Tata Consultancy Services is ramping up its offerings in big data and analytics, looking to increase its competitiveness in IT consulting and services as communications service providers try to get a handle on the opportunities and challenges that cloud, mobile and social technologies are bringing.
“CSPs find themselves at a crossroads,” said Seeta Hariharan, general manager and group head of TCS’ recently formed Digital Software and Solutions group. “The ones that we see as the winners are those that make data a substantial part of their strategy.”
Hariharan said that CSPs are looking for new revenue sources and new business models, and that the new group was formed within TCS about 16 months ago to take on the challenge of helping businesses cope with the digital transition going on that is being heavily driven by mobile technologies, social technologies and the cloud as well as big data analytics.
TCS was named a leader in business process outsourcing for business analytics by IDC earlier this year, and announced in August that it is partnering with Cloudera to certify both its professionals and its products for big data and analytics.
In a blog entry earlier this year, Hariharan wrote about what she called “a gap between the vision of digital transformation and what is actually delivered today in the market.”
She said that “one group of vendors provides broad-based technology platforms like cloud, mobile, social and big data. When a customer asks for a solution, the vendors say ‘we will pull the technologies together for you’. This approach is cost-prohibitive and time-consuming.
“Another large and disparate group of suppliers offer narrow, non-integrated point solutions aimed at solving isolated issues such as Web analytics or cross-channel management. This approach requires clients to integrate with various technology platforms and other point solutions to solve problems posed by digital transformation, which is also time-consuming and expensive,” Hariharan wrote.
Hariharan said that while communications is the backbone across every industry, CSPs are under particular pressure to figure out new ways to leverage technology to better understand their customers so that they can deliver customized products and improve profits, as well as improve their own operations.
Successfully navigating this digital transition is crucial to businesses, Hariharan said — and those that don’t manage it well are likely to not continue to be in business.
“In my view, it’s not a choice — it’s an imperative,” Hariharan said. “The time to address this is in the next 18 to 24 months.”
