Saurabh Gupta is President of Research and Business Operations at HFS. He oversees HFS’ global research function managing the global team of analysts and operations across US, Europe, and Asia-Pac. He works closely with the CEO to set the strategic research focus and agenda for HFS Research, understanding and predicting the needs of the industry and ensuring that HFS maintains its position as the strongest impact thought leader for business operations and services research.
He is a recognized thought leader and passionate problem solver in the global services industry. With 15+ years of experience across client, provider, advisory, and analyst roles, he brings a uniquely realistic and wide-ranging perspective to our industry’s challenges and opportunities. Before joining HFS, Saurabh led strategy for Genpact’s CFO and transformation services, helped shape the Business Process Services (BPS) strategy for AbbVie, managed Everest Group’s global BPS practice, and worked as a techno-functional consultant at Infosys.
Saurabh advises senior executives on business transformation initiatives with a strategic mindset and execution orientation. He has authored over 125 research reports, is a frequent speaker, and is regularly quoted in industry publications. He is well-known for spotting disruptive trends like As-a-Service, Cloud, Analytics, Robotics and predicting their implications for different stakeholders. He brings to the table a combination of subject matter expertise and structured thinking with effective collaboration and communications.
Saurabh is a Mechanical Engineer from Delhi College of Engineering and MBA from IIT Bombay. He lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter. He is a fan of Indian cricket and European soccer but is still trying to comprehend American football.
Digital Fluency – the ability to drive the seamless interplay between business and technology - is recognized as the most urgent business skill to ramp up in today’s pandemic-accelerated rush-to transformation. But investment in Digital Fluency is lagging behind –...
Our extensive research of Global 2000 organizations reveal that less than 30% of enterprises have seen tangible value from emerging technologies across their cloud, AI (artificial intelligence), analytics, edge computing, and blockchain initiatives. However, organizations that “strongly agree” to the...
Musings from the Virtual Roundtable on Supply Chain Management COVID-19 shined a light on our supply chains and illuminated the cracks that have always existed. The pandemic shock created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for supply chain executives to do what we...
You might be relieved to read that we won’t nudge you to go confession to repent your automation sins. If anything, we want to foster a more realistic and relevant discussion on all things automation. With often bewildering noise levels...
The major healthcare industry innovations focus on reducing the cost of care (thereby improving the supply crunch) and shifting the mindset from illness to wellness (to manage rising demand). The pandemic shock has exacerbated these challenges. COVID-19 created a burning...
We’re on the precipice of the New Dawn of 2021 and beyond, and we’ve got serious work to do. The billion-dollar question on everyone’s lips is making a rapid pivot to the OneOffice Mindset, which means understanding the smartest way...
The HFS Hot Vendors are an exclusive group of emerging players, each with a differentiated value proposition for the Digital OneOffice. HFS analysts speak with numerous exciting startups and emerging players. We designate a select group as the HFS Hot...
Improving patient experience is at the heart of healthcare transformation (see Exhibit 1). A good patient experience requires healthcare services to be unified, seamless, personalized, and omnichannel. Continuous health status monitoring and reporting are two of the next big developments...
Finance is no longer a back-office function. More than 80% of the 30 senior finance executives that participated in the recent Capgemini-supported HFS digital roundtable ranked “enabling enterprise top-line growth” as the #1 objective for their finance departments going into...
The global pandemic ripped its way through traditional business operations, where nearly a million Global 2000 employees in the US, India, and the UK had been happily executing work from service centers for the last few decades. Most centers worldwide...
The HFS Top 10 healthcare services report examines the role service providers play in the dynamic healthcare industry. We assessed and rated the healthcare-specific service capabilities of 18 service providers across a defined series of innovation, execution, and voice of...
