Cloud
The Unstoppable ‘Amazonification’ of Sourcing and Procurement
IT Outsourcing: Changing Landscape
The last few years have triggered dramatic changes in the way IT outsourcing arrangements have been made by enterprises. As expected, some of the changes are taking time before they become center stage. In addition, some of the triggers did not live past their hype and fizzled out before they could deliver the promised value sought by enterprises.
Everyone Into The Cloud
Outsourcers fear the coming Robot Revolution. Specifically, they are concerned that robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will wipe out traditional outsourcing. The reality is that the technologies behind the Robot Revolution will create the greatest outsourcing opportunity of all time…cloud services.
Offshore Impact: Report From The Trenches
Almost every week in the last few months someone has asked me about the general mood on the streets of Bangalore. What are the IT professionals in the Silicon Valley of East making of the changes in the industry? How is the senior management of offshore headquartered service providers preparing for the future? While there are several versions of the predicted future, everyone agrees that this is a watershed moment in the evolution of the IT outsourcing and offshoring industry.
Three Considerations for Optimizing Your Hybrid Cloud Environment
Cloud adoption is on the rise. According to a recent Gartner prediction, the worldwide public cloud services market will grow 18 percent in 2017 to $246.8B, up from $209.2B in 2016. As more and more organizations move to the cloud, many IT teams are tasked with identifying the right infrastructure framework to ensure they meet their business and operational requirements – a challenging task considering there are so many options.
More, more, more: 2017 will be marked with easier access to data, increased analytics and better cloud storage
There is no doubt that cloud, big data and artificial intelligence will be trending in 2017, just as they were in 2016, and will likely be in 2018. These are multi-year endeavours because the true implementation of technologies under these umbrellas have just begun, and challenges - like finding quality resources and better understanding of the technologies to fit into the business use cases - remain.
TBM: time’s up - are you ready or not?
I remember attending the first technology business management (TBM) conference in 2012. Back then, the concept of this new data-driven framework, which would help measure and manage IT budgets, consumption and value, was new and exciting. Speakers and delegates talked at length about how TBM would respond to the need for financial transparency, deliver data that could drive decision-making at the highest levels, and unpack the consequences of decisions made in the past.
Live Wires #9: Cartographer of the future
Wipro’s KR Sanjiv is a busy man. As CTO, he has the weighty task of making sense of tomorrow’s disruptive technologies - today - then enabling Wipro to compete and win in these areas. We met him to hear how his team thinks about the future, and where RPA and AI fit into their roadmap.
Live Wires #8: Late or leapfrog?
An almighty fight is raging for control of the RPA software market. Who is the market leader? Which is the best product? Which features really stand out? There are a number of names in the frame, but one name Daniel Dines wants you to hear is UiPath. He is its founder and CEO and he spends his day spreading the word globally about what his software can do. We caught up with Daniel, to get his perspective on RPA and the world of smart automation.
EMEA As-a-Service boom contrasts sluggish traditional outsourcing activity
We’ve just published the latest ISG Index, which includes – for the first time – a view on the growing As-a-Service market. Whilst combined second-quarter ACV in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market fell by 18% year-on-year to €2.2 billion, the new data reveals record growth of the As-A-Service segment, contrasting the sluggish activity in traditional sourcing.
Building a BRIDGE to better insight into non-profits
Though millions of non-profit entities exist worldwide, their activity, social impact, financial performance and effectiveness remain relatively mysterious, at least in aggregate. In order to increase their transparency, four leading non-profit organisations partnered with my company, a Polish software development firm, to build a platform that would uniquely identify social sector entities around the globe – a vital first step towards understanding the bigger picture.
Identity, Transparency and Data
Q&A: Kate Vitasek, University of Tennessee & Vested (Part 1)
One of the most famous figures in the global outsourcing arena, Kate Vitasek is also – not coincidentally – one of Outsource’s most popular contributors, having graced our pages with both her regular column (examining lessons to be learnt by the sourcing and outsourcing community from renowned academics and thought leaders from elsewhere in business) and standalone articles for over five years.
Look busy: the robots are coming
It seems like there isn’t a day which goes by at the moment without a new robotic invention in the news, with promises around how these inventions will not only revolutionise our lives, but threaten our jobs.
In the outsourcing sector robots are most definitely on the way, or in some cases, already here. And it is, therefore, vital that businesses operating in this sector seriously consider how some robotic processes can enhance their operations – there’s no doubt competitors are also considering the same issue.
Both sides now
Almost twenty years ago, my son responded to the ubiquitous inquiry “What do you want to be when you grow up?” His interlocutor was his Italian godfather (the Milanese not the Sopranos variety). There were certain implicit cultural expectations about the response, the godfather being both a lawyer, an aristocrat and an exceptionally cultured Renaissance-man: doctor, lawyer at one end of the spectrum, bookended by painter, composer at the other with the (yes, stereotypical) accommodation to age and gender of train driver somewhere in-between.