We will have to build our own digital capability on top of the technology that we have adopted. Because every company is a software company
CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella
Modern businesses use front-end software to improve the purchase experience, enable omnichannel delivery, and introduce new product or service capabilities. In the middle- and back offices, cloud computing, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) boost employee productivity.
Players from non-digital industries borrow ‘playbooks’ from software companies to unlock new revenue channels and achieve greater scalability. General Motors generated about $2 billion from in-car subscription services in 2021 and aims to reach $25 billion by 2030. Rolls-Royce doubled its operating profits in 2023, with a substantial fraction of revenue now coming from its growing portfolio of digital products, including asset management software, engine health monitoring solutions, and digital twins.
According to McKinsey research, 70% of top-performing businesses use proprietary software to differentiate themselves from their competitors. A third also monetizes the software directly.
As technology becomes more crucial for business growth, CIOs’ roles are evolving. Tech leaders are expected to help develop business strategy, establish competitive differentiation with technologies, and participate in re-engineering business processes. In the 2023 State of the CIO survey, 71% anticipate a greater immersion in business strategy over the next three years.
Source: 2023 State of the CIO survey
However, the Ops workloads didn’t disappear either. Most are also expected to handle system modernization projects, security management, and other IT infrastructure management tasks.
IT outsourcing, in its classic sense, only helps address talent capacity and cost issues. A staff augmentation vendor may supply hard-to-find skill sets or deliver a scoped volume of services bound by tight SLAs. Yet, such a vendor management approach fails to account for the growing need for wider transformations: faster adoption of data analytics across functions, new security practices to protect AI systems, or improved ESG performance.
Such transformations are complex to handle in-house. Leaders lack experience with emerging technologies but want proven best practices and certainty in implementation. A recent survey found that 57% of executives “lack confidence in their leadership team’s AI skills and knowledge,” for example.
What tech leaders need today is strategic support in transforming IT from a back-office function to an engine of innovation and business growth.
Transactional IT vendor management doesn’t help address the wider issues of business transformations. It merely focuses on farming out certain workloads. However, by changing approaches to IT services acquisition, business leaders can acquire the missing skills and the partners’ experience in engineering processes, digital product development, and modern infrastructure management practices.
Our Vision of Value-Driven Technology Services Partnerships
Over the years, 8allocate has worked with dozens of clients, ranging from Fortune 500 enterprises to scale-ups and rapidly growing startups.
The most successful partnerships have been ongoing for over six years, with our team earning the spot of a strategic, long-term technology partner (rather than a service supplier) because we:
- Develop client knowledge. We’re not just showing up when it’s time to foot yet another bill, but whenever we spot an opportunity for internal process improvements, a nascent market risk in your industry, or a new tech-led opportunity for revenue diversification.
- Collaborate with agility. Markets move at breakneck speeds. We aim to anticipate the new ebbs and flows to help you move with agility. As one of our clients said: “[8allocate] skates to where the puck is going to be”. We take pride in maintaining high responsiveness levels thanks to Agile project management practices and effective change management approaches.
- Communicate transparently. We like to maintain an open line of project-specific discussions and approach tough conversations honestly. Strong communication is the bedrock for effective roadmap alignment and cultivation of synergetic relationships.
These principles form the pillar of our service models, which help our customers jump-start new digital capabilities, improve software development velocity, and gain more strategic insights to drive business innovation.
Long-Term Vision Realization
We’re operating in a new business climate where companies compete as ecosystems. The average company now has 27 ecosystem partners, according to BCG, ranging from OEM manufacturers and distribution partners to software providers and technology research facilities. Amazon, for example, has 67 core partners in logistics, finance, media, and telecommunications. The most successful partnership ecosystems also span multiple countries.
Source: BCG
Recognizing this new business reality, 8allocate aims to build affinity ecosystems with our clients, ensuring strong alignment in expectations, goals, and service delivery. By operating closely in your orbit, we can effectively supply the right knowledge, skills, and expertise as your company enters a new period of growth or faces market turbulence.
We help strategize and implement multi-year technology roadmaps, ensuring that your organization progresses, invests in the right priorities, and progressively improves its maturity levels in different business areas: new product development, data analytics, cloud-native operations, cybersecurity, and IT infrastructure maintenance.
With our help, you can direct resources toward digital initiatives that will bring the highest ROI and help you secure a strong market position for the long term. The added benefit of such strategic partnerships is flexibility. At different stages, 8allocate can supply different competencies, acting as an advisory and a polyvalent implementation partner.
We combine strong competencies in software architecture and UX/UI, critical at the prototyping stage, and strong software engineering, data, and cloud acumen, critical for building and scaling new digital products or modernizing legacy systems. Likewise, our partners gain access to AI, ML, and data science expertise whenever required, as well as a variety of other technical competencies.
C-Level Strategic Advisory
When it comes to digital transformation, 61% of leaders wish their technology function could better explain the potential and value of new technologies. Poor collaboration practices, skill gaps, and a risk-averse culture are among the other common barriers.
As part of our strategic consulting service, we offer C-suite level advisory to help sharpen your vision and determine key priorities for tech-led transformations. While the technology budgets keep increasing, leaders aren’t always focusing on the right priorities. Two in three businesses experience software purchase regret and two in five states that poor software choices made them less competitive, according to Gartner.
We offer on-demand access to senior tech experts to consult on the impacts, risks, and ROI of different technology acquisitions. So that you can better understand how emerging technologies can influence key business metrics and become a driving force behind new revenue streams.
