Expansion into the Digital Transformation Space

Pivoting product roadmaps developed by internal teams is difficult. See how we helped our client pivot theirs through our evidence-based and independent approach to due diligence.

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Our Client’s Problem
Our client is a digital transformation service provider, with clients across the telco (tier 2), financial services (regional banks), and government (local) markets. While it had gained significant traction among Tier 2 customers, in order to increase revenues, it would need to win bigger clients.

To do this, it would mean considering vital factors such as what products to focus on in their product roadmap, which products to offer (catalog, order management, CRM, campaign management, etc.), what architecture would be required for larger customers, and what large enterprise customers would value in the market.

Our client's management was also wondering it it was more advantageous to acquire solutions, or build them from the ground up.

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Our Brief
Our client asked us to conduct due diligence on the digital transformation landscape, investigating vendors that currently sell into the large enterprise market. We were tasked to discover:

• A profile of the size of deals our client could look forward to in the large enterprise market for its digital transformation services.

• The solution architecture, including whether they were cloud-agnostic, cloud native, and supported multi-tenancy.

• The scalability of vendor solutions and their data services.

• Vendor products, including key features, functionalities in their current roadmap.

• The level of AI functions supported and their use cases.

• The level of customization or OOTB compliance they gained in RFPs.

 

Our Method
Advising a client on their entire roadmap is an enormous responsibility, and would not be possible without providing in-depth information regarding the technology and roadmaps of comparable solutions in the market, and knowing customer needs.

As such we sought to interview solutions architects and product managers that had previously worked for six of the major digital transformation solution vendors globally, along with executives across Tier 1 customers at telcos, banks, and government organizations at the regional / national levels.

This would inform the client of both the capabilities of existing solutions, and reveal any white space, advantage, or gaps in their offering. Our ex-vendor  interviewees provided us with detailed solutions architecture descriptions, including diagrams and walkthroughs, as well as insights into sales and roadmaps, while our customer insights told us more about key needs and requirements of major customers the client wanted to target.

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Client Outcomes

Our investigation revealed exactly how our client needed to pivot their product roadmap.

 

We found that the majority of digital solutions offered by digital transformation leaders globally are not cloud-native, but cloud-enabled. They use legacy stacks that have been upgraded so that their monolithic architecture could be deployed to the cloud, usually by breaking down parts of the stack and containerizing them. This meant that their products could not offer clients the full advantages of the cloud, such as use of microservices. This made scalability an issue as additional hardware or processing power would often be required to service enterprise customers.

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Our client therefore took the decision to re-build specific modules such as their CRM and Catalogs from the ground up to offer a cloud-native product that could take advantage of horizontal scaling and the auto scaling properties offered by public cloud platforms.
 

Modular applications and integrations were particularly successful for one vendor, as it meant that customers didn’t have to buy an entire tech stack to operate a solution. This meant that customers' go-live time was reduced and customers could scale their offerings faster by adding individual modules. This type of offering is also appealing from a cost perspective, as customers can add only what they need, when they need it.

This was a major advantage for our client, as it meant that rather than re-working their entire stack, they could focus their roadmap on ground-up builds for certain modules that they knew from our findings would be attractive, and sell them to clients individually. Cost, ease of customization, flexibility, and scalability at speed are key priority for customers that our client put to good use.
 

Our due diligence also found that AI was not a core part of recommendation manager engines or campaign management engines, and most digital transformation vendors instead used big data solutions. This meant that upsell recommendations and similar solutions were still comparatively basic. Again, while AI was on our client's roadmap, based on our recommendations, our client was able to pivot and focus on white spaces in the market.

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Finally, our due diligence showed that PaaS solutions and scalability offerings and 5G catalog use cases (for telco clients) were in the roadmaps for most vendors, based on customer demand.

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Our client was thrilled with the result which helped them pivot their roadmap. The client built several selected solutions, such as a new 5g enabled catalog manager, from the ground up to be cloud-native and easy to integrate with both public cloud and competing stacks and solutions, meaning that  shortly after the launch of their new suite of offerings they won three major contracts with Tier 1 accounts that would otherwise have been impenetrable.

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