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Driving Innovation in Investment Avenues and Optimizing Costs
Despite a challenging business environment, financial services firms are investing in digital technologies to improve cost efficiency and capabilities. Digital assets have become an increasingly popular alternative investment avenue amongst the customers of private and wealth managers. Financial services firms are also allocating significant resources to cybersecurity measures due to growing cyber threats. Stringent financial regulations mandate ESG investment scrutiny to avoid greenwashing of the tagged investments. To address these issues, financial institutions are leveraging digital technologies to optimize operations, deliver efficient investment services, and enhance customer experience while mitigating risks. Both demand-side and supply-side trends are covered in our Financial Services Digital Services 2023–2024 Market Insights™ and Financial Services Digital Services 2023–2024 RadarView™, respectively.
May, 2023
Rain or Shine, IT Budgets Refuse Decline
The IT spending outlook for 2023 can best be described with the old British slogan, “keep calm and carry on.” For at least a year, enterprises have been expecting the recessionary shoe to drop as central banks raised interest rates to fight inflation. War in Ukraine and increasingly brittle supply chains have not helped. By now, we would have expected more companies to be cautiously preserving cash, preparing for a recession. And yet, for the most part, businesses are not cutting IT budgets. This research byte is a brief description of some of the findings in our IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks 2023/2024 study.
July, 2023
IT Staff Growth Mixed Bag
There have been quite a few competing pressures on IT hiring in recent years. Organizations need more talent, especially those that understand the needs of business and the art of the possible. On the other hand, labor has gotten more expensive and harder to find. Combine the push and pull from these competing factors with economic uncertainty, and this is one of the stranger hiring years in recent memory. This research byte is a brief description of some of the findings in our IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks 2023/2024 study.
August, 2023
Data and Cloud: The Silent Soldiers of the Gen AI Revolution
Generative AI is the talk of the town and there is a lot of hyperbole about its capabilities and use cases. However, the true value will be derived by organizations that are able to build the right data and cloud environments that can enable Gen AI applications. In this research byte, we explore the actual maturity of generative AI and what its foundational elements are. We also discuss how service providers need to focus on building services and offerings for helping their customers build the data and cloud environments required to derive Gen AI value. We highlight the efforts of one such service provider, Infosys, based on its recent annual conference, Americas Confluence 2023, held in September.
October, 2023
Workday HCM Services: Transforming HR processes with Generative AI
Organizations are increasingly adopting Workday HCM to standardize HR processes, boost employee engagement, and improve system integration. This adoption is helping them overcome challenges such as workflow redundancy, data visibility issues, and process inefficiencies. To further enhance the effectiveness of Workday HCM, service providers are actively developing tools and accelerators to address data errors and streamline HR processes. Moreover, the integration of generative AI within the HCM framework marks a transformative leap toward efficiency, enabling companies to significantly reduce human effort through automated job descriptions, targeted candidate shortlisting, and personalized interview question suggestions. Both demand-side and supply-side trends are covered in Avasant's Workday HCM Services 2023–2024 Market Insights™ and Avasant's Workday HCM Services 2023–2024 RadarView™, respectively.
November, 2023
IT Wages to Rise 3.0% at the Median in 2024, Salary Study Finds
Despite lingering questions about the economy, unemployment remains at low levels and inflation is coming under control. We anticipate modest upward pressure on IT personnel wages in 2024. Overall, our IT Salary Report 2024 anticipates that average wages for IT workers will rise 3.0% in 2024. This is lower than the 4.0% we projected the past two years, but it still shows a strong IT job market, especially considering a fair number of high-profile layoffs in the tech industry earlier in 2023.
December, 2023
App Development Outsourcing Increasing But for How Long?
The outsourcing of the application development function has grown in the past five years, increasing from 56% in 2019 to 64% in 2023. However, this is an outsourcing category that should be monitored, because there are countervailing trends such as public cloud infrastructure, SaaS, low-code/no-code, and even AI, which may result in decreased demand for developers in the near future. This Research Byte summarizes our full report on Application Development Outsourcing Trends and Customer Experience.
