deal architect

Why midmarket customers love Workday

Since its early days, I have heard Workday executives talk about having a highly scalable cloud so large companies would feel comfortable moving off their on-premise finance and human resources applications. So, it is not surprising that multinational customers like United Technologies can consolidate over 100 payroll systems across 80 countries on Workday, and many others report very large volumes with its financial management application. I think even more impressive will be the transaction volumes of two recently signed Workday customers, Amazon and Walmart.

However, it would be a mistake to assume Workday is designed only for large customers. The system was architected at inception to support multi-tenancy and can accommodate a large number of individual entities. Indeed, Workday already has many medium enterprise customers across its customer base.

Workday recently briefed me on a deployment approach, using their single line of code, that features fixed-scope, fixed-fee, pre-configured packages. The approach is based on learnings from past successful, midsized deployments and helps get medium enterprise customers live quickly and at lower risk. We also spoke about Workday’s successes to date in serving this market, and I spent some time learning what medium enterprises find attractive about Workday. Here are some common themes:

“Consumerized” applications

We are seeing a dramatic shift in the enterprise application market where the ratio of designers to developers is being reversed to greatly improve the user experience. Customers report how this “consumerization of IT” manifests itself in their Workday deployments.

One is through employee and manager HR self-service. I learned about Interstate Batteries, whose human resources team is now able to focus on more strategic initiatives, rather than manual processes such as keying in employee information. Even simple things like giving executive assistants the ability to look up employee birthdays without manually maintaining a spreadsheet has boosted productivity.

The user experience itself is driven by Workday’s persona-based design—meeting the very different needs of many types of people, within the same system. Take how we all use smartphones differently: a grandmother to FaceTime with her grandkids, an IT manager to remotely monitor network performance, a teenager to Snapchat with friends, a CHRO or CFO to lead their organizations while traveling. Workday has strived to bring that level of personalization to enterprise processes.

Workday also supports what it calls “built-in insights.” Users benefit from over 50 different dashboards that are pre-built in Workday that utilize real-time data to bring forth snapshots on collections, projects, and other areas. That lets cross-functional teams collaborate more efficiently to reach decisions based on the same data, including one set of numbers.

Another example is how Workday has solved a common spreadsheet conundrum. Microsoft Excel users know the problem of ending up with countless spreadsheets after they’ve extracted data.  Workday solves the problem through its Worksheets, a collaborative spreadsheet built directly into the core of its technology platform.

As I described in this post, Workday analytics will get even more powerful and user friendly in the next couple of years.

While many of these features come standard, Workday also allows end users to personalize the system with custom validations, custom fields and more, again freeing up IT staff for more strategic work.

Consolidation of multiple applications

Most customers report that Workday has allowed them to consolidate multiple applications, spreadsheets and data stores. Ensono, previously a division of Acxiom, split from its parent company and is now a fast growing IT services firm near Chicago. Alan Cole, vice president and controller at Ensono, describes his experience.

“Before we deployed Workday at Acxiom, we were using PeopleSoft for HR and finance, Concur for expense reporting, Taleo for talent succession planning and reviews, and CA Clarity for project management. We were able to eliminate all of these systems, and at Ensono, we estimate we’re saving roughly $1 million a year compared to what it would have cost to maintain those functions in separate systems. (Also), from a maintenance perspective, one system is much more streamlined with just two major updates each year.”

Having HR and finance in one system, in turn, significantly improves the quality of data and reporting. Joseph Fanutti, CFO at Bill Gosling Outsourcing shared his thoughts in a video:

“Our people metrics and our financial metrics work hand-in-hand. The dashboards we’ve set up for our operations managers now include both financial and HR metrics. Profitability means just as much to an operations manager as turnover. So understanding the correlation between those two is very important.”

Reduced need for IT infrastructure and staff

One of the biggest advantages of the Workday cloud reported by midsized customers is they do not have to provision IT infrastructure in their own data centers. Workday also needs a much smaller contingent of IT staff to deploy and manage the infrastructure or to help with updates. Workday Co-Founder and Chairman Dave Duffield likes to talk about the “Power of One” – having all customers on the same release, with updates delivered in the background. It is a welcome change from disruptive upgrades which plague most on-premise applications.

Agility

Still other Workday customers cite the increased efficiency and speed at which they can operate. Since opening a single clinic on the Upper East Side in New York in 2010, urgent-care chain CityMD has rapidly expanded. CFO Louis Salamone describes in an interview how Workday Financial Management helped his team accelerate closings and other financial processes.

