cloud-agnostic while transforming into a cloud-native organization. It will enable AWS, Google, Azure, IBM, and other private cloud providers to operate within an enterprise concurrently, building and running applications in a cloud-agnostic way by facilitating portability across cloud providers.

Enabling efficient operations as SRE

As clients embark on their journey to the cloud, Infosys seeks to help them transform operations into a site reliability engineering (SRE) model. Infosys is taking an SRE-enabled approach as the default to manage end-to-end cloud services in a highly automated way through Polycloud. As clients move to the cloud and invest in, for example, containers, APIs, and microservices, clients need the cost of operations to come down through more tools-based automation. Infosys is bringing a de-coupled team structure across infrastructure, DevOps, and middleware into a single team to manage everything as code. Across assets, it is looking to deploy infrastructure as code, creating templates and models where the service catalog will improve architectures used to deploy infrastructure in the cloud, enabling a highly automated model to deploy workloads in the cloud. Infosys also works closely with the client to develop the right cloud strategy for business impact, allowing them to decide, for example, what to keep on-premise, what to put in the cloud, what to SaaS, etc.

Outlook

Infosys plans to build a Cobalt community of ~100k resources in the next 18 months, coming from Infosys, clients, partners, academia, startups, gig workers, and cloud developers. This includes expanding its dedicated resources curating assets from the cloud community.

It also plans to increase its cloud assets to ~100k across business, engineering, knowledge, and learning. In support of its strategic initiatives, Infosys is also deploying its Cobalt capability internally, utilizing several platforms, including Wingspan, for training and development. It is also working in partnership with academia, including Purdue University, to develop skill sets required, in this case, ~3k cybersecurity resources. We also expect Infosys to further invest in its Polycloud Platform, supporting multiple cloud services across IaaS, PaaS, and CaaS – providing everything as a service through its Cobalt Cloud Store. Polycloud also provides API-driven architecture for IaC to expedite SDLC, and through AI-Ops, it aims to move clients from a DevOps to No-Ops construct.

For all clients currently on Infosys Infrastructure Management Suite (IIMS), it is providing a roadmap to migrate all existing client deployments to the Polycloud version at no additional cost.

Finally, we expect Infosys to further invest in its Cobalt Labs to expand its localization initiative to support cognitive and AI services and foster greater co-creation and co-innovation with clients and ecosystem partners in support of cloud services.

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 chain observations & impacts on utilities

Utilities are seeing noticeable demand reduction, led by the commercial & industrial sector, which has mostly gone into lockdown, resulting in load reductions of ~3-11% across most of the U.S. (half of which is due to COVID-19) and ~2-20% in Europe. This is impacting grid operations, as the usual seasonal load shapes of dips and surges in demand (i.e. in the residential sector due to increased homeworking) are changing, all of which are impacting revenues and marginal costs.

There are also further impacts in the rate case and regulatory space with a number of hearings and energy legislation being delayed or postponed, in particular across the U.S., resulting in capital spends tied to these being delayed. It is further impacting the smart meter installation 2020 target set by OFGEM in the U.K. and contingency planning around RIIO-2 price controls. However, major capital programs already approved across the U.S. and Europe are moving ahead.

Across renewables (solar, wind, and storage), sectors are facing supply chain disruption on goods for new installations and maintenance, and parts availability for grid components is further impacting networks. Global electric vehicle sales are expected to drop by ~40% in 2020, further limiting growth in power demand.

These supply chain and logistics issues are impacting transmission and distribution across field services, outage restoration, and preventive maintenance. Discretionary non-critical construction projects are being delayed, although RFPs across IT services are continuing. A major area of concern for utilities is workforce availability, where ~40-50% of employees are field workers supporting critical infrastructure. EEI has advised utilities to plan for up to ~40% absenteeism due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Utilities are adjusting their priorities in response to COVID-19

To ensure business continuity, utilities are ramping technologies, infrastructure, and processes to enable work from home, and according to Infosys, utilities have enabled ~50% of employees to work from home (the remainder are field resources and employees in critical roles across their facilities). They are mobilizing and fine-tuning BCP actions and ensuring rapid logistics support in the supply of PPE for field force and looking to enable the field force with automated processes and technologies, including AR/VR. In addition, they are enhancing monitoring and alerting capabilities in response to cybersecurity threats. Utilities need to provide support for customers, including suspending disconnections, providing self-serve facilities, bots and web chat capabilities, and deploying analytics to track contact center and employee performance while WFH.

Utilities are further deferring discretionary non-critical projects and enabling rapid changes to systems to support COVID-19 response and assessment, with routine inspections and non-critical work assigned a lower priority.

Utilities will accelerate investment in digital technologies to be more resilient

Infosys sees utilities increasing investments in a number of key priority areas, including Digital Workplace, Cloud Computing, Cyber Security, Digital Workforce, Hyper Automation, and Smart Asset Management.

Focus will increase in particular across digital workplace to support WFH, across multiple types of devices, and enabling productivity and collaboration tools (i.e. Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Skype for Business), and supporting virtual call centres. They are using gamification methods to drive employee engagement and enhancing virtual training platforms (e-learning/virtual assistants).

This is further driving cloud requirements to support VDI, IT infrastructure, and training platforms. Other key focus areas include secure connectivity of all devices and assets through unified endpoint management (UEM), and increased focus on data masking and data management.