February, 2024
Hybrid Enterprise Cloud Services: Gen AI and Industry-specific Cloud Solutions Drive Next Wave of Growth
As businesses delve into the possibilities that generative AI presents, cloud migration, data modernization, security, and privacy take center stage as crucial priorities. Service providers are directing investments toward integrating generative AI with traditional automation methodologies to enhance productivity within IT operations. This integration aims to reinforce hybrid cloud systems, ensuring they remain robust, secure, and sustainable. Both demand-side and supply-side trends are covered in Avasant’s Hybrid Enterprise Cloud Services 2023–2024 Market Insights™ and Hybrid Enterprise Cloud Services 2023–2024 RadarView™, respectively.
February, 2024
Retail Digital Services: Elevating Customer Experience Using Emerging Technologies
Retail enterprises worldwide leverage emerging technologies to provide a personalized and immersive customer experience. They also focus on enhancing profit margins by utilizing AI to improve operational efficiency and venturing into higher-margin businesses such as retail media networks. They are also realizing the significance of social media as a pivotal commerce channel and adopting measures to better connect with their audiences there. Increasing regulatory requirements also compel retailers to integrate sustainability into core business operations.
March, 2024
ESG Experts Call Out Lack of Meaningful Progress
According to some environmental, social, and governance (ESG) experts, the push toward ESG resembles what someone once said about the weather: Everyone talks about it, but no one does anything about it
May, 2024
Intelligent Automation Services: Intuitive Automation for Real-Time Decision-Making
Enterprises face challenges in extracting, organizing, and processing high volumes of unstructured data. However, the advancements in AI have significantly expanded the scope of automation by providing new capabilities such as deep learning and generative AI to automate complex, data-driven tasks with high accuracy. Cognitive bots can now process unstructured data, recognize patterns, and make more informed decisions regarding workflows previously considered too complex for automation. By leveraging automation technologies such as RPA, ML, process mining, and AI, organizations can unlock new levels of productivity, innovation, and growth for increasing customer satisfaction and revenue, and gaining a competitive advantage. These trends, and others, are covered in Avasant’s Intelligent Automation Services 2022–2023 RadarView™.
March, 2023
Boosting Banking Through Digitally Enabled Operations
The volatile macroeconomic environment and rising interest rates have put pressure on banks, impacting their liquidity and raising the cost of funding. Rising competition due to neobanks and fintechs that offer personalized products and add-on services have upended customer expectations. Stringent regulatory requirements are driving banks to revamp their processes and operations. Banks seek support from service providers to transform their operations, drive higher margins and process efficiency, and enhance customer experience. This has led to a 23% growth in banking process transformation revenue for service providers in the past 12 months. Both demand-side and supply-side trends are covered in our Banking Process Transformation 2023 Market Insights™ and Banking Process Transformation 2023 RadarView™, respectively.
May, 2023
Business Continuity Fears Favor Growth in Data Center Outsourcing
As IT organizations try to “get out of the data center business,” companies are turning to service providers to make up the difference. However, the amount of the data center workload that companies are outsourcing has been volatile, with rather large swings over the past few years. Why is this so? The COVID-19 pandemic led to an inflection in data center outsourcing. However, those swings should lessen over the next couple of years with the growth of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and the cloud. In 2023, it is likely that areas where businesses increased their outsourcing in the last three years will return to pre-pandemic levels. This Research Byte discusses the changes in data center outsourcing over the last five years.
July, 2023
Digital CX Services: Empowering Growth Through a Connected and Engaging Customer Experience
Enterprises are revamping their CX strategies by eliminating data silos between multiple customer touchpoints and different business functions to create a single view of customers and deliver unified CX. Companies across sectors are pivoting toward a business outcome-driven approach to CX transformation that measures and drives key business outcomes such as increasing customer conversion, sales, customer engagement, and cost and inventory optimization. The focus has shifted toward leading with an integrated CX. As a result, the providers focus on a broader spectrum of digital CX services. These trends, among others, are covered in Avasant’s Digital CX Services 2023 RadarView™ and Digital CX Services 2023 Market Insights™.
August, 2023
Quantum Computing in Action – Charting a New Course for Logistics Optimization
Addressing data challenges requires strategic investment in innovative tools, robust data management practices, and the use of pre-trained ML models effectively. However, the ever-accelerating pace of data generation and the need to run numerous scenarios for optimal decision-making continue to be daunting. The limitations of traditional computing capabilities often pose significant challenges in managing vast amounts of data in real time. This situation underscores the need to pivot to the next generation of computing power—high-performance computing, edge, and quantum computing modalities.
October, 2023