10 Critical Success Factors to bring finance out of its back-office relegation Click to read 'Re-inventing finance as an integral part of the Digital OneOffice'
This December 2020 HFS Top 10 Finance and Accounting Outsourcing (FAO) service providers report is a refreshed and expanded analysis of finance and accounting services reports we conducted in 2019. This report builds on previous years’ reports, which you can...
Welcome to Vision 2025 – a stake in the ground and a North Star to give organizations across the globe an essential roadmap to thrive. What is clear is that technology alone cannot absorb what has been the biggest shock...
Click here to read Nowhere to hide: Embrace the most seismic technological and business change in our lifetime
Quad’s real-life experience of envisioning, deploying, and scaling automation across 29 departments. The HFS Research team is on an exciting adventure to share the real, unvarnished view on robotic process automation (RPA) experiences from customers worldwide. In partnership with Automation...
Click to read 'Cognizant's Ambition to Engineer the Modern Enterprise'
Demand for healthcare services is outstripping the supply, and consumer confidence is shaky. By 2050, one in four people living in Europe and Northern America could be aged 65 or over[1]. Healthcare spending accounts for a whopping 17% of the...
The HFS Hot Vendors are an exclusive group of emerging players, each with a differentiated value proposition for the Digital OneOfficeTM. HFS analysts speak with numerous exciting startups and emerging players. We designate a select group as the HFS Hot...
Belfius’ and Hexaware’s enterprise-wide approach fuels a journey from RPA to intelligent automation and beyond Why is it so hard to scale and industrialize automation initiatives? The ugly truth surrounding the first seven years of RPA adoption is that...
The HFS Top 10 S2P service providers report examines 12 service providers across a defined series of innovation, execution, and voice of the customer criteria. The report highlights the overall ratings for all participants and the top five leaders for...
An agricultural equipment manufacturer partners with Infosys to ensure farmers have the tools and capabilities they need to feed the world In a relatively short period, business leaders have shifted the focus of their competitive lens from their...
Click to read A Manifesto to Revitalize the BPO Industry
Latin America (LATAM) accounts for only about 5% of the global market share according to HFS estimates. While the region has picked up as a hotbed for nearshore delivery, the domestic market for IT services continues to be untapped and...
There are around 30 million lone workers in Europe who work out of sight without close or direct supervision. And this number is expected to rise significantly post Covid-19 as Work-From-Home (WFH) becomes the norm. Lone workers carry a significant...
The COVID-19 pandemic has further reinforced the importance of driving enterprise transformation using technology as an enabler. Technology underpins nearly every change triggered or accelerated by the crisis. Emerging technologies that enable automation, artificial intelligence, powerful computing, connected devices and...
The HFS Hot Vendors are an exclusive group of emerging players, each with a differentiated value proposition for the Digital OneOfficeTM. HFS analysts speak with numerous exciting startups and emerging players. We designate a select group as the HFS Hot...
How Medtronic is using AI-powered cloud solutions to transform diabetes management Emerging technologies are all the rage in the life sciences and healthcare sector; over 80% of executives are investing (or plan to invest) in technologies across cloud, artificial...
The IBM GBS story to scale WFH post Covid-19 The world changed overnight and the new abnormal is here! The one critical but obvious lesson is to be safe, not sorry. In the post Covid-19 world, Business Continuity Planning and...
Musings from EY’s 2020 Virtual Blockchain Summit Blockchain promises “creative destruction” through disintermediation, but that is a long-term vision; only 6% of executives we surveyed are leveraging blockchain to remove the need for intermediaries (see Exhibit 1). Enterprise clients...
What you’ll get to know from this report: The world changed overnight, and the new abnormal is here! We reached out to the global service provider community to understand how they reacted to the global COVID-19 crisis and their...
WHAT THIS REPORT COVERS Distributed ledger technologies, including blockchain, promises to fundamentally change and disrupt business models, potentially as significant as the internet itself. HFS recognizes blockchain as a Horizon 3 change agent for digital operations with significant value potential...
