TechM’s Next-Gen Connected World Strategy: TechMNxt

ISG was part of Tech Mahindra’s TechMNxt event held on April 11-12 in Hyderabad, India. In these two days, TechM showcased its digital technologies capabilities and how its businesses are aligning to the company’s “3-4-3” organizational strategy. TechM’s focus is on what it calls “#newagedelivery,” its approach to software transformation, cloud solutions, artificial intelligence and building connected systems.

TechM is focusing on the following:

• Aligning individual business units with the “3-4-3” organizational strategy
• Building a robust partner ecosystem in focused areas to quickly gain market share and accelerate business
• Investing in design thinking to enhance customer experience
• Investing in upskilling existing employees to raise digital competency
• Investing in different intellectual property, platforms and frameworks for building the company’s solutions portfolio on connected ecosystems with renowned names in the industry like Cisco, Vodafone, PTC and others
• Creating partnerships with start-ups in key areas like augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI)
• Strengthening its networks; TechM is working to build robust IoT capabilities and develop new IP for its cloud services.

Run, Change and Grow – TechM’s Strategy

CEO C. P. Gurnani kicked off the meeting by announcing TechM’s strategy and its increased focus in the areas of customer experience, connected ecosystems, networks and AI.

TechM’s 3-4-3 strategy encompasses the company’s outlook on three major trends, the four big bets it’s making and its three important objectives, which are listed in the table below. TechM is striving to be the company that brings together the three biggest trends in the industry, which it considers to be connected devices, newer technologies (like 5G networks) and video on all devices. To support this strategy, TechM launched TechMNxt, a strategy that focuses on enhancing digital customer experience, developing an IoT-connected world, pursuing software transformation and building networks of the future. TechM has aligned each of its individual business units to this broad strategy.

“3” Trends	“4” Big Bets	“3” Objectives
Connected devices New technologies (5G) Video on all devices	Integrated digital customer experience IoT-connected world Software transformation Networks of the future	Run better Change faster Grow greater

To build digital capabilities and accelerate market growth, TechM has partnered with many startups that specialize in niche areas, especially in customer experience, networking, software and sensors. TechM also is deeply focused on building its IoT capabilities, which is a natural move considering it is strong in networking that amounts to significant revenue of $2.3 billion from its overall company revenue. TechM also continues to invest in automation and has proven success by reducing cost per resource by nearly 41 percent.  

Customer Experience

Understanding the end-customer usage patterns, pain points and sweet spots of its clients’ is imperative for TechM to craft an apt solution. TechM has made strategic investments in customer experience by partnering with design thinking specialist players such as BIO Agency and Pininfarina. These partnerships help TechM bring strong consulting practices to its clients to help them embark on their digital journeys.

TechM also showcased its ability to deliver high quality services by increasing automation in its customers’ contact centers. TechM has made significant progress, automating as many as 39 percent of transactions for one of its key clients. In the highly competitive environment of contact center outsourcing, TechM has gained an edge and has been able to compete with other big players. Its increased focus on digital technologies should give TechM’s clients even stronger packaged offerings. TechM has the advantage of a strong ITO background, so its BPO business can leverage technology to bring productivity and efficiency benefits to customers such as improved NPS scores and better customer satisfaction ratings. Although BPO only contributes 6.9 percent to TechM’s overall revenue, the business has huge potential to grow.

IoT and the Connected Ecosystem

TechM is focusing major investment on the IoT and connected systems. The company is working on several use cases in different areas, including manufacturing, telecom, smart homes, connected cars and healthcare, and is now working with clients across different verticals to put the use cases in action and implementation. With a strong client base in North America (specifically in the U.S.), Europe and in APAC, TechM continues to expand geographically. TechM uses its key technology partnerships to build an overall solution for its customers, offering service expertise in consulting, execution and managed services. With its core competence as a system integrator, in integrating user, platforms and ecosystem, TechM works with each of its customers throughout its journey.

TechM has made investments in IP, platforms and frameworks that are helping to enhance its capabilities across technologies. TechM has built its Factory of the Future lab in India, AR/VR labs, a customer experience center, healthcare labs and experience labs in partnership with companies including IBM, Cisco, PTC and Vodafone. These ecosystem partners offer TechM clients a connected ecosystem implementation that is consistent with TechM’s “run better, change faster, grow greater” strategy. Each of the solutions are spread across product to services offerings, digital ecosystem and asset lifecycle management. TechM uses their future software principles like intelligent automation, collaborative skills, upskill and reskill, reusing codes and business development through compliance of principles. In collaboration with its clients, TechM is supporting social causes, especially in the healthcare segment by serving underprivileged patients who do not have access to diagnostics and medical treatments.

