En effet, l’étude montre que pour un produit et un package donné (un ipod Touch, une housse et des téléchargements gratuits dans l’étude) le prix que les clients sont prêts à payer n’est pas égal à la somme des éléments qui compose l’offre mais à la moyenne perçue du package. Concrètement, les clients valorisent 25% plus cher l’Ipod Touch seul que dans un package avec un téléchargement gratuit… Paradoxalement, 92% de la population marketing de cette même étude estime que le package Ipod + téléchargement a plus de valeur (ce qui est vrai dans les faits…).

Si l’on transpose cette réalité sur la perception des offres aux catalogues de service des sociétés de services IT (catalogue très fournis, souvent riche d’une grosse dizaine de solutions…), on peut alors considérer que l’appréciation du marché d’un portefeuille de solutions porte sur la moyenne des offres qui le compose et non pas sur la couverture exhaustive de la demande qu’il représente.

Tout autant que de comprendre les attentes du marché, il est important pour une direction marketing des services d’avoir une vision de la performance des offres plus fine qu’un simple processus annuel de remontée commerciale.

La gestion dynamique des portefeuilles de solutions est aujourd’hui nécessaire et doit s’accompagner d’une prise de décision rapide.

Une récente étude de PAC sur les TJM illustre ce contexte tendu sur les prix avec des acteurs qui luttent pour créer de la valeur (…augmenter leur prix… et retrouver des taux de marge).

En conclusion, il semble que 2 règles de base se dégagent:

• Elargir son portefeuille d’offres diminue la valeur perçue de votre positionnement
• Limiter son portefeuille d’offres aux offres “excellentes” augmente la valeur perçue de votre positionnement

Depuis longtemps, l’Union Européenne réfléchissait à un tel projet, mais une concrétisation se faisait attendre. La première pierre est désormais apportée à l’édifice, et les SSII peuvent s’en réjouir. Les entreprises privées du secteur de l’électricité peuvent effectivement tirer de nombreux avantages d’un réseau de cette nature. Elles peuvent profiter des croissances économiques plus fortes dans certaines régions de l’UE, mieux vendre l’électricité issue de la filière “énergies renouvelables” et baisser les coûts de transport (à long terme). Tous ces facteurs ont, de manière directe ou indirecte, une influence importante sur la demande en terme de services IT.

E-Highway 2050 demande en effet un investissement considérable, notamment en matière de technologie. Ainsi, les services IT autour du Smart Grid connaîtront un essor important allant du conseil en amont jusqu’à l’implémentation dans un deuxième temps et la maintenance à très long terme. Une présence pan européenne des prestataires de service sera également indispensable ; s’y ajoute une très bonne connaissance des enjeux métier. Les services autour des énergies renouvelables auront également le vent en poupe, le nouveau réseau permettant effectivement de mieux acheminer l’énergie ainsi produite.

La réalisation du plan est prévue pour 2020-2050, il s’agit donc de relais de croissance  à long, voire très long terme. Mais face à l’ampleur de la tâche et la longueur des cycles de décision dans cette industrie, le positionnement des SSII sur ce créneau dès maintenant paraît indispensable.

Or, depuis le dernier scandale alimentaire, les notions de chaine d’approvisionnement et de traçabilité sont mises sous les projecteurs. Il est vrai que les industriels rencontrent des difficultés à gérer les informations techniques des fournisseurs et des matières premières tout le long de la chaine d’approvisionnement. C’est pourquoi des solutions de stockage et de partage d’informations spécifiques sont particulièrement recherchées.

Excellent timing puisque Trace One propose une nouvelle plateforme « Booster » qui permet aux industriels d’améliorer la gestion des matières premières auprès de leurs fournisseurs, l’objectif étant de gagner en transparence vis-à-vis des consommateurs finaux. En effet, toute niche, aussi privilégiée soit-elle se doit d’évoluer avec les challenges de son secteur. Selon PAC, il ne s‘agit pas d’une évolution « tendance » mais au contraire d’une évolution cohérente et significative de l’offre, développée notamment en partenariat avec des groupements d’industriels. L’aspect communautaire de cette offre est également intéressant dans une optique de partage d’informations légales ou de santé publique dans un secteur particulièrement dynamique en règlementations.

