ETL 49: Virtusa’s Euan Davis on Thought Leadership in Tech Services

Transcript: Euan Davis and Bob Buday

Bob Buday: One of our findings from a new global study of the technology services industry is that a majority of the 300 firms we surveyed say thought leadership is important. What has changed in the last few years that has increased tech services firms’ recognition of the importance of thought leadership?

Euan Davis: For me, the biggest change is the speed of change. Markets are moving incredibly fast. I’ve started creating a leadership brief here at Virtusa because there are so many variables and conflicting signals—analysts say one thing, advisors another, and stakeholders something else. I wanted a way to capture what’s going on as a snapshot in time.

For our industry, the pace is unlike anything I’ve seen in nearly 30 years. Clients are asking, “What’s next? What do I do to protect myself? What’s the context for my industry?” On top of that, we have a looming technology shift—agentic AI and everything around AI—that will be a huge change for the industry. So you have the speed of change and the technology itself, both of which affect thought leadership. Those two forces are reshaping how thought leadership is conceived, created, produced, and disseminated.

Bob: Does that mean tech services firms that minimize thought leadership—spend little on it and don’t dedicate people to it—won’t be able to compete, especially smaller firms with under a billion dollars in revenue?

Euan: I think that’s right, and it hasn’t worked for years—at least the last five. You have to proactively go to clients or prospects with a point of view: how things are changing, how technology could be used, and how an industry could look in two, three, even five years. That context is essential. Tech services firms need it just to get in the room. Without it, you’re a commodity sitting at the edge of the table.

Thought leadership is more important than ever for our industry and for what my team does here at Virtusa.

Why the Old Playbook Won’t Work

Bob:  You’ve worked at research firms like Forrester, Corporate Executive Board (CEB), Yankee Group, and IDC—companies that live and breathe market research and thought-leadership best practices. They “get” thought leadership. Tech services firms aren’t in the research business, and many have taken time to recognize its value.

Do some tech services firms still think, “We use Gartner or HFS for thought leadership. We implement software; the analyst firms and consultancies—McKinsey, BCG—are the thought leaders. We’ll follow them”? Is that sentiment still out there?

Euan: I’m sure it still exists in some firms, but the imperative is stronger than it was five years ago. The pace of change has increased, and clients want to understand the headspace of their partners and suppliers: where we think things are going and what technologies to implement.

You can’t operate in a vacuum anymore and assume the old lock‑in strategies will keep clients returning. A new generation of leaders is taking seats. They’re well‑connected, networked, and paying attention to points of view. If you’re a supplier without one, you’ll get short shrift because you can’t satisfy them. You need to at least provide a counterpoint to how they see their industry evolving—“What do you think, vendor?”

You can’t ignore this. It’s more important than ever. We’re also seeing interesting collaborations between analyst firms and vendors to get the point of view right. Thought leadership as a career is gaining in criticality across tech services vendors.

Bob: You’ve been doing thought leadership for 28 years. What are the key factors that lead to great content?

Euan: I start by listening to the business I work for and distilling the high‑growth areas, service lines, and case studies that have a bit of magic. In my role I’ve listened to many calls with our service‑line leads. Certain things spark interest—something that could become a story with legs.

Listening to the business and building relationships with stakeholders is key. Sometimes stakeholders need a nudge on how to think about an issue. Then you pair that with an understanding of market trends. With those two inputs, you triangulate: how could this evolve, and where should we pitch our tent for thought leadership that advances the company?

Bob: Otherwise it’s easy for a newcomer to walk in and declare, “We need thought leadership on this hot topic,” regardless of the client experience the firm actually has.

Euan: Exactly. You could try to build a McKinsey‑style think tank, but if it doesn’t connect to your brand, case studies, credentials, or heritage, no one will believe it—or read it.

Understanding your heritage and brand is essential, as is seeing where things are evolving. Lately I’ve focused on data because, as the agentic wave builds, a solid data foundation is critical. Fortunately, we have real heritage there. Start from a position of truth and roll forward.

Bringing Great Insights to the Market

Bob: Next question: what are the keys to getting target audiences to discover and engage with thought‑leadership content? I’m separating thought‑leadership marketing from brand‑level marketing—thought leadership is closer to the product level. What are the keys to marketing thought leadership?

Euan: Internally or externally?

Bob: Either—looking back across your career, what worked to get great research into the market?

Euan: There’s a lot of hard work to make people aware of what you’ve done and why it matters. You have to “carry the bags” for sales and consultants—explain why it’s important—and be relentless. The payoff is that senior people who get it will help drive it.

Get into the right meetings and brief people: here’s why this matters. Create collateral and decks that teams can use freely, even if it feels like you’re giving a lot away. I’m also a big believer in toolkits—diagnostics and similar assets that align to the story.

It’s about understanding what the audience needs and helping them get in step with what you’re doing. I’m fortunate to have a strong marketing team that values thought leadership. When you align roundtables, partner events, service offerings, and case studies around a theme, you can materially improve company performance.

Getting Internal Buy-in

Bob: Third question: once you’ve created a great study or book, how do you mobilize the organization to open doors with clients—getting sales teams and practice leads to use it? Is internal socialization critical to getting a study to market externally?

Euan: Absolutely—especially at a smaller company. At a very large company like Cognizant, there are established forums—offices, webinars, internal spotlights—where you can present your work. At a smaller firm, you sometimes need a guerrilla approach to get the message out.

