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Digital Transformation Strategies in Utilities Operations

John Villali — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Web Conference examines digital transformation strategies in utilities operations. Utilities are under constant pressure to improve the performance and reliability of their assets. Digital transformation in the area of utilities operations can improve the efficiency, availability, and economics of their assets. In addition, digitizing your utility's operational processes and procedures can ensure regulatory compliance and the safety of a utility's employees and the customers that the utility serves all while reducing overall operations and maintenance costs. This IDC Web Conference takes a look at some of the operational challenges utilities are facing and the digital investment opportunities that can address them.

Enabling Frictionless Journeys in Retail

Jon Duke — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Web Conference explores the challenges and solutions for retailers today as they enhance their analytical capabilities. Enabling frictionless journeys isn't as simple as implementing operational, customer-facing processes. To be effective, it requires deep analytical maturity to support decision-making across the organization, which in turn, requires the right people, processes, and technology. But how do retailers with less mature capabilities get there, from where they sit today?

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Collaboration and Community Applications 2021 Vendor Assessment

Wayne Kurtzman — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study represents a vendor assessment of the collaborative and community applications market through the IDC MarketScape model. Team collaborative applications and enterprise community applications became critical to connect workers, vendors, partners, and customers. Each vendor has differentiated itself with both core abilities and integration abilities that they believe will be most in demand in the future. While some companies saw customer service challenges in their growth, all are seeking better ways to improve adoption to make collaboration and communities a core part of the enterprise IT stack going forward. If user adoption of these platforms is any gauge for the future, collaborative and community platforms will be very successful. Enterprises must embrace them as a new way to communicate, form community, improve customer and worker experience and, most importantly, redesign legacy processes.

"The future of business is the connection and communities with the workforce, partners, and customers," according to Wayne Kurtzman, research director for Social, Communities, and Collaboration Applications at IDC. "Deep integrations with the rest of the technology stack improve insights, minimize context switching, and drive significantly more productivity with better worker experience. Companies that fail to provide well-designed collaboration and community platforms will force their workforce, partners, and customers to create their own solutions."

IDC's 3rd Platform Industry Spending Guides Provide In-Depth Sub-Industry Forecasts for Technology Investments Across Nine Industries

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 04:00:00 GMT

IDC has published a series of 3rd Platform Industry Spending Guides that provide in-depth forecasts for technology spending across nine industries.

Oracle FY 1Q22 Earnings: SaaS and IaaS Reach $2.5 Billion Revenue Mark in Quarter

Jordan Jewell, Eric Newmark, Mickey North Rizza, Carl W. Olofson — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 04:00:00 GMT

On September 13, 2021, Oracle announced its FY 1Q22 earnings. Following are the top financial highlights for the quarter (all growth rates are presented in constant currency terms):

Total revenue for the third quarter was $9.7 billion, up 2%.
Cloud services and license support were $7.4 billion, up 5%.
Cloud license and on-premises license were $813 million, down 9%.
Total hardware revenue was $763 million, down 7%.
Total services revenue was $781 million, up 7%.
Non-GAAP EPS was up 11% in U.S. dollars to $1.03.

Scaling DevOps in the Future Enterprise: Future Enterprise Planning Guide

Meredith Whalen, Jim Mercer, Serge Findling, Martha Rounds — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation is part of IDC's Future Enterprise Planning Guide series. Each module delivers key overviews, targeted advice, and peer insights to guide users through key parts of the digital transformation (DX) process.

Scaling and Automating DevOps Practices Is Vital to Continued Competitiveness

In the modern digital ecosystem, digital end-user expectations are propelling organizations to deliver faster software updates, using DevOps development practices. Almost all enterprise organizations are now using or planning to adopt DevOps. However, many of these efforts remain at a pilot stage. Scaling and automating DevOps practices is vital to continued competitiveness in the recovery. Teams practicing accelerated application delivery and DevOps were in a better position to use software innovation and agility to impact their organization's response to the pandemic. Digital resiliency is a central tenet of the future enterprise — IDC's vision for the end state of DX.

Aim for Culture Change and Focus on Delivering Business Value

IDC believes that DevOps is a vital piece of the digital innovation supply chain, encompassing methodology, processes, and enabling technologies. Expanding DevOps requires cultural changes, a proper foundation, and support from the top. "Executive sponsorship and leadership buy-in are critical to build mutual trust among teams and break down traditional organizational silos," explains Jim Mercer, research director, DevOps and DevSecOps at IDC. "Also key to scaling DevOps is using automation and integrated testing to overcome the manual processes acting as bottlenecks to DevOps delivery. Automation reduces errors, speeds release frequency, and increases reliability and quality."

The Future of Business Operations in Latin America

Waldemar Schuster — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 04:00:00 GMT

The future of Operation Centers in Latin America focuses on adopting value propositions for companies in a customer-centric environment. Modern Digital Operation Centers pave the road for satisfying, safe, and trustworthy user experiences using technologies that help build intelligent automation and advanced analytics for accurate decision-making. These exciting value-added digital experiences ultimately trigger revenue growth and competitiveness.

"Among the many problems companies currently face is the resilience to situations like the crisis we are experiencing, which adds to the volume of information consumed and generated. This amount of data has been multiplying rapidly, so companies are shifting their focus on performance towards a market-centric culture with a smooth, secure operation, making NOC and SOC essential for the new digital environments." Waldemar Schuster, Program Manager Services Latin America.

