As CIOs and IT leaders rely on the cloud to grow their businesses, new trends and innovations will continue to emerge and reshape the future.
Cloud is no longer a buzzword that is only popular in big businesses, but, has trickled down to the masses. It is woven in our everyday lives, in the way we communicate, listen to music, watch movies, and store or share our data. Cloud has also dramatically transformed the way business is conducted. Recent studies have shown that businesses employing cloud services improve their productivity and grow 19.6% faster than those that don’t.

The digital economy we operate in, marks the boundless growth of new age technologies such as IoT, big data, real-time data capturing and analytics, and on-demand services. In this aggressively competitive scenario, cloud provides a conducive environment to create a lean, flexible, and responsive digital eco-system that is required to navigate the rough tides of the connected world.

Here are some key cloud trends that impact IT strategies in 2017 for organizations looking to deploy cloud services:

1. Cloud 2.0

A new era in cloud technology has begun. From ‘cloud first’, companies are moving to ‘cloud only’. As per IDC Chief Analyst Frank Gens, cloud implementation is “moving beyond experimentation towards mass enterprise adoption.” Cloud 2.0 is about doing more with the data that is stored in the cloud- analyzing the patterns in data, identifying anomalies and drawing insights. According to Diane Greene, Senior VP of Google’s cloud businesses, organizations should reflect on the question, “Now that you’re in the cloud, how do you take advantage of it so that your business can operate at a whole new level?” Powered by Machine Learning and intelligent analytics, Cloud 2.0 is moving from mere storage to data analysis and more.

2. Cloud Containers

It is believed that the use of cloud containers will become more widespread. The portability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency in operations that containers enable, are the reasons for their increasing popularity. According to cloud experts, containers will be used for deploying solutions to solve real-world business problems. Companies will use them to provide new services that are secure, efficient, elastic, and scalable.

3. Cloud Microservices

Harnessing the real potential of cloud is possible through the use of microservices architecture. Cloud microservices is used for creating new applications, as well as for utilizing existing ones. This is especially useful for companies migrating to the cloud, which can create microservices around existing applications, thereby easing the transition. When combined with containers, microservices can bring to the forefront, the features of scalability, re-usability, and resilience that cloud promotes.

4. Cloud APIs

Cloud Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) are becoming increasingly customer-centric. Being consumer focused is having a positive impact on their quality, maturity and scalability rate. Event economy (If This Then That), web automation, and digital transformation are fueling the growth of cloud APIs, as APIs help in the adoption and development of automation for businesses and consumers. APIs are playing a vital role in business because of their ability to integrate platforms and apps. They are able to remove barriers to revenue growth by facilitating the swift launch and scalability of business models.

5. Server-less Computing

Server-less Computing is a key trend that is bound to grow as it requires far fewer infrastructure resources and eases the load on developers. As the adoption of ‘Function-as-a-service’ increases, server-less computing will rise to support the shift from DevOps (scripted automation) to NoOps (intelligent operations). In line with AI, analytics, and automation, server-less computing will contribute to the creation and use of smarter machines that save time, effort, and money.

6. Cloud Security

Security still remains a concern for companies moving to the cloud, though, there is an increase in the number of organizations that are transitioning. In order to ease their worries, data security in the cloud will have to step up. The cloud is expected to be a strong provider of security as a fundamental offering. Storage options, flexibility, easy deployment, and scalability are features of the cloud that enable it to ensure complete safety of data.

Impact of Cloud Trends 2017

The trends affect multiple aspects of business – growth, cost, revenue, customer experience, and ability to innovate. As these aspects tend to be interconnected, we have examined the impact on the following key factors:

1. Enhanced Customer Experience

Cloud 2.0, being the era of data analytics, real-time intelligence, AI, automation, and machine learning, will enable organizations to understand customers and provide a seamless experience across multiple channels. E-commerce, loyalty programs, and on-demand support are examples of cloud services that aid in providing superior customer experience.

2. Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

On account of being virtual, cloud is more cost efficient than physical infrastructure. Cloud technologies such as server-less computing are bound to reduce costs even further while increasing the organization’s productivity and efficiency. Also, the benefits of agility, flexibility, and scalability that the cloud provides, have long-term impact on optimizing costs.

3. Improved Agility and Business Intelligence (BI)

Cloud APIs help in the faster implementation of business models and their scalability. This means businesses can quickly respond to changes in the market using innovative strategies. Additionally, companies can draw actionable insights by processing and analyzing raw data in the cloud. These insights prove to be a solid base for developing innovative products, services, and solutions.

Leveraging Cloud to Grow your Business

As clearly indicated by the above trends, while there are immense benefits in moving to the cloud, jumping onto the cloud bandwagon without proper knowledge or guidance is far from a prudent business move. For companies to remain updated, relevant, and competitive in a world that is dominated by rapidly evolving technology, they need to have a strategic cloud framework in place that is agile, efficient, and flexible. Partnering with the right solution providers can give companies that edge.

The Road Ahead

As CIOs and IT leaders rely on the cloud to grow their businesses, new trends and innovations will continue to emerge and reshape the future. The use of hybrid models of public and private clouds will become the norm, as organizations use multiple different providers for specific services. Further, companies will have to invest in training the workforce to augment their cloud skills and incubate newer technologies.

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According to Nigam, the consumption patterns are shifting from back office to front, and the IT is revenue enabler and therefore the consumption of solutions would be smaller in nature

Nishikant Nigam, EVP and Chief Delivery Officer, CSS Corp, and an ex-Infoscion, speaks about the evolving role of the delivery officer how a mid-tier outsourcing firm finds its niche among the larger players, and why he thinks smaller deal sizes in the industry are here to stay over the next 3-5 years.

Here are some edited excerpts from the interview:

Q: How is the role of a Chief Delivery Officer changing, with automation being such a constant theme?

In the past, it was probably the back-office role, therefore the role of the Delivery Officer or a Delivery Head of any organization becomes much more important, it is more connected to the clients and the businesses to solve the business problems which are the technologies, which are fairly new and maturing very fast.

Earlier there was an era of large deals; you would see 50-100 million dollars deals, a lot of focus was on executing those deals to perfection and that was the delivery main role, but today, with deal sizes have become much smaller, and therefore all the organizations who are providing IT services have to be different.

Q: You are a mid-tier services company, how is the kind of deals that you get into different from your larger peers? Do you think large deals are going to make a comeback?

A: My view is not in the near term because the consumption patterns are shifting from back office to front, and the IT is revenue enabler and therefore the consumption of solutions would be smaller in nature.

So, we won’t see 100 million dollars deals. It’s already happening, those are not there in the market. I think we are still three to five years away from a time when technology disruption of this kind takes place.

You would see the consumption pattern would always be small because our clients are also figuring this out (new technology), it takes time. And therefore I don’t think that we are going to see that kind of deal size in the near term but at the same time, the excitement and the consumption would increase on the smaller deal size, there would be many such deals because when you play on the revenue side the pie is much bigger. In the next 2-3 years, you would see multiple such deals happening in parallel and that is where we are also seeing traction.

We are getting into that part of the business and seeing the consumption growth in terms of numbers.

Q: So, what are the technologies that clients are most excited about?

A:  Data is becoming the most important thing we all know that people say “Data is the new oil, data is gold”. So, I think that technologies which are going to deal with real-time data are going to be very very important. The enterprises today have to make real-time decisions on their consumer behavior and therefore you need to have solutions which can enable that.

Technology-wise, there are multiple technologies which would come together. It would be a combination of data science, AI, analytics, IoT, virtual assistance. All those technologies or a combination of them would provide those kinds of experiences to our customer’s customer.

Q: You mentioned AI and IoT you have also been investing very heavily, internally in these technologies, could you talk a little bit, about the Cognitive Customer Experience Platform platform and other initiatives?