As a global technology partner, we have also cultivated competencies across markets and industries. Having partnered with startups, scale-ups, and enterprise-level companies, we also understand the challenges each business faces at different growth stages. Our advisory services are tailored to support your operations today while also building reliable long-term plans to avoid being blinded by unforeseen risks.
Co-Investment in Innovation
Software products that took years to develop can now be produced in several months. Emerging technologies are also forcing businesses to change gears and often venture into the unknown. Because of AI’s disruptive impact, over 60% of organizations must rapidly evolve their data and analytics operating model.
At 8allocate, we help clients explore innovative ideas at faster speeds and with greater confidence by sharing the risks of minimal product development (MVP). Our team can rapidly prototype new ideas to validate market assumptions and product use cases, sharing the costs and risks with your organization. We helped one of our clients from the construction industry prototype a digital twin platform in two months with a minimal budget using our Agile framework. This helped the company sign on early clients within just four months instead of a year and get extra cash flow to fund scaling.
Effectively, we offer access to our decades in digital product development. An ability to bounce ideas with senior tech and product leaders to sharpen your vision, proven methods for user research and hypothesis validation, and the ability to establish solid guardrails for future product scaling from the first day.
Addressing Talent Shortages
By 2027, Gartner expects that in most industries, 50% more will be spent on IT contractors compared to in-house staff. A number of businesses have been at a disadvantage competing with tech firms for IT talent.
Despite the recent layoffs, 90% of leaders still rank recruiting and retaining talent as a moderate or major challenge. Retention is another problem, as 64% of tech workers plan to look for another job in 2024, knowing their skills are in high demand.
At 8allocate, we help clients secure a link to critical talent and expertise by avoiding talent wars in the local markets. With us, you gain access to an 870K+ CEE talent pool and flexible staffing, which allows you to escape slow hiring cycles and prolonged time-to-market for new initiatives.
Obtain missing competencies from our staff bench to launch new PoC initiatives without worrying about ongoing talent retention. We helped our clients successfully scale from a 5-person to a 45-person distributed team and acquire missing competencies in machine learning, data science, and cloud engineering, among other areas.
Expertise Sharing With Your Teams
Engineering excellence is the grand sum of ‘trial and error’. Few companies start with a high degree of DevOps maturity or strong data management best practices. Only 39% of large enterprises rank their IT staff as “very capable” of cloud implementation, management, and operations, mostly because the engineers were originally hired to support legacy applications.
As a strategic partner in technology innovation, we get to hone our skills across a wide portfolio of projects and technologies. We’ve learned which approaches work best and what practices can perpetuate poor outcomes. Being embedded into your organization allows us to effectively transfer our knowledge to your teams, helping them acquire new skills and adopt the best practices in engineering and project management.
Expertise sharing helps accelerate maturity in various IT functions—from data analytics and cybersecurity to cloud cost optimization—and achieve sustained improvements without going through common trials and errors. “Whenever 8allocate saw an inconsistency or an error in our specification, they suggested how to build certain features differently so we could save on our development budget. They also recommended effective tools and methods to facilitate and streamline our project, which helped us choose the right approaches and technologies”, shared one of our clients in the Energy sector.
Global Scaling Support
New market entry is a natural step for companies seeking revenue growth and diversification. Yet, it also requires extra substantial resources for market research, regulatory compliance, product localization, and the ability to support a much larger user base potentially.
8allocate helps businesses enter new markets without carrying exorbitant costs. Our flexible service models allow you to launch with minimal resources and quickly acquire extra resources once you’ve gained a strong foothold.
As Marc Andreessen put it in an interview with McKinsey Quarterly, businesses are always in a hill-climbing mode.
As you climb the hill, you refine the products and proliferate them to a mass market. Of course, every market has its’ S curve’ of adoption, but it might take a long time to top out, and the plateau might be really big.
Marc Andreessen
The valleys in the S curve include crossing the chasm of the technology adoption lifecycle to win over the early majority of users and ensuring long-term product profitability in the new market. 8allocate can provide on-demand strategic support and resources at every stage of your journey, helping you optimize your cash flow at critical stages and accelerate product development speeds to reach the plateau of mass product adoption.
Corporate Engineering Practices and Productivity Improvements
Over 56% of companies are building new products faster than ever, but 80% are also looking for ways to increase their speed, according to a Protolabs survey. Manual, redundant steps in engineering processes reduce software development productivity. Instead of staying in the flow, your engineers constantly switch tasks, spend unnecessary time in meetings, or get blocked by the slow pace of decision-making. The outcomes are well-known: prolonged time to market, low efficiency, and lost business opportunities.
Our team can audit your current engineering processes and flag opportunities for optimization. Whether you want to advance your Agile project management, introduce a greater degree of infrastructure automation with DevOps, or advance to platform engineering, we’d be delighted to support you.
Value-Based Engagements
The collaborative strategic partnership model also calls for new engagement models. Traditional IT outsourcing billing models like ‘fixed-price’ or ‘times & material’ no longer serve the buyers or the suppliers well, as they don’t promote interest in shared risk/reward.
Value-based engagements add an outcome-based component to the partnership. It better reflects the hard-to-quantify add-ons a partner brings— tech expertise, product development acumen, process excellence — that lead to tangible business impacts. EdTech company GoIT increased the number of weekly active users from 74% to 86%, and the average Net Promoter Score increased from 60 to 75 by proactively suggesting new solutions to the customer. A user-friendly e-commerce platform we’ve developed for a B2B services company generated a 30% sales increase.
A value-based engagement model promotes scope flexibility, as neither party is as strictly tied to optimizing the number of billable hours. Instead, we focus on driving the real business impact of our services.
Contact our team to learn more about the complementary capabilities we can provide for your business.
