Applications Outsourcing

Applications Outsourcing – a driver for business innovation

Managing the applications that drive the business has become increasingly complex as organisations have to balance the support of their existing stack whilst continually changing to take advantage of the latest technologies. Keeping the ‘old’ working alongside moving to the ‘new’, and doing it in a cost effective manner, can be an enormous challenge especially when factoring in resource constraints and business risk impacts.

The benefits of applications outsourcing

Applications outsourcing enables organisations to:

Take control of their existing applications portfolio and ensure it is optimised to maximum business advantage
Deploy the most up-to-date applications without the challenges of managing upgrades
Develop new applications based on modern platforms, such as Service Oriented Architectures
Explore and deploy new application delivery models, such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and mash-ups

Capgemini’s approach

Applications outsourcing has typically focused on technology-centric cost reduction. We believe that outsourcing should be used to encourage innovation and ensure that companies can take advantage of the most up-to-date applications while also maximising the return from existing investments. Our approach to applications outsourcing is about delivering services built on an industrialised platform that drives business efficiency and provides competitive advantage.

Our approach is based on understanding:

Where complexity resides in your organisation and putting in place the systems to meet that challenge.
How increased flexibility can be introduced into your applications architecture.
Where there are compliance requirements and how to meet them.
What the most appropriate technologies are for your organisation.
How to plan incremental application development to ensure that you have the most up-to-date and functionally appropriate application stack that meets your business objectives.

Capgemini’s capabilties

Our Applications Outsourcing Roadmap has four main threads:

Application Portfolio Strategy: for implementing a business-driven framework for decision making and eliminating inefficiencies to increase return on investment through audit of the existing IT estate.
Application Development (AD) Factories: to reduce the risk and increase the reward of application development through the use of our CMMI L5 AD Factory framework. This introduces a factory-model for application development which reduces cost and overheads and increases productivity.
Application Mash-Up: to bring value to the emerging Shadow IT applications, such as Web 2.0 workflow-based mash-ups.
Application Modernisation: to enable improvements to or replacements of existing application portfolios by introducing upgrades and improvements based on your business needs.

Success Stories

Futureproofing

A leading UK retailer of fashion and home wares, with a network of around 200 stores and annual revenues of over £1bn, commissioned Capgemini to modernise its mission-critical merchandise management application for which the hardware, data- base and development language was no longer supported. Capgemini introduced a new hardware platform supported by an appropriate Oracle database management system. The application itself was re-architected to allow it to operate on the new platform whilst retaining all the valuable business functionality.

Business Efficiency

Capgemini created a Dealer Communication System (DCS) Internet Web portal linked to SAP R/3 on behalf of a global leader of the luxury car sector. Dealers are now able to track order status, from headquarters throughout the rest of the world. Supported by the DCS portal, parts orders have doubled, handled comfortably by the same number of staff. The firm is now better prepared to forecast vehicle sales, and inventory is streamlined throughout the supply chain giving full information and clarity to dealers.

Footnotes:

1 Gartner Inc.: “Magic Quadrant for European Offshore Application Services“, Ian Marriott, Gianluca Tramacere, Allie Young, Helen Huntley, Partha Iyengar, Arup Roy, 20 Nov 2008

2 About the Magic Quadrant: The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 20 Nov 2008 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

3 Ovum: “Ovum Navigator: Applications Outsourcing” Ian Brown, 25 July 2008