During a recent global analyst event in Paris, Capgemini presented its strategy to a panel of market and financial analysts. It hinges on two main objectives: improving the resilience of the organization in an uncertain economic environment — especially in Europe — and finding new levers for margin improvements.

From an operations point of view, Capgemini intends to continue leveraging the usual suspects: industrialization, cost cutting, and accelerating the development of its offshore talent pool. It also aiming to optimize its human resource pool via a pyramid management program aimed at, among other things, allocating the right experience level to the right type of work.

More interestingly, the company showcased some of the global offerings it has put together or refined over the past 12 months. Capgemini’s strategic intent is to develop offerings addressing three major client-relevant themes – customer experience, operational processes, and new business models. The offerings will be enabled by a combination of cloud, mobile, analytics, and social technologies. Among the set of offerings managed globally, I found the following of particular interest due to their emerging nature and Capgemini’s interesting approach to developing them:

• Service orchestration. Capgemini presented a clear road map to transition its traditional infrastructure related services offering to a cloud broker model. Different steps exist on this journey — remote infrastructure management, service management, service integration, service aggregation, and service orchestration — and the company aims to align its go-to-market strategy with the outsourcing client maturity level required for each one of these offerings. Capgemini is obviously not the only one on this journey — Fujitsu, Cisco, and Mahindra Satyam are among those that have recently launched service management offerings — but I find this approach to be both pragmatic and forward-looking.
• Asset-based services. Capgemini has finally begun to articulate its software asset-based strategy. It is still in its infancy, but I believe that the company has very strong assets, including recent acquisitions like Prosodie in the payment space and Skvader in the smart metering space. The company boasts 60 products, comparable to what most large IT services providers have today in their portfolio of assets. The next challenge for Capgemini in this domain is to create a strong internal entity that will lead its transition to a software asset-based services operating model.

Capgemini’s strategy for targeting distinct offerings makes sense, as it is relevant to clients’ current business and IT requirements. Interestingly, Accenture was the only company identified as a direct competitor to Capgemini during the event. Now that its strategic vision in place, Capgemini can focus on the real challenge: executing within a corporate culture that has not traditionally focused on delivering global offerings. And this still differentiates Capgemini from Accenture. In other words, the real work is just beginning.