Improving Product Implementation “Density”: 10 Considerations for Your Professional Services Business

With the increase in software/hardware product complexity over the past 5-10 years, we have increasingly seen technology vendors grapple with their Professional Services (PS) organizations’ ability to deliver profitable product-related implementations. Within many of our clients’ Services organizations, we have noticed three distinct project dynamics at play which have adversely impacted Services economics and customer time-to-value:

Leveraging PS as a Key Ingredient to Profitable Growth

Professional services (PS) are a key ingredient to customer satisfaction and profitable growth for technology companies. While many leading technology companies recognize this opportunity – as evidenced by IBM’s radical transformation to focus on services, HP’s acquisition of EDS and Dell’s acquisition of Perot Systems – others do not.

The Services Imperative: Not just for the big guys

The recent HP-Oracle dust-up has focused attention on how the largest tech companies plan to use services to continue to grow. If it’s not an outright bidding war, there is fresh speculation on who will be this weeks’ 3Par. What has gotten lost in the frenzy is the growing importance of services to the success of small and mid-sized businesses (SMB). If your business is anywhere from $50-$500M, you can’t afford to ignore planning, implementation, training and support services.

Key Elements of Successful B2C Subscription Models: Netflix

Founded in 1997, Netflix turned the previously incident-driven movie-rental industry upside down with a subscription model that let customers keep DVDs as long as they wanted, without paying late fees. The company’s use of centralized distribution centers cost less to use than retail storefronts and also provided Netflix with the space to build an enormous catalog of over 100,000 movies and shows.

Since 1999, the company has grown its customer base at a 61% CAGR to over 12 million subscribers in 2009. Additionally, over the same period of time, Netflix has been able to reduce its subscriber acquisition costs from over $110 down to $25, all the while keeping fixed costs low.

2020 Outlook: Technology Enabled Trends Shaping Electronics & Health Care

Over the past weekend, the Orange County Register sought insights from a variety of industry leaders regarding trends that will they believe will emerge over the next decade. We thought that the perspectives from Scott McGregor (CEO of communications chip-maker Broadcom) and Peter Bastone (President and CEO of Mission Hospital) shared some common technology-enabled themes. In particular, the critical impact of wireless technologies, smarter/more interconnected devices, “tracking”, and virtualization stood out.