IT and Business Process Outsourcing Opportunities for 2015

Benefit from aligning solutions with business outcomes, global business services delivery and pragmatic cloud initiatives

Pace Harmon

Vienna, Va.Feb. 5, 2015—With 2015 off to a running start, business transformation and outsourcing advisory firm Pace Harmon advises organizations to capitalize on the latest outsourcing trends for growth opportunities and operational efficiencies. Namely, this includes aligning solutions with business outcomes, consolidating shared services into global business services delivery models, and strategically deploying cloud-provided infrastructure and services.

“Today’s leading organizations must ensure that all business transformation and outsourcing programs are tangibly working toward achieving overall business goals rather than serving individual functions disparately,” said Andy Sealock, partner, Pace Harmon. “As a result, we’re seeing more companies turning to outcome-based solutions, consolidated shared services approaches, and more fine-tuned cloud infrastructure and services deployments.”

Following is Pace Harmon’s analysis on these key trends for the year ahead:

  1. Rise of the outcome-based solution. As solution providers aim to align their products with their buyers’ business outcomes, we expect to see more market-facing, cloud-based solutions that tie compensation and incentives to performance in 2015. These may range from marketing to campaign management or inside sales solutions, which allow companies to utilize outsourced solutions to achieve richer customer engagement.
  2. Consolidation into global business services delivery. More companies are moving away from disparate shared services centers, which means a consolidation of back-office functional towers, e.g., finance and accounting, human resources (HR) and procurement. This will enable organizations to shift into consolidated global business services delivery models that deliver process standardization, innovation, economies of scale and increased productivity.
  3. Fine-tuning cloud strategies. Cloud adoption is evolving among mid-size to large organizations, as more enterprises are realizing the benefits of a pragmatic approach to cloud-provided infrastructure and solutions. We expect point solution deployments, such as HR or finance, to continue getting the most traction. However, on the more general cloud and storage side, there are two distinct trends. New apps will be optimized for private and/or public clouds by default. In addition, as organizations are becoming more open to transferring apps to a cloud infrastructure, this will include establishing standards-based analysis and thorough testing measures to ensure proper service-level agreement (SLA) and business case alignment.

Pace Harmon’s clients include Fortune 500 and select high-growth middle-market companies spanning industries such as telecommunications, life sciences, financial services, manufacturing, technology and energy.

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