The world changed overnight and the new abnormal is here! Following the escalation of COVID-19 to that of a pandemic, HFS reached out to the global service provider community to understand how they reacted to global crisis and the immediate outlook...
The life sciences industry must balance intense margin pressure with significant reputational risk. The industry has to transform while simultaneously managing pricing pressures, low R&D returns, and a changing product mix (rise of biologics, personalized medicine, and med-tech). Will COVID-19...
Distributed ledger technologies, including blockchain, promise to change business models fundamentally and are potentially as significant as the impact of the internet itself. Blockchain became a business buzzword in 2017 courtesy of the rise and fall of cryptocurrencies, during which...
Soap and social distancing are the best answers that humankind has had thus far to COVID-19. But what about all the technological advancements that we’ve made? Shouldn’t artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, or quantum computing have saved us by now? It’s...
Enterprises are struggling to keep pace with the unprecedented rate of technological advancements. The promise and impact of emerging technologies on how we produce, deliver, and consume goods and services are unquestionable. However, businesses are struggling to realize the promise....
HFS resuscitates the analyst industry by bringing unique, fresher and more impactful insights into the major innovations impacting business and IT operations today and tomorrow. We're delighted to share with you our new products and services portfolio, as we continue...
As digitization sweeps every industry in the new age of hyper-convenient, customer-centric models, the healthcare and life science communities must prepare to follow suit. The life sciences industry is hurtling toward a hyperconnected future state that requires a patient-centric collaborative...
HFS, in conjunction with Infosys, surveyed 100 C-level executives and functional heads across the globe to understand how they are evolving their enterprises to meet the changing business environment. In the process, we examined how the right culture plays a...
The power and the challenge for enterprise blockchain initiatives stem from the fact that blockchain, by definition, is an inter-organizational technology. In our recent survey of over 300 senior executives who are closely associated with their organizations’ blockchain initiatives, nearly...
Reflections from HFS F&A Leadership Roundtable, London Any finance leader who has undertaken finance transformation knows that doing so is difficult and time-consuming. It requires careful planning and resources, and it can be costly—especially without proper consideration of how...
Artificial intelligence, analytics, and automation, while offering transformative potential business value, need an integrated approach across data, processes, and technologies. When deployed in isolated use cases at task-automation levels, they do not scale and provide their expected transformational impact on...
Reflections from the HFS F&A Leadership Roundtable, Stockholm In October 2019, HFS held a Capgemini-supported executive roundtable in Stockholm’s Grand Hotel. It brought finance and accounting leaders across multiple industries in the Nordic region, HFS analysts, and Capgemini together to discuss their progress and challenges on the journey to the finance OneOffice. Enterprises can no longer confine finance to the back office. It needs to...
Exactly seven years ago, HFS launched the concept of robotic process automation (RPA) to the world via a seminal report and blog. We described a Blue Prism technology offering that “appears best suited for processes that are highly rules-driven...
WHAT THIS TOP TEN REPORT COVERS The HFS Top 10 Life Science services report examines the role service providers play in the dynamic Life Science industry. We assessed and rated the Life science-specific service capabilities of 14 service providers...
We're delighted to share with you our 2020 Research Agenda, as we continue our mission to define business operations and their technology enablement in the next decade. You may recall that last year’s Agenda centred around the theme: “Exploring...
HFS Research developed the Digital OneOffice and key imperatives of a OneOffice strategy that can help enterprises design and create successful transformational experiences. We use this model to define how companies must adapt their operations to be more customer-centric,...
Musings from the HFS F&A Leadership Roundtable In June 2019 we held an HFS executive roundtable, supported by WNS. London’s Chartered Accountants Hall served as a “safe space” where finance and accounting leaders from multiple industries gathered with...
HFS envisions procurement as the ‘ecosystem builder’ for the enterprise, not just a cost-focused, back-office function. As the role of procurement radically transforms, the client expectations from third-party source-to-pay (S2P) services are also rapidly evolving. The HFS Top 10...