Peu de concurrents existent encore sur ce segment. Bien que des solutions technologiques de traçabilité existent déjà et n’ont cessé de s’améliorer depuis plus de 20 ans, peu d’acteurs se positionnent comme Trace One sur la transparence. Ce positionnement a du sens puisque les solutions de traçabilité ne sont pas en mesure d’identifier par elle-même la réalité entre le flux physique et le flux d’information. Puisque les contrôles systématiques ne sont pas légions, la transparence permettrait d’aller plus loin que la traçabilité. Pour autant, et comme toujours ce n’est pas l’adoption d’une solution facilitant la transparence qui empêchera de nouveaux scandales. Mais c’est bien l’implication des parties prenantes dans une collaboration, qui permettra de détecter bien en amont les anomalies de la chaine d’approvisionnement.

• The perception of SAP users and SAP partners considering “Suite on HANA”
• Opportunities and challenges for users and the ecosystem
• Implications for the SAP ecosystem in terms of skills and service offerings
• Evolution of the ERP-related services business

We do not expect that every SAP customer will invest into SAP HANA, but we expect that almost every customer will evaluate if and how they can benefit from SAP HANA.

Therefore, SAP partners that implement SAP applications have Suite on HANA on the radar screen. It will become mandatory for consulting firms and systems integrators in the SAP ecosystem to add SAP HANA capabilities to their practice.

Regarding the services business, we expect SAP HANA to push the overall SAP services market. However, to a certain extent, the services business will see a shift from SAP-related services around relational databases to services around SAP HANA.

With Suite on HANA, SAP is increasing its reach to the data management level. In the past, SAP used to be database agnostic. Although SAP will continue the support for data management technologies from partners such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Teradata and others, Suite on HANA will have a significant impact on the SAP-related data management business.

SAP partners will extend their existing portfolios for application- and analytics-related services. For example, partners will add SAP HANA concepts to their implementation tools and methodologies.

In addition to the evolution of the existing services portfolios, we expect new types of services to emerge. One example are consulting services for a real-time business transformation, the development of custom applications (native HANA applications).

The transformation of business processes to become real-time processes uses SAP HANA as a foundation. However, it requires the involvement of lines of business and in most cases external consultants to manage the shift from traditional processes to real-time business. Therefore, SAP HANA could be the ignition for innovation within the SAP customer base.

Although SAP HANA is going to become ubiquitous for SAP’s portfolio, it is not the only in-memory technology available. Many database vendors have started to develop in-memory extensions to their platforms, including the market leaders Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.

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Recent achievements in FSI

During 2012, SAP could grow its revenue in the financial services and insurance (FSI) segment by 31%, which is clearly above the overall average. Hence, FSI contributes an increasing share of revenue (8% of revenue in 2012 was FSI-related). But there is even more to this: From PAC’s point of view, special interest should be paid to the increasing share of FSI-related revenue with core industry solutions, which grew even stronger, according to PAC’s estimates. The solution portfolio was extended (e.g. a whole bunch of banking-specific Rapid Deployment Solutions already cover main parts of SAP’s banking portfolio) and almost 150 new projects were won.

PAC’s view

This development underlines SAP’s strong commitment to this industry segment and describes the progress that has been made regarding the industry-specific portfolio. And it confirms SAP’s shift from selling ERP to being a provider of a broad set of solutions to lines of business as well.

While only a few years ago, many banks and insurers were still rubbing their eyes in disbelief when talks about SAP’s core banking and core insurance capabilities came up, SAP now belongs to the leading solution providers in these fields globally. The provider does not deter from supporting complex banking and insurance processes. Recent customer wins and projects have made obvious that customers are increasingly accepting SAP as a strategic partner for their core IT. But of course, SAP is still facing various challenges in the FSI space.

Challenges – in brief – arise from different sides:

1) From the clients’ side: By far not every client has already been convinced of SAP’s capabilities in the core insurance and core banking space or is aware of the solution portfolio. Many companies from the financial services sector shy away from SAP’s industry-specific solutions as they fear complex and costly implementation projects.

2) Parts of the SAP organization still represent a rather technological-driven positioning. Further re-thinking and re-positioning is needed in order to position in a more business-centric manner. The dialogue on business levels needs to be further strengthened, which requires further industry insights. Moreover, SAP has to make sure that enough trained specialists (from SAP and its partners) are available for delivery at all times. But of course, this is not only a question of FTEs as quality is much more important than quantity, which is why SAP needs to pay much attention to this.

