Key Findings & Highlights:

Tech Mahindra was founded in 1986 and is headquartered in Mumbai, India. A major shareholder is Mahindra Group (with ~36% of shares).

Tech Mahindra started focusing on offering agile development services in 2011. It added DevOps capabilities in 2013. Initially, it focused on selling the business case for agile development for clients to adopt it.

The lead group within Tech Mahindra, delivering modern application services, including low code application services, is a horizontal consulting group called Business Excellence (BE). This global team of ~250 consultants targets both clients and delivery teams on agile, DevOps, and low code applications.

In addition to BE, in June 2019, Tech Mahindra acquired Objectwise Consulting Group, an Ontario-based Pegasystems services specialist. Objectwise had revenues of CAD 13.6m in the financial year ending September 30, 2018.

Tech Mahindra is also partnering with the Project Management Institute (PMI) to develop a standard Citizen Development Canvas, consisting of guidelines, tools, and templates to help clients adopt citizen development culture, practices and application platforms (CDAPs) or low code application platforms. In particular, the two organizations are collaborating on a standardized continuous development framework that extends beyond the technical pipeline and encompasses changes to processes, organizations, and governance.

While Tech Mahindra currently sees low code applications still primarily being utilized by professional application developers, it projects the growth of use by non-professional developers (citizen developers) to be significantly higher going forward.

The Business Excellence team estimates it has seen ~100 clients adopt low code applications across 2019 and 2020. The pandemic accelerated these efforts as companies focused on accelerating application development responsiveness to the rapidly changing business context. Tech Mahindra saw four key drivers of the growth:

• The democratization of software development
• Rationalization of shadow IT
• Accelerated prototyping and innovation
• Rapid automation/digital transformation.

NelsonHall estimates that Tech Mahindra's total revenues for CY 2020 were ~$5.2bn. NelsonHall estimates that application services revenues accounted for ~65% of this (~$3.4bn).

NelsonHall further estimates that ~2% (~$68m) of this application service revenue is delivered using low code application services.

Tech Mahindra positions low code application services as a key component within the broader transformation of enabling clients' enterprise transformation. This overall offering is led by the BE team which focuses on the organization design, culture of change, practices, and frameworks to help clients implement a citizen development capacity supported on specific technology platforms by the company's remote development team.

Enabling client transformation to embrace citizen development (i.e., use of low code application platforms), Tech Mahindra offers a broad portfolio of services to support the evolution of the technology landscape as well as the broader enterprise.

As of December 31, 2020, Tech Mahindra has a total of ~131k employees globally. The core of Tech Mahindra's low code practice is its CodeZero COE. In addition to the BE team that consults with employees, CodeZero has ~1k employees trained across its low code platform partners.

Tech Mahindra is placing significant focus on its low code application services, investing in developing a CoE that builds a foundation of assets that enables non-technical employees to deliver services on a low code platform. This expands the pool of capable employees to support clients while also embedding key industry and business process skills at the core of developing these targeted applications.

Additionally, with its collaborative work with PMI, it helps clients undergo the enterprise-wide transformation required to build citizen developers and evolve the entire organization to maximize the value of these capabilities. Taking this broader perspective to these services' scope, positions it well to be a broad transformation partner for clients, moving beyond a role as purely technical support.

While Tech Mahindra has experience working across a broad number of low code platforms, as is the nature of emerging technologies, it has relatively shallow experience across these platforms. This includes some of the more mature platforms, such as Pega and Appian. Its deepest experiences lie in smaller platforms, which differentiates it from its competitors. However, it may act as an inhibitor if a client has already implemented another platform.

Specific to its Pega capabilities, it acquired Objectwise in 2019, which brings it North America-based capabilities, but this group still acts independently of both BE and CodeZero. Focusing on integrating these capabilities with CodeZero provides Tech Mahindra a broader Pega capability and ensures global alignment to best practices.