The battle for customers. An insight on Pentalog's price transparency.

Customers are looking for a variety of new capabilities from IT outsourcers, ranging from their involvement in business outcomes to greater knowledge of the customer's area of business, according to a new report by Forrester Research. The most collaborative outsourcers will distinguish themselves by anticipating the talent they will need to serve major clients or industries. Today, companies have moved on to higher value business process outsourcing and to core activities like research and development.
Still, many companies find that their outsourcing deals fall short of expectations. 76% of respondents to PwC’s Global Outsourcing Survey cited deal structuring as the most challenging part of managing outsourcing relationships. With more than just cost cutting on the line, the management of outsourcing relationships—whether collaborative or traditional, requires considerable attention. Other key areas singled out for improvement include managing the transition (75%), ongoing management and monitoring (71%), strategy development (70%), renegotiation (69%), and business case development (66%).
Just offering low cost services, isn't enough anymore. In a collaborative arrangement, those factors become crucial if both parties are to be rewarded for delivering economic and process enhancements. The success is assured only if the partnership continues to meet current business needs and accommodates future objectives. This kind of arrangement emphasizes transparency and accountability as well as better integration between the two parties. Transparency and visibility are fundamental for any partnership. Trust must be achieved through a series of fact-finding engagements from the start of the relationship and should continue till the end of the contract.
But how far can you go- as a service provider- with price transparency and transparency in general? Perhaps some of you have noticed that Pentalog's price and service catalog, available for download, has disappeared. This is simply due to the fact that a few sneaky competitors, lacking both strategy and transparency, having the same leads as Pentalog and being aware of the fact that they cannot compete with our level of quality and organization, content themselves with offering prices that are slightly lower than ours. Therefore, Pentalog is going to answer back to their petty plans by constantly reducing the catalog prices to the level of their variable offer. Clients will also receive Pentalog's infrastructure, the incubator (Pentalog training programme), the project quality plan, a project manager from Western Europe, the support of professional experts... The client will only have to show us an offer coming from these companies which have neither imagination, nor principles.
Does that mean that Pentalog gives up its promise to provide transparency on prices, which is unique in the consulting and outsourcing sector? Certainly not! The Price Maker can be accessed for free, including by engineering forgers. However, it takes some time to retrieve all the price/service pairs for all commercial cases. Generally, forgers are lazy.
In fact, Pentalog continues to edit the catalog, which will remain free for download following an extranet identification and a validation by the marketing department. For the record, as long as it was free, Pentalog's service and price catalog was downloaded around... 1000 times a month, taking all languages into account! More than 20,000 copies were downloaded in Europe, thus contributing to establish a continental reference! Not bad for an engineering price list.
We would therefore like to thank all those who determine us to continually innovate in order to be more and more transparent in our relationship with the customer. By contenting themselves with copying prices, by putting their talent, which I am sure they possess, to the service of mediocrity, they strengthen the uniqueness of Pentalog's offer: online CV, success stories, price list / price maker and soon an extranet dialog between clients and providers for building up teams, validating candidates, downloading the standard Project Quality Plans and the catalog prices etc.
In short, if these companies are not ready for a new order in the IT sector, based on a more open, more direct and more honest dialog between clients and providers, except by copying some bits of information from us, well, we will keep creating new tools in order to further optimize the efficiency of our services and our relationship with the market. Customers now want suppliers to help them radically improve the way the process is managed by developing their own platforms consisting of processes, software, and business practices. Customers are looking for a variety of new capabilities from IT outsourcers, ranging from their involvement in business outcomes to greater knowledge of the customer's area of business, and not just low cost services. Those who can't understand the new pricing model, will lose ground.