The global information technology (IT) market is set to increase at a CAGR of 4.5% over the next two years (2017-19) reaching a total spending of about $3.845 trillion, with the Software and IT Services segments set to show promising growth.

The IT services market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.1% to reach US $995Bn by 2020, out of which, 40% of the market would be in North America. In the cloud computing industry SaaS dominates the market with a growth rate of 19% and PaaS and IaaS account for the remainder of the market with a growth rate of above 30%. Furthermore, the traditional on-premises vendors are aggressively shifting to SaaS deployment models transforming to hybrid players.

The client was an IT services firm who wanted to prioritize the country for expansion of their product and also identify the customer segments to be targeted in the market.

(A) They offered SaaS& consulting services and were looking at the next target geography. They also wanted to understand the model of market entry as to how they should enter the specific market.

The challenges were to prioritize and segment different geographies, strategize a market entry plan for the top geography in a rapidly growing industry which already had a lot of established competitive players.

The key challenges were –

Develop and implement a global market prioritization model for the IT industry

Identify the avenues for capturing the market via niche or general services in a highly competitive industry with many global players

Identify the market entry model(individual, Joint venture, acquisition etc.)

We took on the problem from a top-down approach starting from the macro-analysis of global IT industry and moved on to the country specific research. We used several qualitative and quantitative tools and resources to come up with insights that directly impact our client’s business. The key takeaways are as follows –

Conducted industry analysis and competitive benchmarking to shortlist factors for market prioritization like size, growth, regulatory support, etc. and shortlisted the top geographies to target

Conducted competitive benchmarking exercise to understand the whitespaces that can be captured in a highly fragmented market and establish a niche for the client

Recommended a market entry model basis the internal factors (financial, core competence etc.) &external factors (competitive forces, threat of new entrants, substitutes etc.)in the industry

Recommended a marketing plan for market launch with avenues identified for best capturing the target segment