Loading...Following the impact of my previous article, a little teasing towards IT services companies, I have made up my mind to share my strategic thoughts which led to our new BM. And I have done it twice: both in this article and, a few days later, in a video broadcast on Pentalog TV (Pentalog Group’s web TV station, leader in the IT sector).Our previous model, which promised our customers the right price for their software and web development activities by finding the ideal balance between local services and low cost is still in line with our new offer.A reminder of the facts: in the 2000s, Pentalog became one of the nearshore leaders in the IT sector in the European Union, mastering the German, French, Belgian, Swiss and Romanian markets extremely well. As for the service centers, we have one in France, 5 in Romania, one in the Republic of Moldova and one in Vietnam (offshore). We have two commercial sites: one in Germany and one in Israel. The group will exceed its 800 employees towards the end of 2012 and should almost reach the number of 900 employees at the end of Q1 in 2013.In the last several months, we structured around these high quality development capacities perfectly complementary offers on a triple play logic:
For Mixshore Consulting, the idea is to come into action upstream from the production phases where we currently operate. Thus, we aim at achieving two objectives:- Starting by consultancy, upstream, relationships which could continue downstream in software production and cloud services.- Enabling our clients to reduce even further the time-to-market and the cost of their projects, by offering them teams of consultants, some of whom come from offshore or nearshore delivery centers. Therefore, the development stages start with those who have contributed to the architecture, to choosing technical solutions, to business analyses… This is what we name mixshore consulting: setting up end-to-end capable teams from high-level experts involvement at the clients’ premises, until carrying out the tests and the actual production.- Proposing an increased number of offers without decreasing margin quality (for instance, Pentalog does not intend to provide direct technical assistance in France)
– Offering new career perspectives to Pentalogians, who are undoubtedly talented and ambitious.As for the Cloud, we draw the lessons from about a dozen years of owning our own infrastructures. Indeed, to have a functional, secure and supervised production for 700 Pentalog employees who work in 8 delivery centers and 2 commercial offices, we had to invest both in people and in technology. Our teams have long become experts in virtualizing machines which enabled us to make significant savings. The upgrade we offer our clients is to step up into Pentalog’s Cloud Software Factory. Why this name?
– First of all because Pentalog has already been a software Factory for a long time. Completely interconnected, our teams can “log in” to a development platform and “log out” on demand. Pentalog employees deliver dozens of new software products, hundreds of upgrades, millions of code lines to their clients every year. What we propose to our clients is to take now advantage of this extremely robust production architecture, to give up their own production servers (thus reducing ownership and administration costs while decreasing financing need) and to join our developers in CSF. By doing this, they could also benefit from all our existing services: instantiating numerous solutions in only a few clicks, test cloud and code cloud audit. In a nutshell, they benefit from a much more powerful solution than that they had previously… at a much lower price. Pay only for what you use. The ON DEMAND concept has become clear.- Then, and few people know that already, Pentalog has become a Cloud Factory. This means that Pentalog has invested in creating a real factory of virtual private clouds (VPC) enabling any client to start a cloud, use the nominal power of his choice (thereafter adaptable)… in a few minutes. The difference from other offers on the market consists in the fact that the customer can use an already existing software library with the most popular 100 open-source solutions ready to be launched with no more hassle. Among these, Magento, Drupal, Sugar CRM, OpenERP have come to my mind… Of course, all the web development projects carried out by Pentalog are compatible with and can be hosted by CSF. In other words, from now on, a Pentalog client can instantiate a development cloud, for himself, for Pentalog or for both, and deliver on its production machines which, of course, are also in the Pentalog cloud. We assist our clients in taking several steps: the client switches from continuous integration to continuous delivery, solving many costly security issues at the same time, by limiting the doors and exchanges with the outside environment…
Of course, for the moment, we have only a few clients who have switched entirely to this full triple play mode (3). But we are optimistic because there is the power in the cloud and the originality in the offer. Moreover, the 700 Pentalog employees already use it every day. The consultants of the Pentalog Institute Mixshore team provide a wealth of consultancy services to about a dozen clients every day. In the end, several double plays (consultancy – production) are already underway. In total, a number of 15 clients already use two of the three components of the business model, which means about a quarter of the clients who are active every year. Through this new Business Model, Pentalog must turn its confidence capital into new services which will open up new growth opportunities!See the new Pentalog business model.See the Cloud Software Factory offer.See the Pentalog Institute consulting and IT technology offer.See the video on Pentalog Institute, IT consultants and experts.