“When I first got here, it took 90 days to get the first financial statement done with the help of eight people in accounting, for just four sites. Now six people can close our books in seven business days for 60 sites. We will soon be at five business days.”

Workday also has a track record of rapid deployments and offers a choice of mid-sized systems integrators like Appirio. While Workday partners with larger firms like Deloitte and PwC, many mid-sized customers like the variety of implementation talent they can choose from.

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While its larger customers will keep pushing Workday to “industrialize” its cloud in scale and robustness, the real beneficiaries are a growing group of mid-sized customers. I expect many more in the coming years to sing praises of the user friendliness, agility, smaller IT footprint, and other benefits of the Workday cloud.

America’s Cup: A Polymath event

Oracle invited me and a few other analysts to Bermuda to witness a few of the races in the 35th America’s Cup. It is a vendor of many technologies to the US team and I was interested in all the analytics it supported before, during and after each race.

What was eye opening was the multitude of other STEM disciplines that I was exposed to at the event including:

• aerodynamics of fixed wing sails
• fluid control concepts to move power generated by the grinders/cyclists
• material science in the foils, sails, hulls, crew gear
• health science to monitor extreme crew performance
• meteorology to keep up with wind patterns
• broadcast technology from helicopters, drone, and the vessels
• telemetry from vessels
• data science around so much to analyze before, during and after each race.

Rocket scientists from Airbus, Parker Hannifin, Medtronic, GoreTex and, of course, Oracle are just some of the brands which have contributed science and technology to the sport.  I will be profiling many of their innovations over the next few days.

Oracle: Does good luck also come in threes?

1. Oracle does very well in the premier version of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for “Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises”. Only Oracle’s ERP cloud and Workday are in the Leader’s quadrant, and Oracle’s NetSuite subsidiary just barely missed getting there.

2. Oracle had a very impressive cloud performance in its recently finished fiscal year. Cloud revenue growth at 66%,  at $6 billion annualized run rate. ERP was up 156% organically, and that did not include NetSuite, whose growth itself has accelerated since the Oracle acquisition. 1,575 new SaaS customers were signed in the last quarter. And it did not include any revenues from a whopping deal with AT&T which over the next few years could move many of its over 10,000 Oracle databases to the cloud.

3. Oracle Team USA got clobbered in the first 4 races in the America’s Cup. The Kiwi challengers are using leg power instead of arm power – cyclors instead of grinders and in other ways are showing masterful execution and won each of the races comfortably. If they win 4 more they will clinch the Cup. Oracle has to win 7. After their biggest comeback in any sporting event in the 2013 Cup, the Oracle team could, of course, do it again.

They say bad luck comes in threes, so why not good luck? My Irish wife reminds me it works for a shamrock. So I will invoke Gartner again, and I say that with a probability of 0.7

Maybe this will spur SAP?

I honestly cannot remember the last time SAP showed in the lower left quadrant – for niche players – in a Gartner MQ. But in the latest MQ for “Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises” , it does.

That has to be a concern because SAP has been positioning S/4HANA, especially its Simple Finance capabilities as its next-gen product.  However, Gartner based its evaluation on the other offering, Business ByDesign which has had its fits and starts over the last several years. About S/4, Gartner says “SAP's new flagship cloud solution, is a candidate for possible inclusion in future iterations.”

Either Gartner could not validate SAP’s statement that over 5,800 customers have licensed S/4, or more likely (my speculation is) they are confirming what I wrote after SapphireNow : “What I would have liked to have seen is more public cloud use cases of S/4. Lots of on-premise/private cloud deployments which could potentially continue the bad habits from ECC world. With lots of exposure at the event to what they called the Big 3 “cloud infrastructure” vendors – Google, Microsoft and Amazon, we will see more interest in public cloud deployments of S/4.”

SAP has been pushing the benefits of in-memory computing for several years now. I have a feeling this will spur SAP to get much more serious about positioning itself also as a cloud computing behemoth (like it does in other process areas with SuccessFactors, Ariba, hybris and other products).

Finance is a strong suit for SAP. I doubt they like being considered a niche player.

Are ERP vendors in touch with a changing services economy?

UNIT4 had an analyst day last week. FinancialForce is hosting its user conference this week. I missed both due to other commitments but I see lots of tweets from fellow analysts. Good to see both vendors, focused on service sectors, get the attention.

