Blue Ocean Strategy @ IBM – Customer Experience Lab Social Business & Analytics focus

IBM had been aggressively investing in social business initiatives since 2007 when company set up a separate unit for selling social business software under the brand name Connections and has built a significant customer base for this business. The company further boosted these initiatives with the launching of IBM Customer Experience Lab headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and supported by researchers at IBM's 12 global labs, including Africa, Brazil, California, China, India, Israel, Japan, Switzerland and Texas. The lab merges skills across disciplines, including service science, industries research, mathematics and business optimization, social, mobile, Smarter Commerce, data mining, cloud computing, security and privacy, cognitive computing and systems management. IBM had realized the fact that growing social networks not only impact people’s lives but also significantly impact the business organizations and how they run their operations across the globe. People of all ages are aggressively engaging on various social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. and also actively seeking to use those platforms even in their professional careers within the organizations. More and more employees are bringing in their own devices to the work place and this Bring Your Own device scenario is presenting a big challenge for business organizations. "Customers across the world are using innumerable channels—from social networks to online product review sites—to express their individual experience with products and services. This is fueling an explosion of data and driving a radical shift in how companies must engage with their customers to thrive and stay competitive," Ramesh Gopinath, director of IBM Research India, said in a statement.

Organizations too are significantly impacted by the digitization of media, documents and communications and have to equip their organizations with the suitable technology infrastructure that suits these trends. IBM had been betting big on the social business and analytics as essential for its future growth strategy and accordingly it is offering products like IBM Connections which is their social business platform offering. IBM has introduced a new suite of social, mobile and big data offerings to help businesses gain deeper insight into their customers' needs and desires. IBM Customer Lab since its inception through IBM Research scientists and business consultants have worked with more than 100 global clients and co-created a range of new technologies and services transformed and revolutionized the way companies interact and engage with customers. Digitization and digital customers had forced the organizations assess their brand loyalty initiatives and increase business growth by not looking at customers as mass audiences  but putting more emphasis increasing the value of personalized customer relationships. IBM is considered to be the market leader in the Social business software segment and as companies across the globe realizing the need to integrate the social networking platforms within the organization for both employee and customer engagement By focusing on the social business segment before the competition it is able to create dominant position in the initial stages of uncontested market place and the value innovation proposition it is offering is also is attractive for the clients as the clients are seeing significant return on investment.  

Nonlinear Revenues – Key future growth driver for Tata Consultancy Services

Since past few years Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has been focusing on non-linear revenue generating businesses like Software Products (Asset Leveraged Solutions), Platform-based BPO services (Process Clouds) and iON – an IT-as-a-service solution for small and medium business.  Nonlinear revenues delink revenue growth with proportionate headcount growth. Non-linear revenues from existing clients can be generated through productivity-enhancing tools, frameworks, solution accelerators and managed services engagements. One of the crucial initiatives added by TCS is to automate some of its commoditized information technology (IT) service lines for achieving more non-linear growth. Current product and service offerings from TCS non-linear business model are products such as BANCS (BFSI), Rewardz and mPOS (retail), hosted OSS/BSS (telecom), Clin e2e and Med Mantra (life science & healthcare) and SWIFT MRO (travel); vertical platforms for industries; technology platforms like iON - a fully integrated IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) model for small & medium businesses; and solutions comprising several configurable solutions and pre-built components.

TCS signed a multi-year agreement with Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) wherein TCS F&A platform provides pre-built and pre-configured financial processes, tools that lead to rapid and efficient implementation of solution. Solution is provisioned under a Cloud model including infrastructure, applications, IT maintenance and multiple platform developments over the duration of the engagement. The platform is designed to conform to the latest global statutory and legal norms, such as IFRS and GAAP. TCS's deal with the Home Office to run the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), which was created when the Criminal Records Bureau and the Independent Safeguarding Authority came together also a major boost for nonlinear revenue growth as the company plans to offer services with less number of delivery staff and increase the amount of automation and digitization, which requires less people. TCS automate internal processes and offer citizens new digital channels for services.

Commoditized services refer to back-office IT projects where firms bill customers on a per-person, per-hour basis and automation in these processes will increase productivity and reduce human errors. TCS’s global head of human resources Ajoy Mukherjee highlighted that non-linearity remains a focus area for the company in terms of products, platforms and consulting and in the future, the contribution from non-linear is going to improve. TCS CEO Chandrasekaran highlighted that the company would invest in newer areas of technology such as social, mobility, analytics and cloud computing for nonlinear revenue growth. TCS is betting on digital as an important growth driver and the digital unit is developing products that will improve company’s edge in new contracts and will also take forward its nonlinear agenda. Non-linear revenue growth can be achieved by developing intellectual property-based solutions. Currently, nonlinear initiatives make up 10 per cent of TCS's new revenue and TCS CEO is expecting non-linear revenue contribution to significantly improve in next three years and "It is the future business model," he says.