Key Findings & Highlights:

Sopra Steria is a France headquartered IT services company primarily focused on delivering IT services within the European market. In CY 2018, Sopra Steria had revenues of €4.1bn, its headcount at the end of June 2019 was 44,959.

Sopra Steria has a federal organizational structure, and its operations (countries and its various software product units) have prime P&L responsibility. Within major Sopra Steria geographies, Consulting and Systems Integration (C&SI) accounts for ~64% of revenues and has structured its delivery organization by major vertical. Its C&S services include the following:

• Continuous modernization services
• New development services
• SaaS services
• Continuous maintenance services
• End-user support services.

In January 2018, Sopra Steria agreed to acquire BLUECARAT, a German consulting, agile development, API management, and cybersecurity specialist. BLUECARAT was founded in 2001 and services large clients in manufacturing, financial services, and public sector. It had 2017 revenues of €33m. Germany is a strategic geography for the company. With BLUECARAT, Sopra Steria gained access to new verticals and new clients.

In CY 2018, Sopra Steria had revenues of ~€4.1bn (~$4.5bn). Sopra Steria reports that ~64% of these revenues are associated with consulting and application services, with 85% of these revenues coming from application services. NelsonHall estimates that ~34% of these application services revenues are made up of agile development and DevOps services (~€885m / $973m).

Sopra Steria has developed specific offerings across three distinct areas to enable clients to modernize their application landscape:

• Agile and product management services
• DevOps and automated development services
• Low code development.

Sopra Steria has a total headcount of ~45k currently, with ~20k application development focused employees. NelsonHall estimates that ~40% of these employees work on agile development engagements (~8k).

Sopra Steria delivers services from 25 countries including delivery centers in Spain, Poland, India, China and Singapore.

Sopra Steria also has a broad DigiLab network. DigiLabs are client and demo centers and offer 120 use cases across sectors.

Sopra Steria has built mature capabilities for both the delivery of scaled agile projects and DevOps. Its broad set of certified employees with agile and DevOps capabilities positions Sopra Steria well to deliver scaled agile for its clients. While it possesses some remote delivery capabilities, its delivery resources are primarily located either at client site or in nearshore centers on the European continent. As clients continue to become more comfortable with distributed agile, it will be important for Sopra Steria to continue to invest in growing these remote capabilities in its remote delivery centers in parallel with its more client-proximate employee base to remain cost-competitive.

Sopra Steria's Digital Enablement Platform has been refined and evolved since its introduction in 2013 and has been utilized across a large number of clients. Having an evolving DevOps platform in place for more than five years gives Sopra Steria a mature capability to offer clients. It is looking to further mature this capability with the addition of new capabilities such as AI, including expanding its portfolio of optimized pipelines to support AI capabilities.

While it is investing in these pipelines, it is still working on its own delivery teams' use of DevOps pipelines, ensuring that teams are using the appropriate pipelines for each scope of work. A broad portfolio of offerings is only of value if being appropriately leveraged by the delivery team to achieve client objectives.