AI-Driven Cloud Expansion, Cost Reduction Clash in France

France’s enterprises torn by competing pressures to adopt GenAI, optimize cloud costs and navigate Europe’s economic challenges, ISG Provider Lens™ report says

PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- 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, according to a new research report published today by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm.

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 expansion of GenAI throughout France is being limited by the lack of available market skills,” 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.

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.

The 2024 ISG Provider Lens™ Multi Public Cloud Services report for France is available to subscribers or for one-time purchase on this webpage.

About ISG Provider Lens™ Research

The ISG Provider Lens™ 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 offering their services globally, across Europe, as well as in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, the U.K., France, Benelux, Germany, Switzerland, the Nordics, Australia and Singapore/Malaysia, with additional markets to be added in the future. For more information about ISG Provider Lens research, please visit this webpage.

About ISG

ISG (Information Services Group) (Nasdaq: III) is a leading global technology research and advisory firm. A trusted business partner to more than 900 clients, including more than 75 of the world’s top 100 enterprises, 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 AI, cloud and data analytics; sourcing advisory; managed governance and risk services; network carrier services; 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 1,600 digital-ready 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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Press:

Lucy Hermann-Taylor, ISG

+33 06 76 01 35 48

lucy.hermann-taylor@isg-one.com

Will Thoretz, ISG

+1 203 517 3119

will.thoretz@isg-one.com

Source: Information Services Group, Inc.