The services sector has been on my mind for several gut-wrenching changes I describe below and I wonder if the use cases of these vendors  and other PSA vendors are starting to reflect these new realities

a) Dynamic Changes to Global Delivery model

Just about every SI and outsourcer has moved to a global delivery model with a blend of on-site and offshore resources. This year we are seeing visa reviews, bans on devices on planes start to significantly affect labor mobility across countries, and therefore cause a need to rebalance staff resources across regions. Is your PSA allowing you to model this and drive your HR decisions?

b) Deflationary pricing in some services sectors

Amazon has cut prices of its infrastructure-as-a-service over 50 times in the last decade. If I am a CFO in the managed services sector which is even remotely affected by Amazon I want my ERP to help me re-price my proposals and contracts on a very regular basis. Hopefully I will not need to cut pricing that often but it would be foolish to be unprepared.  

c) Smart products and impact on some services

Products with embedded software and services are the foundation of the Internet of Things. Field maintenance services need a complete overhaul in this world where maintenance is predictive and therefore very different from traditional scheduled maintenance. Is your ERP allowing you to keep up with that?

d) Automation pressure

While outsoucers try to convince their clients to try out automation in the form of AI and robotics, there is similar pressure on them to rebalance their own man-machine mix. Is your PSA able to load balance between FTEs (full time employees) and AFTEs (automated full time equivalents)?

I look forward to hearing from my fellow analysts if the functionality in these products is keeping up with a rapidly changing services economy. 

Son of SMAC

Cognizant popularized the acronym SMAC for the stack of Social, Mobile, Analytic and Cloud technologies where most innovation IT dollars are going. Indeed Malcolm Frank,  EVP Strategy and Marketing was talking about it as far back as November of 2012.

In a more recent survey of over 2,000 executives around the world, they found continued interest in those SMAC areas, but growing interest in IoT, automation, and cybersecurity. The core of digital technologies keeps growing. CEO Francisco D’Souza also provided some color commentary on the survey results in my interview last week. 

Download a copy of their latest Cognizanti magazine for more details on the survey and lots of stories of digital transformations.

 

Kara Swisher interviews Mark Hurd

As part of Recode Decode webinar series, Kara Swisher interviewed Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle on their Media Day in May. It’s always interesting to hear a consumer tech journalist interview an executive in enterprise tech. Kara did a nice job and Mark  did a good job dodging uncomfortable political and other questions

I was there (my post from the day is here) and I managed to squeeze in a question in Kara’s session. It runs about an hour – worth a listen.

Here comes the automation whiplash

As I pointed out in my book, Silicon Collar, for years now analysts like Gartner and academics at places like Oxford U have been predicting doom and gloom in massive job loss from machines. Even years after their predictions, there have been few to none job losses but they have not bothered to update their analysis. Why should they when fellow academics and analysts just parrot their studies, without challenging them? While the book points other flaws in their studies, the biggest one is they did not bother to call and survey practitioners and validate their analysis.

I have been waiting for a backlash to the “sky is falling” noise. Well, IDC finally has a report which a) has surveyed practitioners and b) actually predicts job gains from use of machines. It is narrow – only looks at AI, not other automation like robotics, wearables, drones etc. And it only looks at the CRM domain. Still, it is good to see something positive.

Where the IDC study loses credibility in my mind is its conclusion that “AI associated with CRM activities will boost global business revenue from the beginning of 2017 to the end of 2021 by $1.1 trillion.” I would be more comfortable with that number if they had also surveyed product folks – those building next-gen smart products and services embedded with software, sensors etc. Or if they had talked to companies that are radically rethinking business models. Without those two components I am not sure better CRM activities they surveyed (see below) will actually increase revenues that dramatically.

Still, I would love other analysts to expand the scrutiny and present more realistic view points on automation. This week as the Golden State Warriors ( a case study in my book) won the NBA championship in dominant fashion, it allowed me to include them in a class of “super workers” that machines are helping create.

May be AI will allow some companies to create “super salespersons” who generate that additional trillion. But I bet they will need a new category of products, services and economics – not something CRM should take credit for.

Born Global: Part 2 of conversation with Francisco D’Souza, CEO of Cognizant

In The New Polymath I had profiled Francisco D’Souza and the company he helped found, Cognizant as “born global”. The son of a diplomat, he has lived and worked around the world and has grown Cognizant into a nearly $ 15 billion global technology company. I had a chance to converse with him recently about political changes around the world and impact on global trade and technology adoption.

