Brazil ADM Providers Pivoting to Agile Development

SÃO PAULO, Sept. 14, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Providers of application development and maintenance (ADM) services in Brazil are pivoting toward agile development, but the vast majority still rely on traditional approaches, according to a new study by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm.

Traditional development still accounts for 70 percent of development revenues among the 33 ADM providers evaluated in the just published ISG Provider Lens(TM) Next-Gen ADM Services Quadrant Report for Brazil. These providers, the report says, face the challenge of adapting SAP and other ERP and legacy applications to agile development.

Consequently, Brazil's ADM services market is growing relatively slowly, at about 11 percent annually for the providers in the study. The 10 best performers, however, saw their revenues grow by an average of 31 percent. Five of them have made significant improvements to their agile offerings.

"The providers represented in this report are working daily on changing the code for the digital world. Collectively, these organizations dedicate more than 70 million hours to changing or adding new application code for Brazilian businesses every year," said Esteban Herrera, partner and global leader of ISG Research. "Still, they recognize they must address the need for speed and increasingly adopt agile and automated approaches for ADM services."

The ISG report finds the Brazilian market is still moving toward automating the "applications lifecycle." Providers are investing in platforms that accelerate development through libraries, microservices, cloud, low-code programming, test automation and robots for script writing. Maintenance platforms, meanwhile, use cognitive and artificial intelligence to automate ticket classification, run scripts that automate service delivery and apply troubleshooting procedures.

With a greater focus on agile development, the majority of providers in the report can now deliver new releases within a month or less. Agile projects typically have eight to 10 developers working on them, but scaling to hundreds of developers is still a challenge. Several providers are using Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®), involving dozens of agile teams within a customer organization, to help deliver projects at scale.

The report also sheds light on continuous testing, including testing-as-a-service offerings used by development teams that are further along the agile and DevOps maturity curve. Such cloud-based services are used most notably for smartphone apps. Testing services providers also are moving into the product certification market to be able to assure the reliability and security of software for everything from payment systems to connected devices.

Not all providers are able to automate functional testing at this point, but this capability is growing with the availability of artificial intelligence and cognitive technology in the cloud. Similarly, not all providers offer DevSecOps in their methodologies, ISG cautions.

The ISG report also examines ADM trends in Brazil's Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) and Manufacturing verticals. Robotic process automation is now a component of applications development in the BFSI sector, and open banking, microservices, platforms and blockchain are also important considerations. In manufacturing, providers are still focused largely on upgrading legacy SAP-ECC systems to SAP S/4HANA and migrating them to the cloud. Most manufacturing companies in Brazil have yet to take advantage of such Industry 4.0 advances as cloud, Internet of Things and supply chain integration, the report found.

The ISG Provider Lens Next-Gen ADM Services Quadrant Report - Brazil evaluates the capabilities of 33 ADM providers serving this market across five quadrants: Next-Gen ADM, Agile Development, Continuous Testing, Next-Gen ADM - BFSI, and Next-Gen ADM - Manufacturing. IBM named a leader in four of the five quadrants, while Accenture, Capgemini, NTT DATA/Everis and Wipro were named leaders in three of the quadrants.

Other recently released ISG Provider Lens Next-Gen ADM Quadrant reports evaluate global and U.S. providers. Additional reports will soon be issued on providers serving the Europe and UK markets, Germany, Australia and the Pan American region. The reports are available to ISG Insights(TM) subscribers or for immediate, one-time purchase on the ISG website.

A customized version of the global report is available from Cognizant.

About ISG Provider Lens(TM) Quadrant Research
The ISG Provider Lens(TM) Quadrant research series is the only service provider evaluation of its kind to combine empirical, data-driven research and market analysis with the real-world experience and observations of ISG's global advisory team. Enterprises will find a wealth of detailed data and market analysis to help guide their selection of appropriate sourcing partners, while ISG advisors use the reports to validate their own market knowledge and make recommendations to ISG's enterprise clients. The research currently covers providers serving the U.S., Germany, Australia, Brazil and the UK, with additional markets to be added in the future. For more information about ISG Provider Lens research, please visit this webpage.

The series is a complement to the ISG Provider Lens Archetype reports, which offer a first-of-its-kind evaluation of providers from the perspective of specific buyer types. An ISG Provider Lens Archetype report on Next-Gen ADM services will be published next month.

About ISG
ISG (Information Services Group) (Nasdaq: III) is a leading global technology research and advisory firm. A trusted business partner to more than 700 clients, including 75 of the top 100 enterprises in the world, ISG is committed to helping corporations, public sector organizations, and service and technology providers achieve operational excellence and faster growth. The firm specializes in digital transformation services, including automation, cloud and data analytics; sourcing advisory; managed governance and risk services; network carrier services; technology strategy and operations design; change management; market intelligence and technology research and analysis. Founded in 2006, and based in Stamford, Conn., ISG employs more than 1,300 professionals operating in more than 20 countries--a global team known for its innovative thinking, market influence, deep industry and technology expertise, and world-class research and analytical capabilities based on the industry's most comprehensive marketplace data. For more information, visit www.isg-one.com.

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SOURCE Information Services Group, Inc.