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.