Focus will increase in enabling the field force digitally, with additional advanced technology like AR/VR, and remote operations, including drones. Companies will also invest in cross-skilling staff across job functions, to be able to do more with less staff.

Utilities need to further streamline operations, including automation of non-decision-making operations, enabling more self-service, and industrial automation for daily operations support. In addition, they need to expedite the transition to next-generation asset performance management with IoT integration, remote sensing, and AI/ML-based predictive maintenance.

Infosys is working collaboratively with utilities to support COVID-19 initiatives

Infosys helps utilities Navigate the Future of Energy by transforming customer experience, modernizing infrastructure (grid infra and IT assets), and enabling future-ready business models. This is particularly key in its current initiatives to support utilities in their response to COVID-19.

Immediate priorities for utilities

While Infosys has done a very detailed analysis of challenges and opportunity impact of COVID-19 across the utility value chain, it is providing utility clients a prioritized view on what they should focus on now and what can be planned for the future. In terms of immediate priorities, these include six key areas:

• Making employee safety and technology a top priority (i.e. IoT sensors to monitor health and geo-locations of field workers), and return to work protocols and mitigating workforce shortages
• Enabling collaboration tools and best practices and remote working infrastructure for all employees and vendors
• Ramping cybersecurity management for all IT systems accessed remotely
• Personalized communication to all impacted utility end customers through smart video, digital billing, etc.
• Enhancing mobile workforce management through GIS-based zoning and tracking (overlaying COVID data) for field services for essential and priority services
• Deploying RPA and virtual assistants for repetitive tasks across call center and back office.

Infosys offerings & client examples

Infosys is supporting a number of global utility clients in their response to COVID-19 across a number of areas:

• Digital Workplace: enabling utility workforces to work from home and remotely through Infosys’ Workplace Suite (collaboration), Modern Workspaces (VDI), Workplace Operations (automation, self-heal, analytics, virtual agents). In addition, enabling traders to access trading applications via VPN for day-to-day trading
• Mobility & Field Force: created COVID geofencing solution and zones for field crew safety and protection, and COVID-19 impact GIS dashboard and real-time crew tracking, and work allocation and prioritization based on zoning
• Customer Service: implementing COVID-19 energy support program and promoting digital billing, canceling service disconnects and waiving late payment charges.

It also sees further traction for its Wingspan open-source cloud-based IT skills training platform, where utilities are currently looking at creating digital CoEs in collaboration with Infosys. The platform now has multiple training courses, including technology, domain, and utility products developed by Infosys, that utility client accounts can use for digital capability build-out and cross-skilling. In support of hyper-automation, it is deploying its LEAP (Live Enterprise Application Management Platform).

Utilities smart bot and AI/ML use cases relevant to the grid, energy supply, and plant operations include:

• Vegetation management and safety, with the ability to quickly do visual analytics through the use of drones for asset and field inspections, and using AI/ML to do predictive analysis, in partnership with third parties to identify where vegetation management needs to be done (i.e. where trees are close to transmission lines and need to be trimmed). The data is processed through the NIA IP layer
• Infosys NIA-based chatbot for anomaly root cause and resolution
• Grid analytics, using Grid 360 from Nexant, taking insights into the NIA common platform, and bringing out insights both at the planning end and operations end of the grid; DERM and urban grid offerings
• AI-based RAMS leveraging KRTI 4.0. Infosys is integrating the Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Safety (RAMS) lifecycle services models from Pöyry with NIA predictive modeling and insights capability and tying this back to the asset management and work management systems to identify whether a specific process should be automated or kick-off a maintenance process.

Outlook

Infosys sees continued traction in cloud adoption across utility enterprises, and a key IP includes its Polycloud (hybrid cloud orchestration) platform which is part of Infosys Live Enterprise Suite, to enable a utility to develop a new digital services platform and quickly launch new products and services. It effectively enables users to build vendor-agnostic solutions across cloud providers. It includes a vendor selection support framework, smart brokerage; self-service tools for server provisioning and deployment; and a governance framework.

Infosys expects further traction for remote surveillance (drone and robotics) for power infrastructure monitoring to reduce field visits, and AR/VR and smart glasses to enable remote field support backed by a central command team to mitigate potential staff shortages in the field.

Further traction in support of COVID-19 (and post-COVID-19) includes remote sensing technologies enabling touchless substations for device management and load control, and IoT, AI/ML-based analytics for planning and asset management. Infosys expects to see further traction for its Wingspan training platform as utilities seek to adapt to the ‘new normal.’

NelsonHall completed an in-depth analysis of advanced digital workplace services (DWS) in 2019. This blog looks at some of the key findings from this research, in which we spoke both to leading IT services vendors and clients of their services. We will also take a look at some of the drivers and trends we expect to see as we move into 2020 and beyond.

DWS is enabling the future-ready workplace

Organizations are placing greater emphasis on overall employee experience through the deployment of digital workplace services. In addition, the role of central IT is changing, adopting the role of a service broker to enable end-users to provision the services they need, when they want, and how they want. This is increasing the need for more personalized engagement models, including self-service (mobile support apps, virtual agents, chatbots, and knowledge articles). DWS is also driving the use of proactive and predictive engagements, including self-healing, AI and automation, and specialist onsite support through Tech Cafes and smart lockers, while utilizing AR/VR in the field for remote services.

