Several recent Forrester reports, including “Mobile Is The New Face Of Engagement,” have shown how new business success imperatives are pushing clients to change the way they leverage IT solutions. In my report “The Move To An Asset-Based Services Play,” I describe how IT service providers will have to adapt to these new rules of engagement if they want to stay relevant to their clients in the long run. In particular, the increased focus on business innovation will push service providers to invest more in the development of software assets — or solution accelerators (SAs) — that provide strong business value to multiple clients.

The move to asset-based services will force service providers to invest in new operating models that differ significantly from their traditional models and are closer to the ones leveraged by software providers. In my next report, I will cover some of the associated best practices in terms of the organization, people, processes, and tools that IT services firms need to implement to make this shift happen internally. Service providers will need, among others, to recruit new skills such as product and portfolio managers, incentivize the creation of software assets, fund and incubate the creation of solution accelerators, and overhaul their partnership management processes.

I’m currently working on a report entitled “IP-Based Solutions Will Transform The Global IT Services Industry.” In a nutshell, I believe that the business model of IT services firms (consulting firms, systems integrators, and outsourcing firms) will transform from a traditional human capital-intensive model to a software capital-intensive model over the next five years. As I will detail in my report, I believe this transformation will have far-reaching implications on the IT services firms’ organizations, including their sales, marketing, portfolio management, and delivery capabilities.

As I’m based in India, I also see this change as a major disruption for India’s export-oriented IT services industry (AKA “offshore services”). I believe that the growth model for India’s IT/ITeS industry’s in the next 20 years will be much different than it has been for the past 20 years. Software assets — what I also call IP-based solutions — will become critical to the competitiveness of the Indian IT services industry. The recent investments of companies like Infosys, HCL, and NIIT Technologies in such IP-based offerings are strong proof points.

This means a couple of things for the Indian industry:

• The Indian IT/ITeS industry will create far fewer jobs than in the past. This is what some Indian firms refer to as “non-linear” business models.

Infosys recently published strong fiscal Q3 results as revenue growth and operating margins were boosted by a falling rupee (down a sharp 11% sequentially). For the full year, however, the company revised its forecasts in dollars from 19% to 16% for FY2012 (April 2011 to March 2012) on account of a slowing business in Europe.

Forrester expects marginally slowing growth in the global IT services market, dropping from about 7% growth in 2011 to 6% growth in 2012 (read Andy Bartels’ tech market outlook for 2012 here). Most of the slowdown effect will come from the debt crisis in Europe. Growth in emerging markets like AP should remain strong in 2012 (read my report with Andy Bartels here), although this growth will not be large enough to offset a slowdown in mature markets.

I look forward to having updates from Wipro, TCS, and HCL this week to see if we can “generalize” Infosys’ guidance to the overall IT services industry. Until now, Indian IT companies’ growth and margins have been protected thanks to a weakening rupee. I believe that this situation combined with slower growth in the US and Europe will lead to a price war between vendors as they try to build volume.

What does this mean? As economic uncertainty looms in 2012, I believe IT services companies will have to accelerate their transformation toward software capital intensive models. In my upcoming report (“Solutions Accelerators — A Reality Check” to be published in April 2012), I will look at how far they have gone in this transformation and what the key success factors are going forward. Stay tuned.

Mobility, cloud, and smart computing will drive tremendous growth and significant changes in the IT industry over the next few years. My fellow analysts have brilliantly covered these topics in the past few months.

I would like to build on these views and focus more specifically on the productivity race that the IT services industry and its clients have been in during the past 10 years or so. While IT services vendors have managed to improve their output levels in order to protect margins in a market of severely eroding price points, I believe they will rapidly reach a plateau if they continue to use traditional methods. Instead, the most successful IT services firms of tomorrow will increasingly leverage disruptive methods in order to fulfill the client expectations to always “do more with less.”

Ever since the Internet bubble burst a decade ago, clients have pushed their providers to find ways to provide them with continued price decreases for similar or greater output levels. This was achieved thanks to two main levers to decrease the amount of resources required to run IT systems by end user firms:

• Fewer resources: Optimizing the utilization of resources in order to reduce their consumption. For example, most projects around asset management, infrastructure standardization, consolidation, and virtualization yield the most evident returns as sources of productivity improvement. This is the case in particular in developed countries where companies need to cope with multi-layered legacy technologies that render IT systems as complex and expensive to maintain.