I am now doing my rounds of the major IT services companies in India. Based on my conversation with Ananth Krishnan CTO of TCS, I can see three major trends in services.
Native Social web applications: As executives within companies look at applications from Google, FaceBook and Twitter, they wonder why enterprise applications aren't similar from an user experience perspective. IT services companies are gearing up to do the same with applications they are building. User engagement, notification, aggregation from multiple sources, ease of combination. blurring of boundaries between user and developer will all be considered for each application. The total quality of experience has to be a driver in making these decisions.
Whole process clouds: While services companies have been providing infrastructure, application and processes as a service, they will now give the customer the option to get the entire process as a service, with the pay as you go model built in. Specialized community clouds could emerge for domain like finance, healthcare, and manufacturing Data portability will be a base requirement with these clouds. This may result in brand dilution for the hardware, software and service providers while enhancing the brand of companies like TCS. Get ready for the TCS inside future.
Total customer analytics: Current expectation with business analytics is that companies are able to easily derive value from all the data they collect about their customers. The new expectation is deriving value from all the data that exist about customers. If a customer engages a company in a dialogue, that company could augment information that they currently have with what exists on may of the social sites. For example, if a new customer utilizes the service of a company the company should be able to assess the potential value of the customer and act accordingly. If the customer uses Tripit often, the system should be able to infer that he/she is a frequent flier and bestow them that status.