A key development is the use of DWS tools and techniques across the entire organization, with examples including the use of chatbots and virtual agents in HR for onboarding and off-boarding activities. Gamification methods are being deployed across marketing and communications departments to drive engagement and adoption of services. In addition, there is greater integration with facilities management through the use of IoT-enabled devices and wayfinding solutions to drive smart office concepts.

Intelligent collaboration services & design thinking take personalization further

Vendors are developing social and collaboration platforms to integrate multiple platforms (including Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Workplace by Facebook, G-Suite, Skype for Business, and Yammer) into one. This is driven by organizational requirements to enable employees to collaborate more effectively on projects through the platform of their choice, and improving overall UX. It also enables targeted communications to specific user groups or personas. We expect activity will ramp in this area, in particular as vendors partner more with disruptors in the market, including Google and AWS.

Many vendors are further utilizing consulting and advisory services to drive a collaborative design thinking approach to client engagements, to develop the digital workplace user experience. They are further investing in and developing dedicated design and digital studios in support of DWS initiatives. This also includes the use of immersive technologies, including AR/VR, to showcase ‘smart office’ capabilities.

Analytics is playing an even more critical role across DWS

Vendors are increasingly looking to use advanced data analytics, NLP, and ML tools to manage and analyze data, including Hadoop and Kafka, and DataRobot to evaluate different ML algorithms.

They are seeking to better understand the big data generated in the end-user environment and act on this data to stop issues in the first place, working out what to automate to drive the best outcome. This also includes the creation of automation scripts or bots to improve service quality pre-emptively.

Another key focus area is the use of end-user analytics tools, including Nexthink and Systrack, to improve end-user monitoring and overall UX. Vendors are collecting data from log files across the different devices deployed across the workplace and aggregating this data to get a view of patterns in data. This is then used to trigger actions to propose preventative measures to improve configuration and to predict, prevent, detect, and fix potential issues before they reach the service desk.

AI-led service desk initiatives are increasing

Many vendors are expanding capabilities in support of AI-led service desk to facilitate the move to a fully automated ‘zero-touch’ service desk capability. This includes automation and self-serve capabilities (IVR, RPA, chatbots, auto-scripts, biometric password reset capabilities, including fingerprint and face recognition).

A key focus includes the development of AI-based virtual agents, using NLP and acting as an L1 agent, learning from past data, and improving through ML. These are invariably a mix of IP and third-party solutions. If the virtual agent is unable to rectify, it may log a ticket on behalf of the end-user (whether incident or request), passing the data and intelligence collected to a specific L2/L3 resolver group. Vendors are also integrating common AI interfaces into VAs, including Siri, Cortana, and Skype for Business, to improve UX.

Self-healing ecosystems will enhance predictive capabilities further

As vendors gain more insights across the end-user environment through analytics and AI, it is enabling greater adoption of self-healing technologies and auto-remediation capabilities. Typical toolsets deployed include Nanoheal and Nexthink, enabling self-heal frameworks that run interactively, helping end-users fix their own issues, or providing agent-assisted services (for example, through ServiceNow to remotely fix issues, or run silently to address issues proactively). Vendors are building libraries of self-heal scripts and self-help including one-click automated solutions, knowledgebase articles, and invariably targeting self-healing at L0, L1, and L1.5 incidents.

Future developments

The DWS market will continue to evolve with demand for even deeper personalization of services driven by increasing workforce expectations across the enterprise. It will also be key to attracting and retaining new talent.

AI-led service desk will expand

The propensity to adopt AI, ML, analytics, and self-healing technologies will increase to facilitate the transition to an AI-led, zero-touch service desk with greater predictive and preventative capabilities to further improve both the end-user experience and employee experience across the entire enterprise. This also includes AI-enabled virtual agents utilizing ML and semantic analytics and enhancing use cases to deal with more complex support issues (L3 and above), and expanding VA capability across the enterprise.

In addition, we expect to see further development in areas including proactive mass healing (L2/3), with super-users within the service desk resolving data corrections or data validation errors with site reliability engineers (SREs) approving solutions offered by self-healing, although we anticipate this will be across a more protracted timeframe.

Microsoft MMD will gain traction

Although end-of-life support for Windows 7 kicked in on January 14, 2020, we expect there will still be considerable migration activity for the foreseeable future, with laggards moving to Windows 10, which provides added security along with device flexibility and improved UX.

We also foresee more traction with Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD), enabling organizations to allow Microsoft to manage their Windows 10 devices, providing the latest versions of Windows 10 Enterprise edition, Office 365 ProPlus, and Microsoft security services. We also expect to see more uptake for Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure, enabling Windows 10 virtual desktops to run on the Azure platform; these will also provide a real alternative to Citrix.

Other developments will include increased provision of ‘aaS’ offerings for Windows and devices, and Evergreen services for Windows 10; and also, EUC as a Service (providing Win10, 0365, DaaS, and unified endpoint management) on a price per-user basis.

IoT-enabled smart buildings will increase

We expect vendors will further enhance their capabilities in support of workplace IoT across the smart office (utilizing beacons, sensors and wayfinding solutions) for smart meeting rooms, reservations, facilities, space management; and expanding field services through AR/VR for asset tracking and worker safety, and remote technical support – in addition to using AR/VR for immersive learning, training, and development.