A: We invested very heavily some months ago in our Innovation Labs.

We have around 50 plus User experience designers, extreme programmers, we have around 40 data scientists, who are only working in the labs. Therefore, all these guys, the great brains are coming together.

Cognitive Customer Experience Platform is our AI platform which is one of the platforms, which is ingesting a lot of data, it also helps in virtual assistant in real time, it can be applied to conversational commerce, and it can be applied in the tech support area of where it becomes an enabler

Active Insights is a customer intelligence solution. We are sitting on the huge amount of data from our customers where we can find patterns in that data, we can apply those patterns into real-time work, in terms of either benefiting the business process or helping in terms of making the hyper-personalized experience for their customers so all that can be done through that.

We also have a context-driven IT operations and automation platform called Contelli, which can be applied to any infra world hybrid eco-system. It can quickly bring down the total cost of ownership as well as it has very contextual automation and we believe on the cost side in the contextual automation.

Q: How are you finding people with the requisite skill set? Are you retraining internally?

A: These are specialized services and I think that there is enough talent because in our lab we don’t need more than 100 people. So, from that point of view, you can attract talent. There are those kinds of people available, they may not be in large numbers. Secondly, you also need to re-purpose, re-orient.

The other thing is to retain talent. The employees need to also see whatever they are doing, they are able to generate interest in our client’s organization, and they are also contributing to our revenue growth.

As word spreads, this is how more and more people come in.

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In a digital economy, customer experience [CX] is the new currency. CX is at the epicenter of the success of any engagement across industries. According to a Walker study, by the year 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. Organizations should understand that flawless post-purchase customer support is the key component of a well-crafted customer CX strategy. Amidst all the evolution and innovation in the technology industry, the key differentiator for companies is the personal care and support that they offer to their customers.

Increasingly, technology companies are looking at ways to deliver customer support services around the connected home sector. Demand for cross-platform consumption of media and content is opening further revenue opportunities for OMEs and service providers. Organizations are experiencing enormous difficulty in improving CX, with limited support budgets. With the steady increase in the number of devices and the growing needs of users, support costs are prone to shoot up.

To add to the woes of the product industry, product revenues are declining due to the growing popularity of the anything-as-a-service (Xaas) model and the dramatic increase in competition. Moreover, traditional, reactive support budgets are shrinking. Opportunities that enable the creation of additional revenues to subsidize costs have become the need of the hour. Therefore, there is intensified pressure on support functions to step up and generate top-line revenue growth for businesses.

Recalibrating Investments in Technology

Until now, the core objective of most customer service and support engagements has been to reduce cost, automate back-office business processes and manage support remotely. Driving revenue for customers seemed unthinkable. Vendors seldom discussed solutions where the value proposition was around helping customers generate new revenue streams and augment growth opportunities. The majority of organizations are yet to realize the hidden potential of their customer support function to transform into a growth catalyst.

In the current scenario, not many companies are paying enough attention to new-age solutions which have the prowess to mitigate challenges in generating revenue. Also, there are not many ideal solutions in the market that are future proof.

The key is to design a customer-specific support solution that helps companies enhance customer experience and convert their CapEx-heavy support function into a profit-making function. Organizations need pre-packaged support solutions that include customer service, self-help, knowledgebase, analytics, and operational expertise. The service should be built on a revenue-sharing approach, aimed at transforming a cost center to a profit center and converting non-revenue generating calls into revenue streams for the connected homes sector.

Support Center into a Profit Center

A robust, sophisticated tech support service such as Premium Tech Support (PTS) is the best possible remedy to all these business problems. PTS is the ideal pre-packaged solution that provides the entire gamut of services from supporting consumer products to managing infrastructure and deploying networks. This should be a subscription-based model that generates significant revenue while creating superlative customer experiences at the same time.

