HCL is going toe-to-toe with major IT services firms and winning: Enterprises must consider their capability to bring scale to digital engagements

HCL has picked up some seriously big wins over the past few years, with double-digit growth for the last 10 years helping the firm nudge above Wipro in global revenues earlier in 2019. At a couple of recent HCL events, HCL shared its secret sauce to taking on giants like IBM, TCS, and DXC and coming out on top with success across digital services—from cloud migrations to the digital workplace. Helping enterprises scale digital projects should be bread and butter for IT services firms, but not all come with case studies so willingly. At a recent event, we heard from a couple of HCL’s clients who came on stage to testify to the firm’s capability to deliver pragmatic and scalable digital services as part of these engagements. Enterprise leaders would do well to find similar proof points from providers or risk going from digital scale to digital fail.  

DHL Ventures is tackling staffing challenges in the logistics sector with start-up FLEC, and it is relying on HCL to bring talent, experience, and scale 

Take the example of FLEC, a high performing start–up incubated as part of DHL Ventures. FLEC stands for Flexible Lifetime Employment Company, which is working with DHL to transform agency labor. The firm recognized issues with the way organizations were staffing based on generational preferences. After all, Millennials and Gen-Zers invented side hustles and the gig economy. FLEC’s job was to understand how this shift in generational demand would impact the logistics industry, namely grappling with the flexible schedules younger generations value and the poor supply of workers in the sector generally.  

FLEC aims to unlock the value of flexible employment trends by empowering agencies with a digital wrapper that helps them appeal to flexible workers, largely by streamlining processes that traditionally were unwieldy in terms of workload and regulatory compliance. Staying up to date with working time legislation and regional minimum wage rules keeps most agencies busy and has historically disincentivized traditional firms for hunting flexible workers. FLEC has been successful, and the workload on its platform has grown exponentially. 

Enter HCL to scale the platform. FLEC kept a core team but leaned heavily into HCL’s broad capabilities in the space to help the business grow. Offering flexible resources to support the fledgling business, FLEC was able to leverage an offshore delivery model to bring in expertise to tackle challenges as the platform developed—whether that’s pulling in 10 developers to build fresh features or leveraging HCL experts to convince cloud partners to tackle key issues with their offerings. HCL’s involvement enabled the firm to focus on both cost efficiencies through accelerated digitalization and building out new revenue streams. With the technology in check, FLEC now aims to take a chunk out of the £31 billion UK contract recruitment market by leveraging the growing global gig economy. 

Even soccer teams with a full trophy room need help developing customer engagement platforms at scale 

Part of HCL’s success is its innate ability to capitalize on a good idea—whether that’s by acquiring assets from IBM or productizing client solutions. Our next example emphasizes this strength. HCL has built a compelling business from products and platforms, many of which are highly verticalized. One of HCL’s clients is the Manchester United Football Club. HCL has worked with the global brand to help the firm engage with its global fanbase. The new platform gives fans the ability to access a new website and app that enable greater engagement, from viewing live team stats during games to keeping up with breaking news. The platform delivered the intended results, recognizing 80% growth in downloads of the app since its launch in 2018. 

According to members of the Manchester United leadership team, this feat isn’t the only exciting part— rather it’s the broader digital change that the century-old firm has been able to recognize from working with HCL that’s more interesting. The team’s business model targets sponsorship by boosting engagement for existing sponsors and luring new logos. Recalling the initial engagement, executives at Manchester United advised the clincher was that HCL seemed to have a similar vision for the firm’s growth strategy. Ironically, digital hardly received a mention. It was about “building a platform to support the business with a capable service environment to scale.” In terms of scale and capability, the team candidly recalled the launch of the firm’s flagship app, which was so responsive it announced goals in a live game before most viewers’ video streams had caught up. 

The Bottom Line: Packing a room with digital talent is half the battle, but scaling those solutions requires an entirely different mindset and capability 

According to clients, HCL has played an invaluable role in scaling their digital projects with pragmatic solutions. The firm has recognized that building a partnership enables building greater client stickiness as projects roll from one into another, an approach that has seen the firm capture considerable market share on large transformation deals. This ability to partner and scale digital projects is becoming an indispensable piece in the IT Services market in particular as enterprises look to reduce costs, drive new revenue streams and engagement models, and boost employee and customer experience. 

The reality is that enterprises across the globe have tried and failed to scale digital projects past ideation, even with a capable partner in place. Enterprise leaders would do well to ensure their partners have a successful delivery track record to ensure the providers they’re working with have the talent, experience, and capability to generate the most value and impact from digital investments.