IT Service Provider Mobility Heats Up

Kathryn Weldon

Summary Bullets:

• While IT service providers always claim to be doing a lot in mobility, this year they really are:  Many have reorganized/repositioned or added a mobility overlay to consolidate all the different internal organizations and services offering mobile solutions.  Others have added new partners and services or reconfigured their portfolios.
• While the large global IT SPs still target the Fortune 500, they see mobility as a wedge; they can take on smaller projects within large companies because they can upsell and cross-sell related consulting, advisory application development and integration projects, or get business from the prospect in other related transformational areas such as cloud/virtualization, UCC and social/data analytics/B2C.  Does this make them a bigger threat to operators and pure-play managed mobility services providers than they were before?

Historically, whenever Current Analysis has talked to the large IT service providers (ITSPs) about mobility, they have claimed it is a really significant area and noted that they are providing mobility solutions throughout their vertical industry practices, their application development groups and their managed services organizations.  However, each year, both the ITSPs and the operators claim they do not really consider each other competitors and, in fact, play well together for joint engagements.  We recently completed a round of briefings from companies including IBM, HP, Accenture and T-Systems, and the sets of mobility services these providers offer appear to be positioned more as standardized services and less as simply a small (but growing) component of much larger BPO engagements.  These solutions also seem to be similar to the operators’ portfolios.