Yesterday evening the Badger enjoyed refreshing cold beverages in the garden of the local hostelry, watching the sun set, listening to the song birds starting to roost in the trees around the local pond, and watching ducks marshal their youngsters to the protection of the small island in its centre. It was divine! To say the Badger was relaxed is an under-statement. However, it was also bizarre. Why? Because the Badger’s brain in this idyllic setting turned to reflecting on the results published over the last two weeks by the major IT service providers. Sad, but true.
What the Badger reflected on wasn’t so much the numbers reported, but the buzzwords CEOs used in their webcasts. All the webcasts were pretty standard corporate fayre, contained the usual rhetoric and predictable messaging, and the numbers were well-rehearsed and conveyed with positivity. What struck the Badger, however, was that the words Digital, Digital Transformation, Cloud, Consulting and Systems Integration dominate narratives way more than the term ‘outsourcing’, even though this continues to be an important bedrock within most IT service provider’s business. It was this simple point, oiled with creativity from a cold beverage, that moved the Badger’s thoughts to some murky visioneering and speculation of future ‘outsourcing’ business opportunities.
So, what did the Badger conclude from this murky thinking? First, and most obviously, outsourcing of IT services by major and medium size enterprises is well established and will continue in one guise or another for many reasons. Second, outsourcing for small or tiny businesses – which is influenced by many factors, as the neat little Tenfold item here illustrates – is an increasingly powerful and viable option and this area is destined to continue growing. And third, the piece-de-resistance, the blue-sky handwaving result – families will be attracted to outsource their IT!
Families typically have internet connections, desktops, laptops, tablets, games consoles, smart phones, printers, storage devices holding precious personal information, and so on, scattered around the home and used by different family members. There’s always some incompatibility or something unfathomable wrong causing frustration, and many find it daunting and difficult to ‘join up’ the technology to provide something that could loosely be described as a service for the family across the plethora of devices. More and more technology is coming into the home, so integrating it and looking after it in a coherent, cost effective way suggests family ‘outsourcing’ for a sensible monthly fee could be viable, attractive and perhaps inevitable. At least that’s what the Badger concluded!
So, there you have it. Cold beverages at a local hostelry on a warm Summer evening have a lot to answer for…
