INSIGHT High-Tech Industry-Specific Offers from TCS' Cincinnati Lab Gard Little IDC OPINION IDC reviewed the offers being developed by TCS' High Tech business unit at the company's Business Solutions Lab in Cincinnati, and IDC believes the offerings to be well focused on evolving customer needs and emerging industry trends. Furthermore: TCS' investments in digital solutions and services at the lab demonstrate the commitment to deliver business value to clients across the four high-tech segments: computer platforms, electronics, software, and professional services. IDC has seen co-innovation examples from TCS increasing over the past 18 months and believes both IT buyers and IT suppliers should consider how best to leverage the interconnects between ongoing TCS research and development (R&D) and specific industry applications. IN THIS INSIGHT This IDC Insight reviews TCS' High Tech business unit and how the industry offers being developed in TCS' Cincinnati Business Solutions Lab will be used to grow the business and deliver value to the company's customers. IDC recently had the chance to visit the lab and see how these solutions can be used by clients across the various segments of the high-tech industry. SITUATION OVERVIEW Figure 1 illustrates the four segments of TCS' High Tech business unit. IDC observed that grouping the professional services segment along with electronics, hardware, and software firms in the business unit has more to do with the attributes or forces impacting these industries than with the specific activities performed. It reflects a deep understanding of domain context in the way TCS approaches these industry segments. For example, companies across all four segments are operating in a mode of: Continuous disruption within their industry, primarily from the digital technologies created by one or more of the segments included in the business unit A globally dispersed value chain Rapid product or service development cycles Fluctuating demand Rapid adoption of emerging technologies December 2016, IDC #US41998516
FIGURE 1 TCS High Tech Business Unit Segmentation Note: For detailed explanations of each business unit, go to www.tcs.com. Source: IDC, 2016 These common attributes help explain the logic of TCS grouping these industries into a single business unit. TCS emphasizes how the aforementioned five operating innovations create alignments that give rise to multiple industry standards for devices, software products, and services that influence all the industry verticals in terms of technology adoption. IDC believes it makes sense for TCS to operate the business unit this way because it enables sales and service delivery professionals to share relevant insights across the companies served. Moreover, R&D solutions developed in TCS' labs can be implemented with similar approaches across the various segments. IDC reviewed some offers under development in the Business Solutions Lab and where these offers are being applied across one or more of the High Tech business unit segments. In detail: Cognitive Product Purchasing Advisor: Built on IBM Watson Engagement Advisor and Explorer/Content Analytics services, this offer provides customers with a digital sales channel that will identify the product that would fit their needs. IDC interacted with it to help guide the selection of a new digital SLR camera (an example relevant to TCS' electronics segment). However, the principles of cognitive computing could be used in a wide array of applications ranging from financial auditing to warehouse management, and they are applicable across all segments of the high-tech industry. IDC believes that beyond the opportunities to design and build these solutions, data gathered about people's purchasing questions can be mined in two ways: to help current manufacturers understand better how customers are engaged in the buying process and to look for clues about how to develop new features or functions for an existing product. 2016 IDC #US41998516 2
Outside of the TCS Cincinnati Lab, in June 2015, TCS launched its flagship in-house product ignio, which is a cognitive automation system that combines enterprise context with prebuilt IT infrastructure and application expertise to derive insights and drive intelligent decisions. Auto email response: TCS has used TensorFlow and SyntaxNet software (open sourced by Google) to provide end users the ability to have automatically generated responses for digital communication such as email (clearly a helpful tool for the professional services segment). This is not an incremental advance for your "out of office" message, if you still use one. Rather, it analyzes previous responses to similar email requests and generates a selection of options for more efficient replies in subsequent communication. IDC sees this digital assistant as a tool to generate routine email replies (of which there are many) for a sender's review and believes this will increase productivity. Even more interesting: what may increase the effectiveness of professionals is the ability to analyze the tone of email and voice communications. Consider how useful it could be to know more about the sender's tone in an email you