Greater focus on XLAs and business outcomes

It is likely we will also see greater adoption of business outcome-focused XLAs, which include end-user journey quality, zero-time-to-fix where incidents are avoided, measuring digital adoption (end-user satisfaction, engagement, omnichannel, number of liked and shared knowledge articles).

We anticipate vendors will focus on developing dedicated digital transformation centers and CoEs in areas including AI, ML, automation, data science, cognitive virtual agents, and NLP bots/chatbots – in addition to creating joint R&D capabilities and go-to-market initiatives with key ecosystem partners.

Market disruption

Finally, we expect Amazon and Google will continue to become major disruptors in the DWS market, already evidenced by a number of recent collaboration initiatives with vendors.

NelsonHall recently completed an in-depth analysis of advanced digital workplace services (DWS). This blog looks at some of the key findings from this research, in which we spoke both to leading IT services vendors and clients of their services.

Changing workforce expectations are driving DWS transformation

Organizations are deploying digital workplace services to improve productivity and efficiency while also improving the overall employee experience with more self-service tools, more personalized support, and gamification methods. Offering a digital workplace is also key to attracting new talent.

Employees’ experiences in their personal lives in using mobile devices and AI assistants such as Alexa and Cortana are driving similar expectations at the workplace. There are three engagement models for offering personalized support:

• Proactive & predictive (remote monitoring, self-healing, RPA, AI and intelligent automation, predictive analytics)
• Self-service (portal-based, mobile support apps, virtual agents, knowledge items)
• Specialist on-site support (e.g. Tech Cafes, smart lockers, IT vending machines, video support, smart FM).

There is also an increasing focus in contract agreements on business-aligned ‘XLAs,’ or experience-level agreements (i.e. on user journey quality including zero-time-fix, user hours saved and marginal gain methodology).

Maximizing value from DWS requires collaboration across the enterprise

The buying profile of organizations is evolving as they endeavor to enable more collaborative working by their employees. Where traditionally central IT would drive services as a means to improve cost, IT is now adopting the role of a service broker, offering self-serve capabilities to end-users to provision the services needed, when the end-users want, and how they want.

Recent developments include engaging with marketing and communications departments and using gamification as a means to improve adoption of self-service tools, and with HR for more efficient on-boarding and off-boarding of employees. In addition, collaborating with facilities management to drive the adoption of smart offices (smart conference and booking facilities) and intelligent space management and wayfinding solutions through beacons and sensors.

Design thinking takes personalization even further

Many vendors are now engaging with their clients through collaborative design thinking workshops to generate ideas to improve the end-user experience. This includes the use of ethnographers to understand the profile of target clients and their needs and priorities, including self-serve portal creation. We expect vendors will ramp their design thinking capabilities over the next 12 months.

Social collaboration tools are an important part of UX

There is also growing demand to enable workers to collaborate more effectively through tools such as Yammer, Workplace by Facebook, Slack, Hangout, G-Suite, Skype for Business, SharePoint, WhatsApp, and Microsoft Teams to drive better collaboration across projects and improve end-user experience. Vendors are developing social and collaboration platforms to integrate various social collaboration platforms into one and partnering with disruptors in the market, such as Google. It is evident some vendors are further ahead of the curve than others in this area, with some having already implemented dedicated social collaboration platforms to improve UX.

Windows 10 migration services will continue to ramp

Windows 10 migration has been high on the agenda for some time now, with the end of Windows 7 support in January 2020 forcing the move to Windows 10. Windows 10 provides added security, along with device flexibility and improved UX. There will be a significant uptick in migration rates for the laggards.

Recent developments have also seen the introduction of Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD), which enables organizations to allow Microsoft to manage their Windows 10 devices. Microsoft also introduced Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure, allowing organizations to run Windows 10 virtual desktops on the Azure platform.

Field services will play an important role in targeting IoT-enabled workplace opportunities

The role of field services is evolving with an increasing deployment of field engineers on servicing IoT-enabled solutions such as wayfinding type ones for smart offices and smart facilities. Their activities include installation, management, and maintenance of sensors and beacons in support of these initiatives. We anticipate vendors will also develop further use cases for AR/VR services in the field for remote technical support and training.

Future developments

The DWS market has evolved considerably in recent years with changing workforce expectations driving a greater personalization of services with a higher propensity to adopt AI, cognitive, ML and analytics technologies through a collaborative approach to improve the employee experience.

This evolution continues, with greater use of models including zero-touch service desk enabled through AI, smart offices, and increased use of IoT-enabled devices, AI and AR/VR in the field.

Also expect to see new technologies such as Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD) and VDI on Azure gain substantive traction, and Amazon and Google becoming major disruptors in DWS.

John Laherty, Senior Analyst with NelsonHall’s IT Services practice, talks about his recently completed global research project on ‘Cognitive IT Infrastructure Management’, which covers latest developments in next-generation IT infrastructure and workplace services, including the use of AI, client requirements, and vendor selection criteria. 

NelsonHall recently attended Computacenter’s analyst summit in Hamburg, Germany, its first such event since 2014. Key takeaways are that the company is now focusing on portfolio consolidation and workplace services opportunities for Win10 migration, and on geographic expansion, specifically in the U.S. and Germany.