3) SAP’s ecosystem of partners strongly influences the acceptance of SAP-based banking and insurance solutions regarding both, sales and delivery. According to SAP, almost 40% of business in FSI is generated through partners today. This is high already but could still be higher in the light of the high number of banks and insurers that are potential SAP customers. Further experts for sales and delivery are required on the partner side and need to be convinced of their SAP-related opportunities in FSI.

All in all, SAP’s recent achievements in the FSI space are good news for SAP partners and the atmosphere in Den Haag accordingly was very positive.

• The perception of SAP users and SAP partners considering “Suite on HANA”
• Opportunities and challenges for users and the ecosystem
• Implications for the SAP ecosystem in terms of skills and service offerings
• Evolution of the ERP-related services business

We do not expect that every SAP customer will invest into SAP HANA, but we expect that almost every customer will evaluate if and how they can benefit from SAP HANA.

Therefore, SAP partners that implement SAP applications have Suite on HANA on the radar screen. It will become mandatory for consulting firms and systems integrators in the SAP ecosystem to add SAP HANA capabilities to their practice.

Regarding the services business, we expect SAP HANA to push the overall SAP services market. However, to a certain extent, the services business will see a shift from SAP-related services around relational databases to services around SAP HANA.

With Suite on HANA, SAP is increasing its reach to the data management level. In the past, SAP used to be database agnostic. Although SAP will continue the support for data management technologies from partners such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Teradata and others, Suite on HANA will have a significant impact on the SAP-related data management business.

SAP partners will extend their existing portfolios for application- and analytics-related services. For example, partners will add SAP HANA concepts to their implementation tools and methodologies.

In addition to the evolution of the existing services portfolios, we expect new types of services to emerge. One example are consulting services for a real-time business transformation, the development of custom applications (native HANA applications).

The transformation of business processes to become real-time processes uses SAP HANA as a foundation. However, it requires the involvement of lines of business and in most cases external consultants to manage the shift from traditional processes to real-time business. Therefore, SAP HANA could be the ignition for innovation within the SAP customer base.

Although SAP HANA is going to become ubiquitous for SAP’s portfolio, it is not the only in-memory technology available. Many database vendors have started to develop in-memory extensions to their platforms, including the market leaders Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.

Related posts:

Free Advice To CIOs: Speed Your BI: Your CEO And Your Users Will Thank You

SAP Business Suite On HANA: Somewhere Between R/4 And An Enhancement Package

Fjord specializes in customer experience and user design providing customer engagement services across new digital consumption platforms such as smartphones and tablets. The company has a bit more than 12 years market presence and over 200 design experts in several key business hubs across the globe. Major clients include BBC, BBVA, Telefonica, Citibank, Nokia, Paypal and Qualcomm.

As with avVenta’s operations, Accenture will integrate Fjord within ‘Accenture Interactive’, its dedicated business unit covering digital marketing services, ranging from strategy consulting to marketing analytics and marketing operations services.

PAC’s View

The market around digital marketing ripens quickly as most leading IT supliers are steering their investments to reaching out to digital and marketing executives.

The relevance of ‘digital’, understood as Customer Management Experience (CXM), is gaining contour in the portfolios and positioning of major SIs such as Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte and IBM. PAC believes that the most advanced providers pushing into the digital marketing space are the ones closely aligned to the strategies of CXM SaaS and software majors such as Adobe and Salesforce.com.

We believe the battle for the unconquered ‘digital marketing’ market will be especially interesting to watch between key rivals Accenture and Capgemini, the latter equally ramping up investment in its Digital Transformation practice.

The digital transformation services opportunity is also throwing the IT consultancies in direct competition with a new category of competitors – digital & online agencies. PAC believes it will be even more interesting to follow how the competitive environment will evolve once classic SIs will enter the territory of these domain specialists.

Basically, HANA Enterprise Cloud is a set of managed services provided through SAP’s data centers. The customer gets an environment to deploy SAP software on SAP HANA. According to the vendor, users can decide what resources they want for the operation of SAP software, such as analytics, SAP BW, ERP, CRM or native HANA applications. Depending on the respective workload requirements, resources can be shifted from one application to the other.

The offering does not include the SAP HANA software license. So customers bring their own license and use the operational services offered by SAP.

PAC’s view

Although not every detail is available about HANA Enterprise Cloud yet (we expect more during the upcoming Sapphire Now in Orlando), this offering addresses one challenge customers may have with the operation of SAP HANA. Since SAP HANA is a new technology that requires new skills regarding operation, a managed service can be helpful.