Zuora announces unified monetization capabilities which

Mark Thomason — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 04:00:00 GMT

One of the big challenges of monetizing subscriptions is selling an array of products that go along with subscriptions, such as GoPro selling cameras with video editing subscriptions. This typically requires two monetization streams (subscription management and transactional systems) with the goal of combining both subscription and products on one invoice for a great customer experience. Zuora can now monetize both streams eloquently, starting from CPQ, working with supply chain systems for inventory and shipping, creating a unified invoice, applying the right amount of revenue recognition, and ending with analytics that help the business understand the big picture of customer purchases.

Accenture Q4FY21: Quarterly revenue up 24%, and 14% for fiscal year, with record bookings of $59.3 billion and free cash flow of $8.4 billion for the full year

Gard Little — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 04:00:00 GMT

On September 23, 2021, Accenture reported its Q4 FY21 results, including $13.4 billion in quarterly revenue, a 24% YoY increase in USD and 21% in local currency. For FY21, revenues were a record $50.5 billion, an increase of 14% in USD and 11% in local currency compared with fiscal 2020. The earnings call was led by Julie Sweet, Accenture's Chief Executive Officer, and KC McClure, Accenture's CFO. Here are the key quarterly details:

Consulting revenues were $7.31 billion for the quarter, an 29% YoY increase in USD and 25% in local currency. Outsourcing revenues were $6.11 billion for the quarter, a 19% percent increase YoY in USD and 16% in local currency.
Operating income for the quarter was up 27%, at $1.96 billion, or 14.6% of revenues, compared with $1.54 billion, or 14.3% of revenues for Q4FY20. Operating margin for Q4FY21 expanded 30 basis points to 14.6% and for FY21 operating margin expanded 40 basis points to 15.1%
Free cash flow this quarter was $2.2 billion, down from $2.97 million for the same period last year, and essentially flat with last quarter. Its cash balance dropped from $10 billion at the end of the prior quarter to $8.2 billion.
New bookings for the quarter were $15 billion, split between consulting ($8 billion) and outsourcing ($7.1 billion), an 7% YoY increase in USD. For FY21, new bookings were a record $59.3 billion. The consulting book-to-bill ratio was 1.1 compared with 1.2 for outsourcing.
By geographic market, net revenue increases in Q4FY21 compared with the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020 were as follows—North America: $6.39 billion, an increase of 23% in USD and 22% in local currency; Europe: $4.3 billion, an increase of 26% in USD and 18% in local currency; Growth Markets: $2.73 billion, an increase of 23% in USD and 21% in local currency.
By industry group, net revenue increases all around in USD for Q4FY21 compared with Q4FY20: for Communications, Media & Technology (26%), Financial Services (24%), Health & Public Service (20%), Products (29%) and Resources (17%).

For FY22, Accenture announced its revenue growth guidance to be in the range of 12% to 15% in local currency and assumes that foreign-exchange headwinds will be 0.5% in USD. Accenture expects operating margin for FY22 to be in the range of 15.2% to 15.4%, which would be an expansion of 10 to 30 basis points from FY21. Q1FY22 revenue guidance was an increase of 18% to 22% in local currency.

Acquisitions

For FY21, Accenture has announced or closed 46 acquisitions across its Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Interactive and Operations areas as well as Accenture Federal Services. McClure acknowledged Accenture invested $4.2 billion on acquisitions in FY21. IDC estimates FY21 acquisitions added about 17,300 professionals. These acquisitions moved the contribution of inorganic growth from 2% to about 5% of revenues compared with FY20, and McClure noted her expectation that FY22 would be like FY21. Here is a summary of recent activity:

Strategy & Consulting

CS Technology New York-based, ~100 employees, a technology firm and provider of infrastructure transformation services with cloud infrastructure engineering capabilities in the areas of infrastructure and cloud planning, critical facilities design, data center and modern workplace technologies.

Ethica Consulting Group Italy-based, ~400 employees, a group of technology companies that provides software and professional services, including capabilities in delivering digital transformation for clients and enabling them to develop innovative products and services using SAP cloud-based solutions.

Trivadis AG Switzerland-based, ~710 employees, an IT services provider specializing in platforms and solutions that enable highly automated provisioning and innovative use of data.

Sentor Sweden-based, ~80 employees, a provider of cyber defense and managed security services including advisory, security testing, managed detection and incident-response capabilities, and a 24/7/365 security operations center in Stockholm.

Interactive

Openmind Italy-based, ~110 employees, a boutique commerce agency with capabilities in cloud-based platforms, to meet client demand in the rapidly growing commerce market and deliver transformative experiences.

Bionic New York-based, ~40 employees, a mix of entrepreneurs, growth investors, and designers with a proprietary solution, Growth OS, enabling customers to launch new products and businesses.

DISH Network Selects IBM for AI-Driven Service Level Orchestration

Karl Whitelock — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 04:00:00 GMT

The IBM – DISH Network announcement stresses the importance of service-level orchestration, while raising the alarm about increasing network and service complexity. Due to the flexibility offered by 5G networks and the real-time nature of 5G-based services, IDC believes that the full business benefits from 5G, and multi-access edge computing (MEC), can be efficiently realized if an automated and intent-based approach to service level orchestration is engaged. DISH Network is establishing itself as a supplier of enterprise business solutions in addition to fulfilling its regulatory mandated role as a major consumer services network connectivity provider for the US market.