Part 1 ran yesterday. Here is Part 2

Even as cloud computing accelerates, there appear to be growing calls for regional and industry specific privacy constraints. How are you seeing clients navigating these cross-currents?

No question, privacy remains a complex issue. We see growing calls for regional and industry-specific privacy regulations. To mention just three: the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, and Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act. Of course, there’s an especially heavy emphasis on preventing data loss and protecting personally identifiable data. And some of our clients are considering the appointment of a Data Protection Officer to ensure both regulatory compliance and data protection.

Cognizant has a lot of experience dealing with different regions’ regulatory requirements. If clients want to move to the cloud yet ensure their data is held in a particular region of the world, we can either host their information in one of our several data centers around the world, partner with a local cloud hosting provider, or work with one of the major cloud providers like Azure, AWS, or Google.

There’s a larger philosophical question here too. The borders of privacy are being redrawn, particularly along generational lines. This can confuse individuals and companies about what’s appropriate for us to share and reveal. We conduct so much of our lives online—shared, visible, transparent, open, and all offered voluntarily by ourselves or our friends through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr, or less voluntarily by our credit scores and phone records. There’s no denying that privacy is receding. In speaking with clients, who, like all of us, struggle to discern the lines of privacy, one issue has become clear: Privacy—or its removal—should be an elective decision. It should not be forced upon or away from anybody.

Nearly every commercial transaction requires one party to “give something”—often money—to “get something” of value in return. We find that a customer, employee, or company will share information in return for value. A positive give-to-get ratio is one where the value of the information you provide about yourself (or that your system, process, or product provides about itself) is exceeded by the value of what you receive. Managing this trade-off transparently is essential to maintaining a trusted relationship.

Malcolm Frank and team at Cognizant have recently written a book about AI - and other machines are transforming work and processes in every industry. But not every country seems to be embracing them the same way. Places like Japan are early adopters, others with unions or other constraints, are much slower. How are you advising clients about automation across regional lines?

The answer is that Cognizant takes a country-by-country approach in advising its clients. Some countries are highly receptive to automation. You mentioned Japan. Its aging and shrinking population has created skills shortages and high labor costs. Add to that Japan’s prowess in robot technology, and the country’s receptivity to automation is understandable. Likewise, in China smart manufacturing is viewed as an essential part of its industrial revolution, and Chinese leadership is betting on automation. Germany’s embrace of automation is spurred by the combination of an aging population and the large percentage of its workforce employed in manufacturing. And of course there are plenty of countries that are likely to be slow adopters.

As the saying goes, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” That’s always been the case with new technologies as they move through their lifecycle of use first by innovators, then early adopters, the early majority, and so on. Automation and AI are no different. We are sensitive to where our clients are in this adoption lifecycle. The greatest impediment to automation is usually less about implementing the technology and more about a company’s organizational culture. Has the leadership prepared employees for all or portions of their jobs to be displaced? Do employees understand what new skills training will be available and how automation will reduce or eliminate drudgery and enhance their productivity? By the way, Cognizant’s view is that in a world of more pervasive technology, activities that human beings do well will be even more important in 2020 than today. Analytical, communication, and learning skills, as well as the ability to relate to other people, are all vital for business success. But in the coming years, these very human traits — things we do naturally, but computers struggle with — will become even more essential in our personal and work lives and for our businesses

All that said, our clients understand the importance of digital technologies to their revenue streams, customer relationships, cost structures, and profitability.

If we want to take a regional look at automation, here’s what we see. In North America senior executives envision digital impacting their personal work dramatically, improving measurable outcomes such as productivity and efficiency, but also softer metrics such as increasing creativity and innovation, improvements, efficiency gains and improved collaboration from applying new technologies to customer experiences and back-office work. A vast majority of leaders (87%) expect personal productivity to improve due to new technologies.

In Europe, for example, the 800 organizations that we surveyed expressed their strong belief in AI, business analytics, cloud. We’ve let them know that companies behind the digital transition curve will pay a large laggard penalty. We’ve been advising clients that digital is not just for sales and marketing, and that there’s a massive opportunity to apply process automation to reduce costs in the middle and back offices.

In Asia, where we’ve surveyed 300 companies, we’ve found that their leaders are set to invest heavily in digital initiatives. They’ve told us that their organizations are applying an average of 15% of their total revenue (compared with a global average of 11%) toward digital each year and they expect substantial returns (an average of 116% by 2018) on their digital investments. We’re advising them to reinvest the cost savings from automation to improve customer acquisition and retention activities and to build and strengthen their technology platforms. Of all the new technologies available to Asia Pacific executives the one they believe will have the biggest business impact over the next five to 10 years is AI. Without question, in Asia digital has moved from potential to mainstream status.