Enterprises are facing an unprecedented threat (and opportunity) from disruptive digital business models, ever-increasing customer expectations and an unprecedented data explosion. To this end, a recent HFS study of 350 digital leaders shows a third of them have seen their...
AI is Nascent, New, Hard… and Inevitable. The “why” and “what” of AI have largely been defined… now it’s getting to the hard task of “how.” Most enterprises realize that the risk of not investigating and experimenting outweighs the risk...
Ten critical success factors to drive F&A services of the future Enterprises have always wanted far more for far less from their F&A function. But the old days of finding cheaper labor and some better packaged software have pretty...
Global supply chains are becoming increasingly complex and opaque—and less trustworthy. Blockchain holds promises to solve the complexities of the supply chain i.e. managing product variants and faster time to speed to market, providing mass personalization, and handling logistic complexities....
HFS has started describing TCS as the “Walmart of IT services”—the firm can pretty much win any large deal it wants and deliver it effectively. TCS grew impressively at 9% last year to end 2018 at $19 billion in...
WHAT THIS TOP TEN REPORT COVERS The HFS Top 10 Finance and Accounting (F&A) Service Providers report assessed and scored service provider participants across execution, innovation, and voice of the customer criteria. The inputs to this process were detailed...
WHAT THIS TOP TEN REPORT COVERS The HFS Top 10 Energy Services 2019 report examines the role service providers play in the energy sector. We assessed and rated the energy sector-specific service capabilities of 11 service providers across a defined...
Not many people have noticed the practical disappearance of the term “outsourcing” from the services dictionary in recent years, but the evolution of heritage “outsourcer” WNS into a firm much better described as a “business operations partner” was highly visible...
The energy and utility market has a long history of disruption, such as the emergence of digital technologies like smart meters and ever evolving energy trends which have culminated in a complex market environment riddled with inefficiencies. Huge barriers to...
Over the last few years, intelligent automation (IA) has emerged as a catch-all term for various change agent technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), and smart analytics that are being deployed individually or in concert to...
WHAT THIS TOP TEN REPORT COVERS The HFS Top 10 healthcare services report examines the role service providers play in the dynamic healthcare industry. We assessed and rated the healthcare-specific service capabilities of 20 service providers across a defined series...
Musings from conversations at IBM Think 2019 While the rest of the world focused on IBM’s “Project Debater” AI at the recently concluded IBM Think in SFO, I spent almost all of my time with IBM GBS Leadership and...
Earlier this month, Kofax closed its acquisition of Nuance Document Imaging (NDI), a division of Nuance Communications, at a price tag of $400 million. It also entered a definitive agreement to acquire Top Image Systems (TIS). These two acquisitions are...
20 enterprise leaders in discussion on AI for business operations - at the Apella in New York At a recent FORA Roundtable in NYC, produced in association with Genpact and featuring their Chief Digital Officer, Sanjay Srivastava,...
HFS Research recently visited Bangladesh to investigate start-ups, digital-native businesses, and home-grown technology firms. We found a vibrant ecosystem in Bangladesh with strong support and commitment from the government, which is resulting in Bangladesh making exciting strides toward establishing itself...
WHAT THIS REPORT COVERS Distributed ledger technologies, including blockchain, promises to fundamentally change and disrupt business models, potentially as significant as the internet itself. HFS recognizes blockchain as a Horizon 3 change agent for digital operations with significant value...
The HFS Research theme for 2019 is “Exploring the Next Frontier Beyond OneOffice.” The “Digital OneOffice” promises to create a boundary-less enterprise where there is only one office that matters—one that caters to the customer. But what’s beyond the OneOffice?...
Enterprises need data more than ever. Marketplace success is increasingly dependent on delighting customers, creating disruptive business models, and running smart operations with data and technology. Even as we transition into a data-driven economy, enterprises need analytics to make strategic...
