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 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.

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.

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.