Let's look at initiatives driving the evolution of Computacenter’s services business, which in 2017 generated revenues of £1.16bn, growing at 7.3% in CC.

Portfolio consolidation & services development

Computacenter is consolidating its portfolio around three core go-to-market propositions across geographies. The U.K. has traditionally been viewed as a workplace services market, with Germany being the market for data centers and networks, so this move is as much about changing that restricted mindset as anything.

The three go-to-market propositions are:

• Digital Me – digital workplace
• Digital Power – cloud, data center, networks
• Digital Trust – security services.

This portfolio alignment will enable Computacenter to showcase its end-to-end capabilities across geographies. It has also invested in senior leadership hires and introduced two new functions to support the development of the services business, which also includes a ramp of Indian delivery resources.

It is also seeing strong adoption of Win10, an important growth area for the digital workplace, where it sees security as the main driver for adoption. These moves also align with the company’s top line growth drivers, which include digital workplace, cloud, networks, and security.

Services development

In line with CEO Mike Norris’s key focus on the development of the services business, it has made some recent senior hires to support this initiative, with Andy Stafford joining as COO (previously SVP, Services at Unisys), and Mo-Siddiqi recently re-joining the company to lead strategy. A key focus for Stafford will be the standardization of the group operating model, although it is likely local management will still retain levels of autonomy regarding go-to-market, which reflects the importance of having local client relationships. Also, Stafford has introduced a Line of Service team across end-user, cloud & DC, networking, data & analytics and security to support proposition development, qualification of large deal pursuits, and driving more repeatable solutions.

Stafford has also created a Service Innovation and Change team to ensure the portfolio is in line with future client requirements, and he will also be tasked with improving global delivery, and as such, is accelerating growth in Bangalore, India. This is an area where Stafford has plenty of experience, having previously been responsible for Accenture’s delivery capability in India. We also asked Stafford about plans for vertical-specific offerings, and he alluded to a focus on the public sector and manufacturing (mostly related to automotive in Germany) in the near future.

Win10 practice

One clear area of focus within the portfolio is Digital Me, where Computacenter sees growing demand for digital workplace services, particularly driven by Windows 10 migration. Computacenter has built a dedicated Windows 10 practice and service offering, and is seeing demand for improved security (in addition to the end of life support for Win7) now becoming the primary driver for Win10 migration.

It also has a strong focus on collaboration and engagement to drive end-user experience, evidenced by its tech bars (providing on-site, self-serve, collaborative services) at over 200 locations. Future developments include greater use of AI and cognitive capabilities, including virtual agents in support of end-user requirements. This is also in line with our recent analysis of the Next Generation End-User Computing Services Market.

Geographic expansion

Computacenter is also focusing on a geographic push, in particular targeting opportunities across the U.S. in support of the subsidiaries of European HQ’d clients. It has focused on the U.S. for a number of years in partnership with CompuCom, but announced recently it had transitioned ~600 employees from CompuCom into Computacenter to target the U.S. independently.

It is likely that Computacenter will acquire further capability in the U.S. This approach seems to make sense, and follows on from the recent acquisition of TeamUltra, which brought ServiceNow capability, further strengthening its Digital Me proposition.

The company has also announced a significant investment in Germany, which has now become the largest and most profitable part of the services business, with CY 2017 operating income overall of £60.3m and 3.5% margin, up 100 bps on CY 2016 (growth driven by the renewal of two of its largest services clients). The manufacturing sector provides good opportunities, in addition to the security requirements driven by Germany’s strict data protection laws. The company’s manufacturing client base includes Daimler, where it is currently supporting the ramp-up of its private cloud infrastructure for initiatives such as autonomous driving.

Computacenter is also investing £35m in building a new HQ and integration center in Kerpen, where it has ~930 employees. However, talent acquisition in Germany remains a problem, and Computacenter has recently opened a center in Poznan, Poland, to support German-speaking opportunities, with ~200 employees providing L1-3 end-user infrastructure support.

One further area of geographic expansion is APAC, where it has established a presence in Dalian, China to support the APAC operations of European clients.

Summary

Computacenter has a strong focus on the digital workplace through its Digital Me proposition, and has the opportunity to target Windows 10 migration opportunities. Its play in security will position it well. However, it will need to expedite its Windows 10 service portfolio, as many of its competitors already have well established Windows 10 migration practices and capabilities.

Although Computacenter has a strong partner ecosystem, it may need to expand its digital ISV partnerships to provide the requisite niche skills and services, in particular in addressing end-user requirements and continually improving the overall user experience.

In support of its services business development, it will also need to expedite the ramp of SMEs, consulting and advisory services, which will take time, to engage clients around a digital transformation roadmap and business outcomes, as opposed to simply responding to client demands.

John Laherty, Senior Analyst with NelsonHall’s IT Services practice, talks about his recently completed global research project on ‘Next Generation End-User Computing Services’, which covers latest developments in build and run workplace services. Here he touches on EUCS market size and growth, key drivers, and major trends – including the shift towards persona-based self-service capability, and the increasing use of cognitive technology, predictive analytics, self-heal capabilities, and augmented reality.