Most professional services firms appear excited about automation opportunities like RPA in their clients, but less so in their own operations. Does the industry need a "doctor, heal thyself" message?

At Cognizant, we believe that being digital (as opposed to just doing digital) is the defining challenge for today’s C-suite and for the enterprises they lead around the world. RPA, AI, machine learning, and deep learning are subsets of the larger digital revolution. Digital now touches every part of every company’s strategy and operations, and therefore touches every part of our business. To be as effective as possible in our engagements with clients, we have to live and breathe what we preach—and we do.

Automation goes to the heart of our focus on operational efficiency within finance, travel and expense management, the processing of legal documents, HR shared services, and of course managing the hardware and software requests of our 260,000 people around the world. This is all aimed at enabling us to redirect our focus and resources to serving our customers better. Now, we recognize there’s more to do—and we’re working on this.

Adopting a millennial, forward-looking mindset helps in this regard. Here’s what I mean. Think about the many digital platforms your millennial employees are using on a Sunday evening to manage their personal lives—entertaining themselves, connecting with friends, shopping, checking their financial portfolios, often all at the same time. Their smart phones are the remote controls for most of their lives.

Yet when they arrive at work the next morning, they have that jarring reentry into the old physical world, perhaps working for a company that has operated with an industrial-age business model for decades. These employees rightfully ask (or at least think to themselves): Why can’t work be as seamless, friction-free, and engaging as my home life? They know one is the future, the other is the past. And we, Cognizant, know that if we don’t drive an all-in digital culture within our own organization, then we will be vulnerable to someone else coming in and executing that transformation for us. We’re not going to let that happen. Our job is to imagine the new forms of value we can create with today’s systems of intelligence for our own company and for our own processes and practices, and do so with the same level of intensity and innovation that we do for our clients’ businesses.

Born Global: Part 1 of conversation with Francisco D’Souza, CEO of Cognizant

In The New Polymath I had profiled Francisco D’Souza and the company he helped found, Cognizant as “born global”. The son of a diplomat, he has lived and worked around the world and has grown Cognizant into a nearly $ 15 billion global technology company. I had a chance to converse with him recently about political changes around the world and impact on global trade and technology adoption.

Here is Part 1

The excitement in the US seems to be about repatriation of trillions in overseas corporate profits. In China it is about their One Belt, One Road initiative with trillions in infrastructure and other investments in Asia, Africa etc. The contrast is quite dramatic - one focused on flows back, one outwards. In your view, how will this affect global businesses in the next few years?

We believe these monetary flows are a sign of much larger change under way in the global economy. That larger story for global businesses is that they’re moving into a new economic era powered by machines that think and learn—or what we at Cognizant refer to as “systems of intelligence.” The combination of today’s advanced digital technologies has removed much of the friction of industrial processes, collapsed time zones and distances, and sped up and broadened the flow of knowledge, ideas, innovation, and collaboration. As a result, we have a truly boundary-less global economy where the key to competing effectively is fourfold: 1) to be “glocal”—thinking global and acting local, 2) to become technology-enabled across your businesses, 3) to speed your pace of innovation and learning, and 4) to recruit the best talent from anywhere in the world you can find it.

At SapphireNow recently, SAP CEO Bill McDermott was asked about nationalistic trends. He said "we are prepared for anything, but with the recent French elections, we think the EU is going to hold and we have not seen free trade inhibited in the US". As you talk to client CEOs what are you hearing? A sense of relief or continued anxiety about limits to global trade?

Although the global economy is more integrated than ever and digital flows of information, ideas, and innovation are soaring, support for free trade at a policy level remains important if we are to continue to advance in this direction. In discussions with client company CEOs, we’ve heard expressions mostly of optimism about the future of global trade. These CEOs recognize that in our increasingly digital era, the source of value for customers, employees, partners, and investors has shifted from hard to soft assets and from the physical to the digital. And these digital assets—whether they take the form of compute power, design tools, applications, education and skills, or e-commerce—can and do flow anywhere and everywhere and can come together in amazing combinations.