receive, not just whether or not they marked an email as urgent or high priority. IDC believes this could be an interesting bridge solution, by first giving clients a one-time productivity gain related to automating email responses. TCS could then further work with clients to change their underlying business processes and systems to create new workflows that generate fewer emails in the future. Private blockchain: TCS is building a private, general-purpose technology platform to implement blockchain technology. Using a combination of open sourced blockchain, Big Data, IoT, and AI components, TCS has created a combined general-purpose platform that will extend beyond the initial use cases seen in the financial services sector to clients served by the High Tech business unit. This is a permission-based private blockchain that leverages smart contracts at its core, making this application relevant to OEMs, professional service companies, contract manufacturers, and software product companies. By bringing known collaborators together, and sharing knowledge in a secure environment, TCS is developing solutions for potential customer use cases for decentralized cybersecurity, digital identity, and know your customer initiatives. The solution includes an auditing process, multitier supply chains, warranty claim management, and digital rights, and it gives users the sole control of who can access their data and when. IDC believes all of these attributes are key for the efficient and effective operation of today's product and service value chains, as they increasingly become multi-company based and globally dispersed in nature. Reduced provisioning time and digital solution development with hybrid cloud computing, microservices, DevOps, and Splunk: All segments of the high-tech industry deal with huge amounts of data and require infrastructure provisioning to be done at a rapid pace to perform data processing and analysis. Likewise, customers are increasingly looking for a seamless and unified experience on a hybrid cloud. Using the open source cloud ecosystem, TCS has developed an automated environment to provision a multinode Cloudera Big Data cluster. It uses Red Hat OpenStack Sahara bundled with Kafka and Storm to drive real-time data processing and analytics. This entire complex setup can be done through an automated playbook procedure in minutes, instead of days. Presently, it supports Hortonworks and Cloudera distributions out of the box. Some of the popular Big Data distribution frameworks like Cloudera, MapR, and Hortonworks require the support of additional Big Data services, which in general are not bundled with these products. TCS' solution integrates all the dependent services along with these Big Data distribution frameworks to drive business agility based on a template-driven approach for endto-end business problem-solving. 2016 IDC #US41998516 3
At the Business Solutions Lab in Cincinnati, TCS uses data processing services on the Red Hat OpenStack Platform to easily provision a Big Data cluster providing "Big Data as a service" capability on a hybrid cloud. TCS' experience and expertise developed through this approach enable the company's associates to anticipate problems and develop best practices ahead of the implementations of customers' hybrid cloud initiatives. TCS' Business Solutions Lab has developed a rich composite cloud reference architecture leveraging a private cloud and PaaS, along with orchestration from private cloud to public cloud, coupled with key DevOps toolsets to provide a true hybrid cloud experience. This reference architecture enables TCS teams to showcase and apply agility in problem-solving for customers. FUTURE OUTLOOK The work being done at TCS' Business Solutions Lab is relevant not only to the clients of its High Tech business unit but also for the ones in other industries. IDC predicts there will be more customer interest in co-innovation. Why? Organizations face the imperative to innovate or grow, or do both, because the past decade of focus on IT cost efficiency has not been sufficient to ensure survival. And as more organizations start to implement digital transformation, their competitors will be compelled to respond more quickly with their own digital transformation initiatives or become uncompetitive. To make the most of this situation, TCS has created a cognitive computing investment strategy around key platforms such as IBM Watson, Google TensorFlow, and Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite. IDC believes TCS' Business Solutions Lab will accelerate the number of cognitive solutions developed over the next 18 months. These solutions will likely follow a similar approach, with TCS using a microservices architecture strategy to deploy and manage cloud-based solutions using DevOps. In addition, the hardware and software engineering services that TCS provides to IT suppliers, in support of their product development, create an environment where TCS can develop associated new implementation services focused on the new hardware or software products TCS is helping create for the IT supplier's customers. 2016 IDC #US41998516 4
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