Accounts Payable (AP) recovery audit services focus on analyzing a company's AP transactions to identify and recover funds that were erroneously paid out. These services scrutinize past payments to detect issues such as duplicate payments, overpayments, missed discounts, unclaimed credit notes, and errors in payment terms. The primary aim is to recover these lost funds and return them to the business. Additionally, AP recovery audits provide insights into the root causes of these discrepancies. By identifying these underlying issues, businesses can improve their internal controls, enhance the efficiency of their AP processes, streamline vendor relationships and reduce the likelihood of similar financial errors occurring in the future. These audits are crucial for maintaining financial integrity and can lead to significant cost savings for organizations.
Marketing analytics skills are among the most important capabilities in the marketing organization, yet it remains difficult to recruit, hire and retain people with strong skills to support in-house teams. Most marketing teams still struggle with a skills gap in this domain. As a result, marketers seek to augment internal teams by using advanced analytics service providers that offer third-party expert resources, proprietary methodologies and models, and even managed technology to help marketers tackle some of their toughest challenges. Vendors in this market specialize in advanced analytics, including sophisticated methods such as mapping the customer journey, attributing marketing spend to measured outcomes, simulating and measuring business impact of marketing and advertising campaigns, and implementing predictive models. Engagements may be project-based or part of an ongoing partnership, and may include the use of proprietary technology.
“Application testing services” is a comprehensive term for the verification and validation services that support quality control and quality assurance (QA) of clients’ applications. Verification assesses whether a product/application or service complies with regulations, requirements, specifications or enforced constraints. Validation typically involves engagement with external customers to confirm suitability and acceptance. Infrastructure testing services, mobile device testing and software testing tools created for the market by independent software vendors (ISVs) are not included in this definition.
Gartner defines the customer relationship management (CRM) and customer experience (CX) implementation service market as project-based services to help clients develop a CX strategy and transform a customer relationship with consulting expertise. Providers in this market design, build, integrate and deploy process change and technology solutions that improve interactions between organizations and their customers. These services are specific to improving clients’ sales, customer service and marketing operations, and they focus on interactions with customers, including commerce transaction enablement.
Gartner defines cloud ERP services as services provided by third-party systems integrators to assess needs, implement solutions and evolve platforms that are transforming their back-office systems via the implementation of cloud-based ERP solutions. A cloud ERP solution is a set of applications (SaaS) that are sold/marketed as integrated products to support organizations. These integrated products include financial management (FM) functionality, human capital management (HCM), supply chain management (SCM) and other administrative ERP functionality.
Gartner defines custom software development (CSD) services as those that develop software in rapid increments and iterate custom applications and software products to meet an organization’s unique business needs. CSD services entail gathering business requirements and coding applications from inception, building applications on a platform as a service (PaaS), or assembling applications from existing web services or other reusable pieces of code. Services marketed as “software product engineering” or “digital product development” are likely to be examples of the category Gartner defines as CSD services.
DCO/HIMS is composed of the following Data center outsourcing services: Managed services for traditional data center (DC) environments: Mainframe managed services ERP hosting managed services Managed servers and network equipment Managed services for hosted and private cloud infrastructure Managed services for public cloud and edge environments: Hybrid infrastructure managed services Data center consolidation and transformation services Cloud migration services This complex set of data center capabilities and services is increasingly based on managed virtual private cloud services plus hyperscale public cloud services. It is managed via a mix of remote infrastructure management (RIM) services leveraging traditional tools, cloud management platforms (CMPs), and intelligent automation and/or hyperautomation.
Gartner defines the market for data and analytics (D&A) services as consulting and system integration (C&SI) and managed services. These services manage data for all uses (operational and analytical), and analyze data to drive business processes and improve business outcomes through more effective decision making. The core capabilities for vendor solutions in the D&A services market include: D&A strategy and operating model design Data management Analytics and business intelligence (ABI) Data science and machine learning D&A governance Program management Enterprise metadata
Gartner defines the external audit services market as professional services dedicated to providing independent evaluations of an organization’s financial statements and controls. These third-party-managed services ensure accuracy, reliability and integrity of financial reporting, while enhancing transparency. The market encompasses service providers that offer expertise in financial statement audits. Auditors’ independent assessments aid stakeholders in making informed decisions based on the financial health, regulatory reporting requirements and compliance status of the organization. This oversight minimizes financial mismanagement and fraud, thereby protecting the interests of all stakeholders involved. Audit services are regulated by professional bodies and standards boards, and auditors must adhere to strict professional standards and ethics to maintain their license and practicing rights.