NelsonHall recently had a briefing with senior management at Getronics to discuss the merger of Connectis under the Getronics portfolio. In this short blog, I look at what the Connectis business brings to the wider Getronics group, the aspirational growth targets that have been set by new CEO Nana Baffour, and some of the key focus areas for Getronics moving forward.

Baffour became chairman and group CEO of Getronics in August 2017, following its acquisition from Aurelius for €220m, by Bottega InvestCo, of which Baffour is a majority shareholder. The Connectis business was acquired by Aurelius in 2012, providing applications and managed cloud services for ~500 clients in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America Markets. It has ~2,400 employees, and a turnover of €130m.

Up until now, Connectis and Getronics have operated as separate entities, but in November 2017 Baffour announced the merger and integration of the two businesses (with combined revenues of ~€500m) under a new global Getronics branding – clearly indicating a greater desire from the new owners to operate as one company. Baffour also announced an ambitious strategy to increase revenues to $1bn by 2020, with 70% from acquisitions providing access to new geographies (people, tooling, experience in IoT and big data) or new industries; and 30% organic growth, which by our estimates would equate to ~26% targeted growth, of which ~8% will be organic. This will be no mean feat.

What does Connectis bring to Getronics?

Getronics has traditionally provided workplace management services, networks, UC&C and managed cloud services (through the 2016 acquisition of Colt’s managed cloud business).

Connectis’ primary target geography is Iberia; it also adds scale in Latin America (Brazil, Chile, and Argentina). It brings in application services capability, and industry-specific IP in the airports sector (currently focused on Spain), including mobile apps for passengers. Connectis also brings some datacenter management capabilities, which are more obviously complementary to Getronics’ infrastructure-centric portfolio.

Getronics is looking to cross-sell Connectis’ industry IP into its core geographies, focusing initially on the U.K. and Belgium. There have been some early wins in the U.K. airports sector, with Getronics supporting clients both onshore and from Connectis’ airport sector application maintenance center in Spain.

Getronics is also looking to cross-sell its portfolio into Connectis’ Iberian and Latin America regions; local management will retain autonomy in terms of go-to-market, a reflection of the importance of having local client relationships.

Utilizing field sales capability to target IoT-enabled opportunities

Getronics is looking to further develop its extensive field services capability, both within Getronics and through the wider Global Workspace Alliance (GWA), which it leads with its partner CompuCom (read recent CompuCom blog here). GWA has a network of 38k personnel, including 15k field services engineers, and supports 9.9m managed workspace assets and 6m users.

One initiative to expand the use of its field-force is the development of IoT-based offerings, installing and maintaining sensors and beacons. Other examples include managing drones in remote areas of Spain to check that building regulations have been met. In support of this, Getronics is forging partnerships with sensor and actuator manufacturers.

Emphasis on digital workplace

Getronics is also evolving its traditional service desk proposition to help clients evolve to a digital workplace. This includes an increased emphasis on the UX, providing a self-service and persona-led approach; also the Solution Café concept, providing walk-in tech support and training facilities, to further facilitate self-service capabilities.

Bottega looking to acquire to build on Getronics

Under its new ownership, Getronics is likely to follow the same acquisitive path it followed under previous owner Aurelius (who made five acquisitions). Baffour has set an aggressive M&A strategy. Of the target $1bn revenues by 2020, 70% will come from acquisitions, and 30% from organic growth, which would equate to ~26% targeted growth, of which ~18% will be inorganic growth.  

So, what should we expect to see in terms of inorganic growth? Initiatives we might expect include:

• Adding capabilities that are complimentary to the aspirations around IoT-enabled product support. This might include small to medium-sized specialists in the utilities sector
• Further expansion in Iberia
• Baffour is also CEO of Grupo Cimcorp, a Brazilian IT infrastructure services vendor with 600 employees, and he may decide to bring it into the Getronics fold.

Getronics also has the potential to utilize its IP in the airports sector, across new geographies, and also its IoT Smart Spaces offering across health, transport, land use and malls.

NelsonHall recently attended a Unisys analyst and advisor day in London. The tagline for the UnisysNOW event was Securing Your Tomorrow, with security taking a central role in the firm’s corporate transformation, along with a vertical-led go-to-market strategy, and analytics. Here I take a look at Unisys’ transformation to date, and at its future strategic direction.

Unisys financial performance

Unisys has undergone a number of turnaround programs over the last ten years; its last CEO refreshed leadership, sales, delayered the organization, simplified the portfolio, and reduced the expense structure. There has been a major reduction in the global field-force, with NelsonHall estimating this has almost halved over recent years to ~4k personnel.

The current CEO Peter Altabef, who joined in January 2015, has reorganized Unisys to a vertical-led go to market organization, and introduced a stronger focus on industry IP, supported by globally integrated delivery teams. In April 2015, the company introduced a further cost reduction plan to drive a more competitive cost structure and rebalance its global skill set. This achieved $205m in annualized cost savings exiting 2016, above its original plan of $200m.

Unisys’ revenues in 2016 were $2.82bn, a CC decline of 4.4%, at the upper end of guidance, and non-GAAP operating margin was 7.7%. However, the Services business (~85% of overall revenues) has recorded revenue decline for the last three years. The ongoing focus is to improve margins of Services and overall business through operational efficiencies, improvements to WC and FCF.