This brandable tech support solution effectively leverages the transforming power of digital, automation, analytics, artificial intelligence, omnichannel support, and machine learning.  Cognitive computing and digital analytics (including predictive and consumption analysis) embedded in PTS, enables unearthing of deep insights into the behavior and needs of customers. Advanced machine-learning capabilities identify issues and correlate them across multiple parameters in real-time. Organizations are able to use this solution to manage customer environments, and also proactively identify, fix and self-heal issues via automation independently. It has the ability to trigger alerts to contact center managers whenever there is a need for action.

PTS’ subscription-based model can earn significant revenue share for businesses, as they get a share of the revenue for each subscription that is sold. For example, if the agreed share percent is 30%, the company will earn $30 million out of every $100 million, that is earned through the sale of subscriptions.

Powered by Omni-channel and Mobile Support

PTS provides omnichannel support which lends a single view to all customer interactions and conversations. It converges traditional and digital channels in the context of the customer journey, resulting in new revenue opportunities. It empowers customers to start an activity in one channel and transition seamlessly to another.

In a tech support environment, omnichannel support will bring transformational benefits with higher responsiveness to evolving customer needs. The solution will provide a 360-degree view of customer engagement, interactions and effective multi-channel management. Consequently, the customer will get a quicker resolution with a seamless experience across all channels.

Mobile support in PTS will act as an instant digital touchpoint for customers to escalate device issues, optimize services and enable payments. It would help them procure new services through the mobile app resulting in additional revenue for the customer.

In addition, it would also enable customers to stay connected with their customer base and help increase brand recall. It would give customers the privilege to access DIY tools, receive product and firmware updates, information on new product releases, and promotional offers on products and services.

Driven by digital Analytics

Digital analytics helps in determining customers’ next best action. Advanced analytics solutions are used to surface new patterns and influence customers’ purchasing decisions. It provides intelligent insights into customer propensities, resulting in enhanced CX and new business opportunities.

Digital analytics in PTS coherently amalgamates data, processes, analytics tools and visualizations. This enables faster time to insight and enhances the quality and reliability of insights through exploratory and self-learning models. Therefore, it would help to improve business outcomes through data-driven decisions.

A recent Gartner survey reveals that customer experience is fast becoming the new battlefield and the pressing mandate for organizations to achieve sustainable success. A specialized customer support model powered by robust analytics, fuels top-line revenue growth and creates new avenues for profit, apart from nurturing long-lasting customer relationships.

Smaller companies that had made investments in technology would have an edge over larger players as the newer digital services they could offer had not yet been hit by commoditisation and consolidation, said CSS Corp’s Nishikant Nigam

Mid-sized IT company CSS Corp expects to grow faster than the market as a smaller-size and technology investments gives it an edge over larger rivals.

The company, which is majority owned by private equity company Partners Group, revamped its management last year bringing in former Infosys executive Manish Tandon as CEO. The $150-million revenue company is targeting 15% revenue growth this year.

Most of the growth is being created by the changes that the new management has put in place.

“Observing the current environment and the way the services industry is growing with anemic rates, we have taken several strategic measures around creating a flexible business engagement model with our customers,“ said Nishikant Nigam, chief delivery officer at CSS. “If you look at the last two quarters, after quite a few years of stagnant revenues, we are growing 3% sequentially quarter on-quarter and looking at the pipeline, the growth will continue.“

Nigam said smaller companies that had made investments in technology would have an edge over larger players as the newer digital services they could offer had not yet been hit by commoditisation and consolidation.

“With all the changes taking place in the industry and the consumption patterns emerging, it is clear that if you are in the right place, with the right tools, you have a huge opportunity. But if you are seeped into legacy as an organisation and you are still looking for large deals, then there is a strong chance you may struggle,“ he said.

While the larger Indian IT companies get on average about 20% of their revenue from digital deals, the majority of their business is facing cost pressures from clients who want to spend less on IT to free up money for investments.

Cloud technologies, automation and a fast-changing technology landscape have also put an end to multi year mega deals that used to drive their growth. This is unlikely to change, according to Nigam.

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