Free for a limited time! Digital is far more than simply investing in new technologies: it’s about driving new revenue and customer experiences as well as harmonizing business silos (or the OneOffice). Success in digital initiatives is also less...
Blockchain is emerging as a powerful architectural technology with the potential to impact enterprise and B2B ecosystems as much as the internet and cloud. The foundation for any blockchain solution is its underlying platform or framework, which sets the...
In today’s data-driven economy, it is essential for all companies to put several principles at the core of their business strategy: customer centricity, data-driven operations, and agility in the face of emerging technologies. HFS Research has summarized these principles as...
Confusion around RPA deployments is rife, with growing questions surrounding whether RPA can deliver on promised ROI and outcomes. Most RPA initiatives continue to be small and piecemeal; scaled RPA deployments are rare because the industry is still relatively nascent,...
The HFS Top 10 not only presents the voice of the customer in a more meaningful way to customers, but it also enables analysts and vendor executives to engage in a less stressful and apolitical manner. This also refocuses the...
The rise of RPA is nothing short of spectacular. It has captivated the attention of digital operations executives with the promise of cost-savings beyond labor arbitrage, cost avoidance by extending the life of legacy IT, quicker implementation than traditional IT...
In July 2018, HFS hosted its 19th summit for enterprise operations and IT leaders in Cambridge, UK at the home of one of the United Kingdom’s most celebrated universities. This academic location, renown for its scientific achievements, made a fitting...
Genpact acquired Barkawi Management Consultants in a move to bolster its Supply Chain Management (SCM) talent and domain expertise. The injection of high-end and onshore consulting talent bodes well for Genpact in an under-penetrated supply chain services space especially at a time...
HfS discussed the promise, the hype, and the reality around Enterprise Blockchain adoption in an unadulterated conversation with Paul Brody, the Global Innovation Leader for Blockchain at EY. Paul’s twitter handles states “rarely right, never in doubt” but of late...
For this year’s April Fools’ Day blog, we poked fun at blockchain and the increasing absurdity of some of its use cases. Quite a few of us out there fell for it—but most were able to delete quickly the LinkedIn...
The global market leader in contact centers, Teleperformance, has made the first bold move to shake up an industry in desperate need of a shakeup. But is this merely buying growth out of desperation, or a strategic shift to sell...
WHAT THIS BLUEPRINT REPORT COVERS The market for enterprise robotic software and services is growing at a breakneck pace of 47% growth in 2018 to surpass $1.5 billion. However, there are growing questions about whether RPA can deliver on promised...
WHAT THIS BLUEPRINT REPORT COVERS The Digital OneOffice is where the organization's people, intelligence, processes, and infrastructure come together as one integrated unit, with one set of unified business outcomes tied to exceeding customer expectations. It allows an enterprise to...
We all know that the business impact of new digital technologies is massive, and we’re all warming up to it, right...? Early winners are acting boldly, while the laggards are stuck in the mud. Senior leaders who think it’s hype,...
The HfS FORA event in New York focused on actions enterprises must take to understand the importance of these change-agents and emerging technologies, and how to apply them to their businesses effectively. It also explored the pace of change: how...
F&A Services are desperately seeking a significant shift in value proposition. CFOs are no longer focused solely on cost reduction. Labor arbitrage is tiring out and providing diminishing incremental returns. On one hand, the F&A Services market is slowing down...
The world of finance and account business process services is poised to take a very different direction as labor arbitrage solutions are replaced by a combination of platforms, automation, AI, and ultimately blockchain. As one generation of services grinds to...
Blockchain is emerging as a powerful architectural technology with the potential to impact enterprise and B2B ecosystems as much as the cloud has. The foundation for any blockchain solution is its underlying platform or framework, which sets the rules of...
HfS is expanding its industry coverage in 2018 to include detailed IT and business process research on 11 core sectors, powered by extensive buyer research with Global 2000 firms. The transformation and challenges posed by digital disruption and changing competitive...
