Mphasis Clients: Exploit their growth plans to match your OneOffice ambitions

Over two years have passed since Mphasis moved out of HP’s shadow thanks to a record buyout from private equity firm The Blackstone Group. The prominent hire in January 2017 of CEO Nitin Rakesh has had made an impressive impact focusing the firm’s strategic goals and improving its financial performance. For existing clients, now is the time to see if you can get more bang for your buck with a firm eager to invest with ambitious clients.

Mphasis is expanding out of its back-office safe space, which could transform your point solution to an end-to-end engagement

As traditional silos blur and break down across front and back offices, modern enterprises need a technology partner that can get to grips with their entire business environment. It’s no longer safe (or lucrative) to focus solely on refining processes in the back office. For this reason, it seems Mphasis has pivoted out of its traditional core stomping ground to take on the full gamut of digital business needs.  The HFS OneOffice Framework demonstrates how Mphasis is seeking to deliver more expansive front-to-back office services:

Exhibit 1:The Digital OneOffice Framework—collaborative, unified, dynamic, intelligent, responsive, and simple

Source: HFS Research, 2019

It may seem that Mphasis is a little late to the digital transformation party, so the firm’s expanding views on transformation work aren’t particularly interesting. What is interesting is the polar shift of the firm away from its traditional strengths in energizing the core, or back-office optimization work. Mphasis’ strength in the back office may be enough of a foundation to let it drive this ambitious framework; for many of its existing clients, it could be the gateway to testing out the growing capabilities the firm has on offer.

However, in a market where it’s getting tougher to stand out from the pack, it will need to produce more client success stories to validate this framework—the proof is in the pudding. So, this is where the firm’s existing clients might be able to get a good deal. Mphasis will need to prove its capabilities outside of the front office, so existing clients should push for some bargains outside of the firm’s usual service offerings.

Mphasis’ willingness to be flexible could give existing clients an open door to bargain for more

Here’s why that may not be as tough to negotiate as people may think. Mphasis is proving itself as a flexible and willing partner to its clients—eager to push experiments and new delivery models to prove it can punch above its weight.

It will come as no surprise to you that Mphasis isn’t the biggest player in the IT services space; it can be priced or positioned out of some engagements. But the firm does have one advantage, and it is prepared to use it—the agility and flexibility that the larger providers struggle to replicate. This comes in two forms. The first is its agile and flexible delivery model which, according to clients, is fairly responsive as their needs change. But the second, and perhaps the most interesting, is how flexible the firm is proving to be when it comes to creating commercial models that can make it competitive with the bigger players. At a recent analyst event, an executive from a large insurance company lauded the firm’s willingness to engage in an RFP process that was far from the ordinary and outmaneuver firms to win the engagement.

Clients frequently talk about their desire for agile and flexible providers who are willing to take risks and demonstrate their commitment to the partnership. Mphasis has been able to demonstrate commitment with its ability to deliver against new and innovative RFP methods, provide outcome-focused models, and evolve commercial frameworks to meet clients’ needs. For clients, this means that Mphasis and similar firms may be more likely to experiment – and invest in – new commercial models while the larger firms rely on the stability and predictability of traditional engagement methods. Although, it has to be said that in a market where every firm shouts about its outcome-focused delivery, real examples are still few and far between.

The firm’s growth plans could also see potential to broaden coverage for multi-nationals and domain-focused buyers

Mphasis has big ambitions, particularly when it comes to growing its business outside of the Americas, which is where the bulk of the firm’s revenues originate. The firm is particularly keen to emphasize its growing presence in Europe; the firm is also pushing to expand outside of traditional vertical coverage, of which banking and financial services take the lion’s share of the revenue, already making inroads into the logistics industry and healthcare.

Breadth, delivery, and scale are important parts of the selection criteria for many enterprises. Large multi-nationals, for example, may be concerned that an organization can’t support its global operations if it doesn’t have a healthy business in key geographies. It also means that for some existing clients, the firm’s growing delivery network will bring them conveniently close to other core business locations. For the savvy buyers out there, this is the time to sit down with an Mphasis account manager to plot out their regional growth strategy and link it to your business plans.

Bottom line: Mphasis’ clients have an opportunity to make the firm’s ambitious strategy work for them by linking geographic expansion and broadening coverage areas to their own business goals.

The market is moving away from a purely operational grind and toward technology that allows more concerted and orchestrated end-to-end process management, giving clients access to new tools like automation and machine learning. Since its carve-out from HPE, Mphasis is embracing the need to shift its needle and position its strategic goals firmly within the new market paradigm. The benefits of this approach cannot be lost on existing clients, however, who should be looking to make sure they leverage the firm’s flexible approach to get the most out of its growing footprint and service portfolio.