However, margin expansion at corporate level is dependent on Technology revenue and ClearPath licenses which tend to be lumpy on a quarter basis. Unisys also has a major challenge over the next few years with its underfunded U.S. DB plan.

Leadership and salesforce refresh

Altabef has built an entirely new senior leadership team, with hires from the likes of Accenture, IBM, Capgemini and Dell Services, bringing in outside experience and helping evolve the Unisys culture, and over a quarter of the company’s client execs have been replaced. There is a stronger focus on proactive proposals.

Looking to demonstrate its innovation capabilities with clients, Unisys has launched a dedicated center in its Virginia HQ for exec briefings about new services. Of the first six exec briefings, four were with clients in Australia.

Consultative-led sales approach

Unisys is also looking to significantly ramp-up its consulting and consultative-led sales engagements (advisory & project work). It has launched a new sales enhancement training program focusing on advisory and consulting skills across the firm, and has also hired 54 domain experts.

The aim is to drive outcome-based client conversations, focusing on business issues, with a drive to increase overall client satisfaction.

It has also introduced a new compensation plan, where a third of account executive compensation is now tied directly to client NPS scores.

Vertical-led go-to-market strategy, leveraging IP to target market opportunities

Unisys has aligned its sales executives to four verticals: Public Sector, Travel & Transportation, Life Sciences & Healthcare, and Financial Services. These are supported by 36 vertical-specific solutions and services such as Digital Investigator (an upgraded version of U-LEAF, Unisys Law Enforcement Application Framework) in the public sector, Pharma Track & Trace in life sciences, and Elevate by Unisys in financial services.

Unisys has deployments of Digital Investigator across EMEA, the Caribbean and Australia. Unisys is likely to see further expansion of its Law Enforcement and Border Protection capabilities across EMEA, in particular U.K. (post Brexit); there may also be opportunities in the U.S.

Elevate by Unisys, its omni-channel digital banking platform, has built-in biometrics and is offered as-a-Service (via public or private cloud) or as an on-premise solution. Launched in Q1 2017, it is being targeted at tier 2 banks in EMEA first and then in APAC and LATAM.

Reinforced by security

As highlighted by the tagline, a key focus of Unisys continues to be security, in particular the Unisys Stealth assets. Altabef highlighted that “(we) don’t enter every conversation with Stealth, (we) enter with the offering and what security makes sense in the context of the offering”.

Unisys has evolved Stealth from dedicated on-premise software, and it is now available on AWS and Azure. Stealth functionality now includes Stealth(mobile), Stealth(cloud), Stealth(identity), Stealth(analytics). The recently launched Stealth(aware) automates the implementation of Stealth. Stealth revenues are still relatively small (NelsonHall estimated revenue of ~$12m in 2016), but now has a dedicated sales team.

Unisys also highlighted its plans for ClearPath Forward, including the ability to deploy ClearPath Forward in hybrid cloud environments by 2020.

Improving the Services business

Unisys is looking to increase its use of automation and AI across EUC, infrastructure managed services, and application services. Initiatives currently underway in support of this include:

• Within C&IS, Unisys is expanding automation with toolsets including VantagePoint and ServiceNow, driving more self-help, and also the use of Tech Cafes. Unisys cited an example within infrastructure support, where it currently deals with ~16k tickets per month, and is looking to automate 75-80% of these tickets
• In application services, Unisys is looking to grow its transformational consulting capabilities, next-generation ADM and DevOps capabilities. It has made a number of recent hires (agile transformation leads). As well as increasing automation, including the use of virtual agents and chatbots in service delivery, it is also leveraging analytics within application maintenance.

Unisys is also seeking to further leverage its advanced data analytics capabilities, which are currently focused on its main client, the Department of Homeland Security, where it claims to have ~300 personnel running >700k predictive models daily to identify threat. Unisys plans to ramp up its capabilities in advanced data analytics, and is hiring a number of data scientists and consultants.

Summary

Unisys continues on its corporate transformation, and has selected security, industry-specific IP and analytics as focus areas for growth. The transition to a consultative and advisory led sales culture; and ramping up on domain experts across industries will take time.

Altabef highlighted EMEA (~27% of 2016 revenues) as a region of focus, and this has been evidenced with a number of recent senior hires in the EMEA region. Restructuring continues in EMEA: the divestment last year of its Italian SAP practice helped to improve EMEA operating margin.

The early signs are that Unisys continues to improve its overall financial stability.

In the near to mid-term, improving margins of the Services business will continue to be a priority for the company.

NelsonHall has recently published an updated Key Vendor Assessment on Unisys, providing a comprehensive and objective analysis of Unisys’ IT and business process services offerings, capabilities, and market and financial strength. NelsonHall also produces Quarterly Updates on Unisys in its Quarterly Vendor Update program. For details, contact [email protected].

NelsonHall recently attended a session in London with HPE Enterprise Services (HPE ES) and Microsoft for an update on their Cloud Productivity & Mobility (CPM) partnership based on Windows 10.

HPE ES shared its vision of the end-to-end ‘Modern Enterprise’, using Windows 10 to enable it to manage and offer a consistent user experience across the entire organization. HPE ES sees one of the main drivers for adoption of Windows 10 as the ‘end of life’ support for Windows 7, which ceases at the end of December, 2019. As a result, many enterprises will be embarking on a migration over the next three years.

