New ISG Study Focuses on Digital Business Services

Upcoming ISG Provider Lens™ report examines the provider marketplace for blockchain services, AI-as-a-service and SaaS ecosystems

Information Services Group, a leading global technology research and advisory firm, has launched a research study examining the provider marketplace for digital business services and technologies, including blockchain and artificial intelligence-as-a-service.

The study results will be published in a comprehensive ISG Provider Lens report, Digital Business — Solutions and Service Partners 2019, scheduled to be released in December. The report will cover a range of digital business processes, including sales, trading, production, supply chain, product design and human resource management.

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Enterprise buyers will be able to use information from the report to evaluate their current vendor relationships, potential new engagements and available offerings, while ISG advisors use the information to recommend providers to the firm’s buy-side clients.

The new report will examine ways enterprises can improve their business agility and enhance their customer experience, said Esteban Herrera, partner and global leader of ISG Research. These efforts “go far beyond software development and encompass how businesses can adjust to survive and thrive when competition and customer requirements are constantly changing,” he said.

“Digital-ready service providers understand the full scope of digital services available through leading technology vendors to provide constant innovation that improves user experiences, accelerates business delivery and incorporates intelligent solutions,” said Herrera.

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ISG has distributed surveys to more than 100 digital business technology and service providers. Working in collaboration with ISG’s global advisors, the research team will produce seven quadrants representing the services and products the typical enterprise client is buying in the digital business space, based on ISG’s experience working with its clients. The seven quadrants are:

• Customer Journey Services, focused on transforming how companies organize marketing, sales delivery and post-sales processes, often using customer-centric design thinking and lean methodologies to design apps, web-based offerings and products and services through an omnichannel approach;
• Digital Product Lifecycle Services, assessing a provider’s capacity to adapt its delivery model to each digital product with required speed, enabling enterprise customers to adopt agile and adaptive operating models;
• Digital Backbone Managed Services, covering providers of robust, secure and reliable operations based on microservices and APIs in a hybrid or pure cloud platform, as well as other digital solutions such as mobile apps, IoT platforms and data services;
• SaaS Ecosystems, including software-as-a-service options such as market-to-order, recruitment-to-hire, procurement-to-pay and other end-to-end solutions, covering providers offering extensions, apps, APIs and microservices;
• Blockchain Services, assessing providers offering consulting, design services, deployment and operation services for blockchain;
• Blockchain Platforms, focused on the platform’s capability to support enterprise client needs and including blockchain education, training and events;
• AI-as-a-service, comparing SaaS providers of artificial intelligence, machine learning and cognitive solutions that can be consumed through APIs with a clearly defined pay-as-you-go model.

The report will cover the global digital business market and examine products and services available in the U.S., Germany, the U.K., Brazil and the Nordic countries. An archetype report also will be published as part of this study. This report, unique to ISG, is the study of typical buyer types of digital business services as observed by ISG advisors.

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