HfS is expanding its industry coverage in 2018 to include detailed IT and business process research on 11 core sectors, powered by extensive buyer research with Global 2000 firms. The transformation and challenges posed by digital disruption and changing competitive...
What are the HfS Hot Vendors? The HfS Hot Vendors are an exclusive group of emerging players with a differentiated value proposition for the Digital OneOffice™. Exhibit 1: The Digital OneOffice Organization We designate a select group as the HfS Hot...
The HfS Research Agenda 2018 serves the real needs of our clients. It aims to deliver impactful knowledge and insights that will help our clients survive and succeed in the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) world that we all live in. Download...
We’ve now had a couple of years to ruminate about the emergence and impact of the blockchain—So where is the industry today and what can we expect for 2018 and beyond? Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), including blockchain, promise to...
It’s got to be one of the most significant milestones to date in the rapid adoption of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), that industry pioneer Blue Prism is now a £1bn ($1.3bn) market cap company. Investors are desperate to find new...
MARKET DYNAMICSDistributed ledger technologies, including blockchain, promises to fundamentally change and disrupt business models, potentially as significant as the internet itself. HfS recognizes blockchain as a Horizon 3 change agent for digital operations – with significant value potential but still...
WHAT THIS REPORT COVERS This report contains market size numbers, drivers and limitations across various horizontals of F&A services Globally. information in this document will set the right expectations for the current and future trends and buying patterns. Our goal...
WHAT THIS BLUEPRINT REPORT COVERS The use and impact of Digital on Payroll Services, and analyzes the evolving value proposition for clients, and emerging sources of differentiation for service providers. It includes coverage of the 15 leading Payroll Services providers,...
Discussions around Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and a rise in the populace of virtual workers almost always correspond with the discussions regarding the loss of jobs and shrinking opportunities for humans. We analyzed the likely scenario in...
The rise of automation fueled by Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has allowed the world of business operations to think different and to think fresh. It enables organizations to transform to a state where there is only "OneOffice" that matters anymore,...
In September 2017, HfS hosted its 16th summit for enterprise operations and IT leaders in Chicago. The occasion also marked the debut session of the newly-formed Future of Operations in the Robotic Age Council (FORA). The purpose was to bring together...
HfS conducted the first-of-its-kind research involving 400 senior IT and operations executives from enterprise customers to drive a fact-based discussion on the impact and maturity of automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) on business operations. Four-fifths of the C-Suite are...
MARKET DYNAMICSThis year’s HfS Blueprint: F&A As-a-Service reflects an industry truly in transition as service buyers and service providers are moving to “finance of the future” in which finance balances its role as strategic business partner and controller. A successful...
HfS Blueprint research reports are the cornerstone of our research. These comprehensive reports have emerged as highly influential guides for enterprise clients to make key decisions on service providers. Since the inception of the HfS Blueprint in 2013,...
The pace of change in today’s world of business and IT operations is astounding. “Digital,” “Platform,” and “Automation” are most frequently used words that clients hear from their service providers and advisors but there is no common understanding or definition...
Our research shows that the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) client experience is bi-polar – around 60% the RPA adopters were satisfied, but RPA did not meet or barely met the expectations for the rest. In this PoV, we drill...
The HfS 1-2-3-4 Research Agenda serves the real needs of our clients. It aims to deliver impactful knowledge and insights that will help our clients survive and succeed in the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) world that we all live in. Download...
The market cap for cryptocurrencies was $16 billion at the start of 2017. It rose spectacularly by nearly 700% to $110 billion by June 2017, then fell to less than $70 billion by the middle of July – then up...
The Global Services Industry is changing dramatically. We have finally evolved beyond arbitrage-centered solutions that primarily focused on operational cost reduction to digital savvy and intelligent solutions that solve business pain points and drive significantly better business outcomes. M&A activity...
