There’s a lot of excitement and anticipation around here these days. That’s mostly because we’re getting ready for our annual member/customer event in Las Vegas, Technology Services World. The Vegas event is our flagship conference and our most heavily attended one. According to the latest data, we’re on track to have our largest event ever. Clearly, having the event in a fun place helps. But in these quintessentially uncertain times, there is no way this many people would expend the time or money to take part in the conference unless they were pretty darned sure that it was going to be a valuable experience. If you’re not familiar with the conference and/or are wondering what all of the hubub is about, you can view the full conference agenda here. What might be a bit less obvious to folks not all that familiar with either TPSA or TSW is what kinds of companies are typically represented. So that’s what I want to cover in this blog post.
The best way I know of to provide information on who will be at TSW is to offer some data on who is in TPSA. That’s because virtually all of our member companies are typically represented at the event. It’s true that the current list of TPSA member companies is available here. But company names don’t tell the whole story. Since the vast majority of TPSA member companies complete the core PS benchmark study, demographic data from that study ends up providing the best source of detailed information on the make-up of TPSA membership. Here’s a targeted smattering of that data.
The first thing that people generally want to know about who is in TPSA is how big the companies are. Large companies seem to want to think that mostly smaller companies participate in associations like ours. The smaller companies believe the exact opposite. So what is the case?
The fact is that companies are pretty equally distributed across large, medium and smaller companies. More specifically and more importantly, there is a virtually identical number of large and small companies. The second thing that people ask about is the representation of companies by product type: hardware vs. software vs. pure services.
The second figure here shows that for better or worse, over 90% of TPSA member companies are technology product companies that have professional services as part of their overall portfolio. At the same time, less than 10% of the member companies are “pure-play” technology services providers. This indicates two things, in my mind. First, we clearly have a wealth of representation and so therefore data, on companies that have a blended portfolio. But second, we do have a meaningful number of services players in the mix. All this means that we have some very useful things to say about both worlds, both in our normal activites at TPSA, as well as at TSW. Relatedly, there is an excellent mix of companies in terms of how services or product centric they are in their overall revenue mix.
All TPSA member companies have services in their portfolios, or they simply wouldn’t be in the membership. But from the above graphic, we can observe at least two additional things. First, most TPSA members have substantial services businesses; 68% of them have at least 35% of total revenue coming from services; whereas 34% of them are very services centric with 65% or more revenue coming from services. Second, though, nearly a third of the member companies are actually very product-centric, with at least 65% of company revenue coming from the product part of the business. This mix provides us with a rich sample of companies that have very different business models where technology services is concerned.
Similary, the revenue contribution of TPS specifically is distributed across major categories. Solution providers (with 35% or higher PS revenue contribution) make up the smallest group. On the other side of the spectrum, we have a majority of companies with less than 10% of total company revenues (the Product Providers) coming from professional services. The middle bucket of Product Extenders refers to companies that have between 10% and 35% of total revenue coming from PS. Put differently, 87% of TPSA member companies have less than 35% of revenue coming from project-based professional services. This means that the typical member company has a significant services business, but is ultimately more dependent on the product and services OTHER than professional services to pay the bills.
There you have it. If you come to TSW and go to any of the dozens of breakouts we’ll be having on issues related to professional services, you now have, I think, a better idea of the sort of companies you’ll be running into. For technology companies interested in the latest benchmark data, best practices and content related to technology services, the TSW train is a veritable smorgasbord of useful tidbits and potential contacts. Hope to see you there!
Tags: Technology Services World, TSW
