Servicizing Products, Productizing Services

Software companies have been talking about "servicizing" for a while now - SOA, SaaS.

Are Services companies getting ready to "productize"? Courtesy of Michael Krigsman I saw that IBM is getting ready to roll out "service products".  That is welcome news - in this post almost a year ago I asked Bill Higgins of IBM why more of that was not happening.

But the question I asked then is still relevant

"IBM's SI/outsourcing groups do not think like its software group. They want to sell more bodies, not automation. If they allowed the same software team which is working on self-healing systems management to work on SI automation, I would be willing to bet they could develop significant labor saving tools."

As I see their market forecasts though, I see IBM, Accenture and other outsourcers are drooling over opportunities to sell even more bodies around SOA, SaaS etc.

Michael's blog is titled "Rearranging the Deck Chairs". I think that is an apt metaphor for what we are seeing in the services market.

Comments

[Michael Krigsman]

In ComputerWorld, an IDC analyst is quoted that IBM was the first on the market with productized services. This is simply not true, for example look at Cognos software, which has a variety of standardized services on their website. They refer to them as being carefully "crafted".

Michael Krigsman
http://projectfailures.com

[Lilian]

this thought is opposite to the one on Steve Hamm's BusinessWeek blog, http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/bangaloretigers/index.html which makes the argument that IBM is investing in automation to counter the threat posed by the bangalore tigers - Wipro, TCS, Infosys among others