Finance Transformation Implementation Consulting market is composed of firms that help finance leaders execute on predefined finance transformation strategies to improve their day-to-day operations and management practices. Service providers operating in this market demonstrate a range of project delivery capabilities – these include project management capabilities, process improvement capabilities, and technology implementation and adoption capabilities. The finance leaders most likely to engage this market are Group CFOs and Heads of Finance Transformation. This market differs from the Finance Transformation Strategy Consulting which focuses on helping CFOs and their finance organizations define strategies and execution roadmaps across multiple business-aligned, forward-looking initiatives.
Gartner defines finance and accounting (F&A) business process outsourcing (BPO) as the use of digital F&A technology solutions and managed services supplied by a third-party service provider. F&A BPO services provide transformation expertise and technology solutions that meet finance departments’ requirement to move from labor-intensive service delivery models to automation-intensive models supporting the digital transformation of finance operations. F&A BPO providers offer processing services and technology solutions for purchase to pay (P2P), order to cash (O2C) and record to report (R2R). BPO providers meet finance buyers’ needs to address improving process maturity at a competitive price. Providers offer processing and technology services to improve P2P, O2C and R2R processes, which offer buyers the ability to purchase transformation expertise and technology solutions to help their finance operations mature. At minimum, an F&A BPO provider processes finance activities on behalf of its customers via a delivery center network, often in low-cost locations, passing on cost savings in the form of labor arbitrage. Mature BPO offerings move beyond labor arbitrage efforts and offer buyers end-to-end intelligent processing capabilities through either proprietary or partner technology ecosystems, which are often cloud-based and are focused on reducing human dependencies in process workflows. Buyers benefit from these types of agreements by maturing their processes and adopting technologies that require minimum human intervention.
Gartner defines global digital agencies as service providers dedicated to developing and executing marketing strategies for global brands. These agencies bundle their strategic marketing services with an array of complementary offerings to support their clients’ needs. An agency’s particular combination of offerings and competitive strengths typically correlates to its roots as a traditional advertising, direct marketing or digital agency, or as a business consultancy or system integrator.
Internal audit services are a systematic and independent evaluation of an organization's operations, internal controls, risk management and governance processes. It is conducted by an internal audit team or in combination of co-sourced and outsourced teams, which operates independently and reports directly to the board of directors or an audit committee. The auditing team also ensures through their assessment that organization adheres to applicable policies, procedures, laws, regulations, and industry standards, along with identifying gaps and making recommendations for their improvements. Furthermore, organizations periodically undertake EQA to assure stakeholder that their internal auditing services are in line with professional standards.
MSSs provide organizations with a variety of management and operational services specific to security technologies and business outcomes for security. Capabilities include security monitoring, detection and response, exposure assessment and management as well as security consulting and security technology implementation. MSSs are delivered in a variety of modes, in the providers’ cloud infrastructure, as consultative engagements or through staff augmentation and on-premises. MSS providers offer a variety of different engagement models. These include heavily customized and consultancy-led models and commoditized technology management-driven experiences.
This market is focused on the full life cycle of Oracle application services, spanning project-based implementation and multiyear application management services (AMS). Evaluate service providers for their ability to deliver a comprehensive set of implementation and management services across the Oracle portfolio of products for clients worldwide. Comprehensive is defined as follows: • A distinct offering, consistent with common market service offerings as defined by the following: scope of service, delivery structure, intellectual property (IP), roles and responsibilities, service metrics and levels, terms and conditions, and pricing model. • A consolidated set of distinct offerings to address industry-specific demand or cross-industry demand, where the offering is recognized by clients or analysts as an integrated offering.
Gartner defines Oracle Cloud Application (OCA) services as only those services associated with the products under Oracle Cloud Applications, also known as SaaS. This means consultancy, migration, implementation, ongoing services, postimplementation evolution and optimization services. To qualify, each vendor project must have an “anchoring” OCA product from at least one of the following Oracle “Fusion” solutions: - Advertising and customer experience (ACX) - Industry applications (IA) - Enterprise resource planning (ERP; includes the previous EPM applications) - Human capital management (HCM) - Supply chain management (SCM)
The services for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) market includes consulting, implementation and ongoing management services for Oracle and non-Oracle workloads hosted on OCI. Service providers in this market combine expertise in Oracle solutions and OCI with skills in managing private infrastructure, hybrid IT, multicloud, sovereign and distributed cloud to provide strategic and operational assistance as clients define and realize their cloud goals and business outcomes with OCI.