HANA Enterprise Cloud offers companies a good way to deploy SAP HANA without heavy investment into hardware. There should also be better scalability.

Also, HANA Enterprise Cloud may offer customers an easier entry into the deployment of SAP HANA compared to an installation on their premises. That said, SAP has indicated that in the future, HANA Enterprise Cloud will be available for on-premise deployments, too.

On the other hand, there will be data center providers that will try to offer similar services to SAP customers, so SAP will not be the only player in this game.

Philip Carnelley, PAC Principal Analyst Software, also contributed to this post.

Their optimism stems from the fact that the niche areas of technology that they specialise in have helped them stay afloat during the times that even the larger firms have struggled. This divergence in the Indian ITES space is not new and is expected to continue to even become more significant over time as the companies mature and find their own niche and develop deeper and wider relationships with clients in these markets, while continuously developing new markets. The Tier II have been able to expand their relationships with the existing clients, generating additional revenues, enabling them to add to their sales force in these markets while also investing in emerging technologies. This strategy seems to have worked wonders for them, while larger companies seem to have been hit by sluggish demand and severe competition for deals that has hurt the larger players.
Some mid-sized firms also decided to exit areas that faced huge competition. For instance, KPIT Cummins, based in Pune, quit banking services an area where practically every Indian ITES company boasts of excellence and expertise. KPIT turned its attention to manufacturing and more specifically automotive space, where the competition is much less.

Another trend which is clearly benefitting them mid-sized players is that since the global crisis began, customers have moved away from the very large deals of hundreds of million dollars that was the trend in the middle of the last decade. Now the deals come in much smaller sizes and are limited in scope. While this could have discouraged the big boys of ITES to chase the smaller deals, it has been a boon for the Tier II players, who have been eagerly bagging these deals. Hence, it is not surprising that most of the mid-sized companies are confident of beating the 12-14 percent growth in exports for the current year forecast by Nasscom, the association of Indian software companies. The scenario for the moment for these companies is pretty rosy, but they are not without any challenges as they would need to ensure that they continue to scale up their models, finding new clients and expanding their relationships with the exiting clients. Sustaining this growth for the mid-term or the long term is the enigma that they need to crack and only those Tier II companies that can crack this puzzle can aspire to move up to the Tier I club.

At the “Salesforce Customer Company Tour 2013 – London“ yesterday, 2 May 2013, the presence of a number of large SIs such as Accenture, Capgemini, CSC and Deloitte proved this. During the event I had the chance to quickly discuss their partnership with Salesforce.com and the evolution of their Salesforce.com practices. They each gave a similar message: SIs are excited about the development of salesforce.com related business and have been able to multiply their revenues with no short-term signs of slowing down. Since many of Salesforce’s customers are large enterprises, the related consulting and integration market has already reached quite some momentum. Thus, it has become a main focus for major SIs, and investments into building up capabilities have been shifting towards Salesforce.com.

I can see several common factors across these successes. First of all it is not surprising that all of these SIs with strong Salesforce.com practices have a strong consulting background. They embed their Salesforce.com capabilities within an overall transformation services offering with slightly different shades and names, such as “Customer Experience Management”, “Digital Transformation”, “Enterprise Application Transformation”, “Cloud Transformation”, etc. At the same time, following the providers’ strategy to develop into a platform provider (rather than a mere CRM provider), the “Salesforce.com world” combines a number of key elements that companies are right now struggling with, when engaging into a transformation process, namely cloud, social and mobility. And, of course, it does so while putting the customer (and thus revenues) into the center of attention. Last, but not least Salesforce.com’s platform strategy invites not only software partners, but also the SIs to create value for their customers around the core Salesforce.com SaaS solutions. Value that ranges from custom developments, integration into back-office solutions to creating added value-IP solutions based on the platform.

In terms of vertical, the SIs confirmed that clients from all industries are interested in transforming their customer processes using the Salesforce.com platform and often this approach is especially interesting for them when different, rather independent business units and a large number of international locations are concerned. This confirms that with the right solution, a SaaS strategy is not only interesting for small companies but also very relevant for large enterprises with interesting business opportunities for a growing services ecosystem. Crucial in this process will be that Salesforce.com continues to work hand in hand with its services partners when moving forward.