About 70% of CIOs are expected to change their technology and sourcing relationships in the next two to three years as organisations struggle to adjust to the digital future, a new Gartner report has suggested.
Gartner managing vice president Eric Rocco said:"They are strongly considering changing the providers they work with as part of responding to this change."
Torrential modifications would reshape the service provider landscape over the following years as businesses strive to fine-tune to a digital future, the report said.
"The impacts of the Nexus of Forces and digital business transformation are reshaping business processes and supporting IT strategies," Rocco added.
"Most buyers cannot simply adopt new services without making changes to existing processes and applications.
"Buyers want speed and agility.
"They recognise an innovation crisis exists internally, but few service providers are well-positioned to capture the opportunity."
The research firm added that helping clients in digital business transformation would turn out to be a driving factor in the majority of IT services opportunities.
Technology and service providers also have to decide and show how their offerings can underpin, support, enable and speed up the digital business revolution to remain relevant to their consumers.
"IT spending buying centres across industries have steadily shifted away from the central IT function and to business buying centres," Rocco said.
"Service providers of the future will articulate value in business terms such as key process outcomes and impact to key performance indicators (KPIs). Doing so requires deep vertical industry knowledge, and new go-to-market models."
According to Gartner, hybrid IT environments may rule client IT architectures in the upcoming years, highlighting the significance of skills in both the old-world legacy environments and the new-world as-a-service operating models.
The report noted the overall IT services market would grow by 4.6% this year.
During the year, hardware support is expected to have the lower growth opportunities, while cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and business process as a service (BPaaS) would expand by 44.9% and 12.4%, respectively.
"The strategic challenge facing service providers is to better understand client value drivers, and to more effectively articulate their own value propositions," Rocco said.
"Our key recommendations, regardless of business model or service segments of focus, for IT services providers are to target new buying centres through the audacity of visionary thinking; articulate value in terms of business outcomes and KPI attainment; and to industrialise and productise, without losing sight of service value."