Growing Hybrid Cloud and Public Cloud Capabilities

Throughout the event TechM, showcased its advancements in next-gen cloud technology and promoted its migration and managed cloud services. As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and Microsoft Gold Partner, TechM leverages its proprietary Migration Accelerator to Cloud (MAC) toolkit for its clients’ workload migrations. This tool has a factory-like framework for repetitive tasks and delivers migration activities 70 percent faster and 30 percent more economically. Clients that need to migrate large-scale workloads to a public or private cloud can rely on TechM.

TechM’s next-generation infrastructure is self-managed and self-serviced. It is working to reduce human intervention so people will be needed only to handle major incidents and significant changes. This automated environment will be capable of dynamically provisioning and de-provisioning infrastructure services based on user and application demands. The system can also simultaneously self-provision. TechM plans to achieve this vision by implementing automation and analytics, which will help orchestrate a self-managed and self-serviced infrastructure.  

TechM also is working with technology original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to deliver software-defined infrastructure for its customers based on their hyperconverged infrastructure needs. The company has successfully implemented a few 100 percent software-defined data centers, which only very few service providers around the world are able to provide. The company believes hybrid multi-cloud management is the future, and has built a proprietary platform called managed Platform for Adaptive Cloud (mPAC). This platform offers management services in an as-a-Service model for its customers. TechM is also investing in infrastructure-as-code adoption, which it believes is the need of the hour.

Actionable Insights

In a highly competitive environment in which companies are embarking on their digital journeys, TechM has made strategic investments in the right direction to gain competitive advantage. However, to win the needed market share and compete with some of the bigger players, TechM has some work to do.

Though TechM has a high concentration of clients in the communication vertical, this may prove to be a weakness if the company doesn’t aggressively expand into other verticals. TechM also must start moving into consumer-centric verticals, which would help it tap into more of the promising IoT areas in the coming years. Retail, smart cities, smart homes, connected cars and healthcare markets are among the new go-to areas.

Although BPO only accounts for approximately seven percent of its business, TechM is one of the key players in the contact center space. However, contact center outsourcing is a highly competitive market and some of the larger players have scale and access to countries and industries that TechM doesn’t have.

TechM is gaining momentum in both the hybrid cloud and public cloud domains and is catching up with some of its large competitors, mainly due to its flexible billing model. However, if the company would benefit from ramping up its number of certifications in virtualization platforms and upskilling its associates in infrastructure automation tools, such as Chef, Ansible, Puppet and others.

Associated Insights

ISG Provider Lens™ Report: Contact Center Customer Experience Services 2017

ISG Provider Lens™ Internet of Things Quadrant Report 2018 - Overall IoT Services

ISG Provider Lens™ Internet of Things Quadrant Report 2018 - IoT in Connected Cars

ISG Provider Lens™ Public Cloud Infrastructure Consulting & Implementation Services Quadrant Report 2017

ISG Provider Lens™ Data Center Outsourcing Archetype Report 2018

 

About the authors

At ISG, Namratha Dharshan brings in her extensive research experience to lead a program called Provider Lens that is designed to deliver research on service provider intelligence. She heads a team of analysts and is responsible for delivery of research reports for the Provider Lens Program. Additionally, she is responsible for authoring thought leadership papers and service provider intelligence report in the areas of Contact Center and Information Security. Namratha has authored several research papers on topics such as Omnichannel, PCI in Contact Centers, Cloud Contact Centers and Virtual Contact Centers.

Manali De Bhaumik is the lead analyst for ISG. With 8+ years of experience, her area of expertise is in IoT and engineering services with focus on different technology and verticals. Manali has authored paper in IoT for the US market. Currently, she is working on Engineering Services paper for the US market, with her core focus being digital and connected ecosystems.

At ISG, Shashank is involved in authoring quadrant studies around cloud services and data center outsourcing market. With around 7 years of experience, Shashank is focused on cloud and data center market. He is also responsible for writing thought leadership reports around the cloud industry and papers on briefings provided by the service providers. He has written blogs on trending topics, specifically in the cloud and infrastructure domain.