These days, it’s never been easier to imagine a product, design it, manufacture it, and sell it—and do each of these steps in different locations. Consider additive manufacturing, the process of making a 3-D object from a computer-aided design model. By harnessing additive technologies, industry leaders worldwide can reduce the time to market of their products, improve quality, shorten their supply chains, and achieve production at scale. The clients we speak with also recognize that operating with a business model that can transcend geographical boundaries creates competitive advantage. They know that those industries where employees can move work around internationally—where the core work processes are fluid and knowledge-based—tend to grow faster. For countries and companies, artificial intelligence, algorithms, software bots, and big data are bringing the outside world in—and there is simply no stopping this trend.

Digital Transformations should be a major opportunity for many professional services firms. Are you seeing regional differences in adoption levels and therefore opportunities?

We do see regional differences in the pace of digital adoption, and that’s to be expected. Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work studied 2,000 companies from across the globe — with a combined total revenue of more than $7 trillion — and found that business leaders are already feeling the ground shifting beneath their feet from the power of new technologies. Executives expect the total potential revenue impact to more than double between 2015 and 2018 to 11.4% of total revenue, unlocking value of about $770 billion per year.

In North America, when we ask executives to look out to 2020, big data and analytics rank near the top in importance, but other technologies — such as sensors/Internet of Things, digital security and AI — move up dramatically and stay there. Almost everyone in our survey (97%) agrees that “jobs and required skills will change significantly” because of digital transformation. With few exceptions, respondents see that the main impact of digital technologies will be to make their work more strategic

In Europe, the hundreds of executives we surveyed understand that digital transformation is a must-do. As part of Cognizant’s research, we’ve learned that business analytics and the science of meaning-making are set to dominate Europe’s economic cycle for the next 30 to 50 years and beyond.

We asked executives to rate the impact of several forces on the nature of work by 2020. Artificial intelligence ranked almost as important (98%) as big data analytics (99%) for our respondents. Cloud delivery of services came in just a little bit lower at 96%. As for inhibitors to their digital ambitions, two forces got a lot of attention: data privacy and security and the looming shortage of digital talent across the region. Three-quarters of our survey respondents in Europe worry about there being enough people in the workforce with the right skill sets as the shift to digital accelerates.

In Asia, things are moving faster. In our study of 300 companies with combined total revenue of about $660 billion across the Asia Pacific region, we found that digital has moved from potential to mainstream status. No longer just another channel, digital has become the channel to master. Companies are digitizing every aspect of their business, building new revenue models, reaching new customers, and making big money doing so. The companies we surveyed are making on average $263 million a year by leveraging digital technologies. Most compelling is that 97% of them started as brick-and-mortar enterprises and only recently turned the digital revolution in their favor. Approximately 12% of the net revenue of the Asia Pacific companies we surveyed was driven by digital during the last year, compared with the global average of 4.6%. Our regional respondents predict the percent of revenues derived from digital will nearly double by the end of 2018.

Labor mobility around the globe is critical for the professional services industry. Are you seeing constraints on such mobility across borders? Do you expect to see more regional hiring like Infosys' announcement to hire 10,000 staff in the US in reaction to potential H-1B visa changes? How are you preparing for more travel restrictions on laptops and other devices?

It’s in Cognizant’s nature, perhaps because we were born global, to have our eyes focused on anticipating and preparing for what’s next. As a leading professional services firm, we’ve had to be expert right from the beginning at mobilizing talent to serve the needs of our global clients. And that means ensuring we have the right skill sets (which change over time) and pursuing specialized talent wherever in the world it lives to ensure client access to their knowledge. We are continually evolving our workforce and delivery globally.

Over the last three years, and well ahead of any talk of potential changes to the H1-B visa program, we hired more than 10,000 professionals locally in the U.S. In just the past year, we’ve hired 4,000 U.S. citizens and residents. And this year we expect to ramp up our U.S.-based workforce by hiring experienced professionals in the open market and by making more use of university, veteran, and related programs. This shift in our workforce is in response to clients’ increasing need for co-innovation and co-location. Another way in which we localize our talent is through acquisitions and the rebadging of the client employees we absorb.

Over the past two years, thousands of employees have joined us in the U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific as a result of our acquisition of TriZetto, Idea Couture, Mirabeau, Adaptra, Brilliant Service, and other companies as well as through the rebadging of employees from our client organizations. We’re also helping the world create tomorrow’s digital transformation experts through our support of STEM programs. In a global marketplace, global sourcing is imperative. Our company prides itself on our ability to adapt and bring our knowledge to clients wherever they may be.

Part 2 follows tomorrow