HPE ES currently manages ~7m desktops globally, with the vast majority on Windows 7 operating systems, and it intends to migrate all these clients to Windows 10 by end 2019 or early 2020.

A long-standing partnership

HPE ES and Microsoft have a partnership that goes back over 30 years, particularly in relation to workplace services. In November 2015, they announced an expansion of the partnership with the availability of Cloud Productivity and Mobility (CPM) offerings based on Windows 10.

HPE ES is offering:

• Consulting services (digital process design and transformation, application development and prototyping): in essence, mapping HPE ES’ services onto Microsoft software products (including Office 365, Windows 10 for Enterprise, Dynamics CRM, Skype for Business, and Enterprise Mobility Suite with Security), and also offering managed services
• Cloud and mobility consulting for the Windows 10 ecosystem, including ‘Reimagine 10’, five-day joint workshops with Microsoft that combine business issues with technology analysis, and user experience and workflow to help accelerate transformation. The workshops culminate with a Statement of Work (SOW), including high-level architecture, pricing and a timeline from prototype to live in a few weeks.
• Industry-specific Windows 10-based applications (see below).

HPE ES has strong desktop credentials

HPE ES’ Workplace and Mobility capabilities include:

• Managing ~7.0m desktops across 135 countries
• ~2.5m managed devices
• Providing service desk support in 43 languages; >44m service desk contacts per year
• 48k Microsoft trained professionals (joint)
• 500+ Microsoft Dynamics professionals.

Deploying joint industry-specific Windows 10-based applications

HPE ES and Microsoft are jointly deploying healthcare, automotive, transportation and financial sector-specific applications in client organizations, Examples include:

• Healthcare: telemedicine solutions (leveraging Skype for Business for remote patient monitoring and diagnosis); also piloting wearables solutions for diabetes monitoring
• Automotive: an offering built on Microsoft Dynamics for the after-sales market (HPE Automotive CX Management Solution).

Other solutions also being jointly developed include industry-specific solutions in the retail, energy and manufacturing sectors.

Three-phase approach to Windows 10 desktop migration

HPE ES is looking to leverage its cross-industry and geography capabilities to enable clients to become an end-to-end Modern Enterprise, with the ability to manage and offer a consistent user experience across their organization. This is envisioned as a three-phase process:

1. Advise: understanding the client approach: big-bang, phased approach (pc by pc), mobility requirements (BYOD); application criticality (and actions to take when a new version is available)
2. Transform: moving to the cloud; application virtualization, joint HPE ES/Microsoft DC
3. Manage: managed services including level 1 service desk, level 2 & 3 support, and level 4 support (Microsoft); transformational projects (e.g. Exchange, Sharepoint).

HPE ES will target desktop deals above 500 seats, whether as a standalone contract or as part of a multi-scope IT infrastructure contract. HPE ES will then seek to provide project transformation around the desktop managed services, with most of its enterprise customers currently looking at Office 360 for Exchange as the starting point. HPE ES’ view is that not all these will be 100% in the cloud, but mostly hybrid.

Within these projects, HPE ES will hold advisory workshops first, building a business case and calling out what it calls ‘watch-points’, which are essentially technical issues that could affect the transformation project (e.g. security, network bandwidth, archiving, legal). An assessment is then carried out, and clients are provided with access to Microsoft FastTrack, providing resources and tools to help with Office 365 rollout.

After Exchange, HPE ES is now starting to see more enterprises looking at Sharepoint in the cloud.

Outlook

Looking ahead:

• Microsoft have aspirations over the next three years for HPE ES to become its top #2 or #3 partner globally in supporting the Enterprise (by number of seats) in the cloud 
• HPE ES’ intention to transition most of its ~7m client desktops to Windows 10 by 2020 at the latest will be a huge undertaking, even more so because many of the migrations will be hybrid in nature
• HPE ES claims to have won a number of deals in last 12 months across industries for Microsoft Office 365 (~35 contracts), and Windows 10 (~15 contracts) and expects this to continue
• HPE ES and Microsoft claim there is strong demand for their joint industry-specific Windows 10-based apps, in particular for MS Dynamics across industries (with many still in pilot mode)
• HPE ES will also merge with CSC by the end of March 2017, and will benefit from the recent CSC acquisition of UXC in Australia, and investment in eBECS, a U.K.-based Microsoft Gold Partner, both bringing significant capability in Microsoft Dynamics and ~900 employees.

The HPE ES partnership with Microsoft on Cloud & Productivity Mobility will allow the company to take real advantage of opportunities with enterprises on Windows 7 migrating to Windows 10. However, the timeline to transition many of its ~7m desktop base to Windows 10 in three years appears optimistic.

Although end of life support for Windows 7 will cease in December 2019, we are unlikely to see a stampede to move to Windows 10 – as was the case when Windows XP extended support ended in April 2014 (indeed, HPE ES still has a number of desktop clients on XP today). It would have been good to see more on IP and accelerators from HPE ES, to show how and why they are differentiated in the market with this offering (although HPE ES is looking at a number of predictive analytics and shift-left capabilities through a persona-based approach within the service desk).

HPE ES will soon merge with CSC, and this next stage of the company’s evolution should present many opportunities to leverage this offering further.