Security certification services are used to provide assurance that products and services meet minimum standards of due care related to security programs and practices. These services include certification and attestation against voluntary or mandated standards and guidance, the most common of which are the: • International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001 • Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) • Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) • Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) • Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) • Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR) • System and Organization Control (SOC) 2
Gartner defines public cloud IT transformation services (PCITS) as services designed to deliver transformational outcomes via the utilization of cloud-native professional and managed services. It includes migration, modernization and the building of new transformational solutions on public hyperscale cloud infrastructure and platform services. Organizations seeking to use public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and similar platforms engage with providers in this market to realize the greatest transformational benefits. PCITS transforms client applications, workloads and data to the public cloud to achieve their clients’ business outcomes. It makes primary use of cloud-native tools and manages IT operations in the public cloud. It encapsulates cloud management, optimization and modernization to continuously manage reliability, scalability, interoperability and more.
This market is focused on the full life cycle of SAP application services, spanning project-based implementation and multiyear application management services (AMS). Evaluate service providers for their ability to deliver a comprehensive set of implementation and management services across the SAP portfolio of products for clients worldwide. Comprehensive is defined as follows: • A distinct offering, consistent with common market service offerings as defined by the following: scope of service, delivery structure, intellectual property (IP), roles and responsibilities, service metrics and levels, terms and conditions, and pricing model. • A consolidated set of distinct offerings to address industry-specific demand or cross-industry demand, where the offering is recognized by clients or analysts as an integrated offering.
Gartner defines the SAP S/4HANA Application Services as: assessment, implementation and applications management services. Assessment services are discrete, project based services to assess the impact of either a new SAP S/4HANA implementation or a migration from a legacy platform(s) to SAP S/4HANA. These services include consulting and potentially Proof of Concept, and covers the analysis of all SAP S/4HANA products, applications, databases, analytics, middleware, mobile and other technologies. Implementation services are discrete, project-based implementations of SAP S/4HANA applications without ongoing management responsibilities. These services include consulting, development and integration services, and covers all SAP S/4HANA products, applications, databases, analytics, middleware, mobile and other technologies. Management services are ongoing services focused on SAP S/4HANA applications that are provided as part of a multiyear-based agreement and managed against defined quality metrics.
Security consulting firms are advisory and consulting services (see 'Definition: Cybersecurity' ) related to information and IT security design, evaluation and recommendations. These services are procured by various stakeholders in an organization, including boards of directors, CEOs, chief risk officers (CROs), chief information security officers (CISOs), chief information officers (CIOs), and other business and IT leaders for the purpose of obtaining and ensuring acceptable risk levels for a specific client organization.
Gartner defines software asset management (SAM) managed services as services expert providers deliver to manage the software, SaaS and cloud assets of end-user organizations. They include skills, processes, technologies and governance to transform and run the SAM discipline on behalf of the client. SAM managed services employ the providers’ proprietary skills and methodologies to transform and run the SAM discipline on behalf of the client, augmenting the client’s resources. Delivered by skilled resources and leveraging the provider’s expertise, intellectual property (IP), rigor and best practices, SAM managed services address the gap in available SAM skills, enable scalability and enhance SAM maturity. At the same time, they deliver day-to-day SAM activities and oversee the full SAM life cycle. SAM managed services are delivered directly to end-user customers, on either a continuous or a scheduled basis, employing required discipline to meet software and cloud cost optimization and governance objectives.
Tax advisory services provide specialized guidance on tax-related issues for individuals and businesses, including key customers such as high-net-worth individuals, expatriates, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), large corporations, and non-profits. These services encompass tax planning, compliance, and representation support to minimize tax liabilities, ensure compliance with tax laws, and protect clients’ interests during audits or disputes. Advisors assist clients in understanding and navigating complex tax regulations, optimizing their tax positions, and managing risks associated with taxation. They offer tailored solutions to address specific tax challenges, helping clients make informed financial decisions and achieve their financial goals.
Workday has two primary product offerings: Human Capital Management (HCM) and Financial Management (FM). It started with HCM (back in 2005) and disrupted the HCM software market. At this point, the HCM offering has risen to become a leading software contender for this particular sector of the software market. We should note that Workday Payroll is available only in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and France. Therefore, the service provider market is also in its early stages, and, as the data provided in this report shows, the quantity and depth of the head count is still nascent. Workday services are life cycle services provided by third-party service providers, focused on the adoption and support of Workday applications.
Gartner defines zero trust network access (ZTNA) as products and services that create an identity and context-based, logical-access boundary that encompasses an enterprise user and an internally hosted application or set of applications. The applications are hidden from discovery, and access is restricted via a trust broker to a collection of named entities, which limits lateral movement within a network.