Phil Fersht
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of HfS Research, the leading global research analyst organization covering global sourcing strategies. Acclaimed Industry Analyst and Consultant who scribes the leading blog for the services industry "Horses for Sources". Previously worked at AMR Research (Gartner Inc), Deloitte Consulting’s BPO Advisory Services, the Everest Group and IDC . In 2010, Phil was named “IIAR Analyst of the Year” by the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR). This is the most coveted global award for industry analysts in technology and services.
Brexit will will rip out the underbelly of the British economy – and we’ll likely never recover
However which way you analyze all the economic indicators, and whatever your opinion may be regarding Britain’s relationship with the European Union (EU), removing the movement of EU labour into the UK will create a perilous shortage of labour, particularly for low-to-mid skilled professions. If anything, removing worker base at the lower end of […]
RPA is a gateway drug – and magically these guys agree too! Don’t you just love coincidences..
And here we go again… Our now-infamous headline “RPA is the gateway drug. AI is the drug…” has now magically appeared on the Forbes website in an article entitled “Robotic Process Automation: A Gateway Drug to AI and Digital Transformation” authored by Babson Professor Tom Davenport and Carla O’Dell, Chairman at AQPC: (Cross-posted @ […]
IBM / RedHat: A grand play at out-sharing Microsoft’s open source economy
It’s really not about the cloud – not at this massive $34bn price tag. IBM’s ingestion of RedHat, the third largest IT purchase in history, is all about Open Source. Commentators are already pitching this deal as long-awaited reinforcements to the trench-warfare of the cloud wars. But in reality, we need to look much deeper to […]
SYKES acquires Symphony becoming the first call center provider with significant automation capability
Disruption is more ripe in the call center space than any other corner of the services industry, and $1.6bn provider SYKES just upped the ante to feverish levels by becoming only the second-ever service provider to acquire deep RPA and intelligent automation expertise, since Accenture picked up Genfour 18 months ago. And $70m cash is a not insignificant […]
RPA is the gateway drug. AI is the drug…
Anyone failing to escape the swirl of intense hype threatening to destroy everything great about RPA, is probably thinking that these cute products are going to solve all their artificial intelligence needs, providing them with a “digital workforce” that will go way beyond scraping screens, producing scripts and running unattended recorded process loops. Now don’t get me wrong […]
Seven deadly misnomers why these billion dollar RPA valuations are insane
It’s not been possible to escape the wild world of RPA valuations these past few months, culminating in the recent claim from UiPath and its investors that the firm is worth $3 billion, despite the reality that AA’s annual revenues this past year are ~$100m, Blue Prism’s ~$55m and UiPath’s ~$65m (HFS estimates). As much as I would love to celebrate […]
Barely a third of outsourcing deals are now safe: Window-dressing legacy engagements is over
We’ve been talking about the legacy model of butts-on-seats “mess for less” outsourcing fizzling out for years, but somehow the same old candidates have clung on grimly to the same old model, relying on clients that still find a modicum of comfort negotiating rate cards down to the lowest common denominator, content to hobble along […]
It’s Bots-on-Seats as IBM, Cognizant and Accenture lead the HFS TOP 10 Cognitive Assistants
The word “Chatbot” is officially banned: they treat conversations like they’re a game of tennis: talk, reply, talk, reply. There is little to no context and zero intelligence, just pre-programmed responses only set up to deal with a pre-set finite number of frequently asked questions. It’s a legacy customer experience that most of us go out of […]
Tinker, experiment, explore, then disrupt: The Hyper-Connected Enterprise will be driven by Intelligent Automation.
As business operations have advanced through several inflections points over the last three decades, the core component at the heart of these changes has been the emergence of digital interactivity driving the hyper-connected global business – only made possible by intelligent automation. Digital connectivity has transformed both front and back offices over the last three […]
Time to kick out quadrants, paralyse peaks and wash away waves. Hello HFS TOP 10
Yes, folks – the rumors are true. HFS is officially out of the quadrant business. We’re done, the whole quadrant craze is starting to smell pretty bad and we know the industry is fed up with it. Increasingly, many of these 2×2 matrices are missing several of the market leaders (who refuse to participate) and having them […]
