The 2024 ISG report highlights the growing demand for GenAI and cloud services in France, amid skills gaps, cost pressures, and data sovereignty challenges.
According to a new research report published today by Information Services Group (ISG), a leading global technology research and advisory firm, enterprises in France are facing competing pressures, prompting them to reassess their public cloud investments to balance the need for AI-driven innovation and cost optimization.
The 2024 ISG Provider Lens™ Multi Public Cloud Services report for France finds the need to adopt and integrate generative AI (GenAI) and data analytics for business process innovation is driving greater use of cloud platforms. At the same time, Europe’s challenging economic and political landscape, coupled with territorial conflicts, are contributing to enterprise uncertainty and a continuing focus on cost optimization. Complicating matters, France faces a shortage of skilled AI resources and increased data sovereignty regulations.
“The lack of available market skills is limiting the expansion of GenAI throughout France,” said Julien Escribe, partner and managing director, SEMEA, with ISG. “Those skills are dearly needed right now, especially among public cloud service providers that could be helping clients resolve problems they can’t tackle by themselves.”
Hyperscale cloud platform providers continue to encourage their clients to spend more on GenAI and data analytics to help them improve their business outcomes. GenAI promises to accelerate productivity with semantic search, timeliness of rapid incident response and ease of configuration of cloud resources and security tools, among other benefits. Yet only a relative few managed services providers serving the French market have implemented GenAI within their AIOps platforms.
On the opposite side of the equation, CIOs are urging providers to help them optimize their cloud deployments and reduce costs. Yet this too is proving more difficult to accomplish, as enterprises utilizing HCM, sales and marketing, CRM and ERP platforms, all simultaneously and all on public clouds, are finding the collective networking costs of all these platforms hard to manage.
The largest cloud providers, including Microsoft and AWS, the report notes, are responding to the need to balance out this equation by offering training to hundreds of thousands more people.
Meanwhile, French enterprises’ drive to migrate their workloads to public cloud platforms remains strong, the report finds, with digital transformation efforts accelerating and cloud adoption initiatives continuing to gain traction.
“Service providers need to train those specialists quickly, and then they need to put them right to work,” said Jan Erik Aase, partner and global leader, ISG Provider Lens Research. “This convergence of pressures upon enterprises for innovation, cost reduction and geopolitical security compliance, all at the same time, will not get any easier.”
The report also explores other trends, including the rising need among organizations for protecting data sovereignty. Enterprises need to select the regions and countries where their customer data is being hosted, while maintaining security and management flexibility.
For more insights into the multi public cloud challenges facing enterprises in France, and ISG’s advice for overcoming them, see the ISG Provider Lens™ Focal Points briefing here.
The 2024 ISG Provider Lens™ Multi Public Cloud Services report for France evaluates the capabilities of 49 providers across seven quadrants: Consulting and Transformation Services – Large Accounts, Consulting and Transformation Services – Midmarket, Managed Services – Large Accounts, Managed Services – Midmarket, FinOps Services and Cloud Optimization, Hyperscale Infrastructure and Platform Services and SAP HANA Infrastructure Services.
The report names Orange Business as a Leader in five quadrants. Accenture, Capgemini, HCLTech and Wipro are named Leaders in three quadrants each. AWS, Claranet, Devoteam, Eviden (Atos Group), Kyndryl, Microsoft, ScaleSquad, Sopra Steria and TCS are named Leaders in two quadrants each. Cloud Temple, LTIMindtree, OVHcloud and SoftwareOne are named Leaders in one quadrant each.
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In addition, Cloud Temple and Kyndryl are named as Rising Stars — companies with a “promising portfolio” and “high future potential” by ISG’s definition — in one quadrant each.
In the area of customer experience, Persistent Systems is named the global ISG CX Star Performer for 2024 among multi public cloud service providers. Persistent Systems earned the highest customer satisfaction scores in ISG’s Voice of the Customer survey, part of the ISG Star of Excellence™ program, the premier quality recognition for the technology and business services industry.