Networking with the right people is essential—people who will cascade the message. You must think hard about how to reach them: which forums, what takeaways.

We created a “What to Know, What to Say, What to Show” frame for every research asset:

• **What to Know:** the main messages.
• **What to Say:** how to sound smart in front of a client.
• **What to Show:** the deck, diagnostic, or tool you can leave behind to intrigue clients and signal that Virtusa has a point of view.

Bob: That seems critical. Salespeople don’t have time—or sometimes the skills—to build those pieces themselves, especially with uncertain returns.

Euan: Exactly. If you put me in a sales role, it would be a disaster—I don’t have that mindset. Sales teams teach me how to sharpen my research and make my approach more pointed. It’s a partnership you must focus on to move to the next level.

When I started in this industry on the vendor side, I spent the first couple of years accompanying sales. Whenever there was a board presentation or strategy session, I brought a futurist lens. I learned a lot from how sales held themselves and described solutions. That feedback loop improved my research and ensured the thought leadership worked for the organization.

Tellling Virtusa’s Story

Euan: When I joined Virtusa a couple of years ago, my title was “storyteller.” My CMO asked if I was the poet. I said, not quite—more a messenger and narrative developer. Since then my role has evolved toward strategy and growth, with thought leadership front and center.

Your book *Competing on Thought Leadership* helped me frame what I’m trying to do. It took about a year to learn who does what and why it matters. One of the first things we did was map our client case studies. We had roughly 300, written haphazardly with no golden thread. With a little help—thank you—we analyzed themes emerging from the case studies.

One theme was customer intimacy: if you have millions of customer interactions, Virtusa can help. Another was software implementation—platforms like Pega, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. A third was data—how to think about it, organize it, and build data lakes.

We asked which theme had the most salience for where we want to go. I bet on data. Industry sentiment and reports made it clear AI would be a lasting wave. To compete with AI—now, agentic AI—you must double down on data strategy. Data is key.

We built a survey to understand what’s happening with data and created a diagnostic to assess data maturity. We can categorize companies as strong or weak with data, even “customer ignorant” or “customer clairvoyant.” We developed a narrative around customer obsession, which became the bedrock for our next major program, launching at year‑end. It will build on data mastery and customer obsession, then explore agentic AI and the possibilities for experience when you have a robust data architecture and strategy.

The dataset lets us slice insights by industry—BFS, life sciences, telecom—or by region like the UK and US, and by best practices. It’s been well received internally. Where we still need work is getting it into the hands of client partners and sales, and ensuring they use it in every client meeting. That last mile remains.

Bob: So you have a roadmap—you know where you’re going. Now it’s about execution.

Euan: Yes. We have a direction, and leadership recognizes it. Even with rapid change in AI and agentic AI, I see them as accelerants to what we do: drive customer centricity for every client. Our big story is customer centricity; our thought leadership paints the path to it through service offerings and case‑study credentials.

Pick Your Topics With Intention

Bob: From my experience, your approach to thought‑leadership research has been strong. Too often, thought‑leadership leaders become order‑takers—Practice A demands a study on X; Practice B wants one on Y—resulting in no cumulative impact. You’ve been intentional about topics. Would you agree it’s better to have a topic strategy so that studies build on each other and compound?

Euan: I agree. We created a publishing architecture we didn’t have before. Our marketing colleagues collaborated on how it should work. We still handle requests for white papers and articles, and there’s a place for those. But a clear direction lets everyone pull together. It shows up in the metrics for our campaigns and reports—the messaging is clearer and crisper.

His Own Journey

Bob: Let’s talk about your career. You joined IDC in 1997. Back in college, did you even know IDC existed?

Euan: No. I’m probably the most unlikely person to do thought leadership. Like many in the 1990s, I went to London for temp work. Through networking, a contact mentioned a role at IDC tied to a “new thing” called the internet. I interviewed and, somehow, aced it. I’d been working at a conference company doing client‑led research—calling people to learn what they wanted in a conference—and I translated that experience into an analyst role.

I joined IDC in the mid‑90s as an analyst tracking application service providers (ASPs)—growth rates, strategies, who was up or down. Valuations were volatile; there was travel across Europe. I learned market sizing. Then I spent two years at Yankee Group as a telecom services analyst. I really cut my teeth at Forrester around the millennium, working for Andrew Parker—one of the most credible services analysts. He brought me in to cover BPO.

At 40 I wondered if I’d be a dusty analyst into my 60s and 70s, so I joined startup HFS—very different from Forrester, and I learned how to hold myself in meetings and think strategically about the market. Then Cognizant called. Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig, and Ben Pring—the “three amigos”—had set up the Center for the Future of Work, one of the most exciting places to be. I learned a great deal from Ben and Paul about connecting research to the vendor play. I spent 10 years there, leading the Center for the Future of Work in Europe, writing about future‑of‑work trends. The pandemic arrived, and after a decade I felt ready for a change.

Virtusa was that change. After a leadership shift at Cognizant, it became clear—my view—that the Center for the Future of Work wasn’t seen as strategic as it should have been, even though it was one of the company’s best assets. So I became the “chief poet,” so to speak, at Virtusa—storyteller, messenger. It’s a smaller company, but the challenges are similar; you just have fewer people to help address them. Virtusa sees the opportunity in the technology shift and is moving to support it. I’m excited about the next few years.

The Profession’s Ups and Downs

Bob: For someone considering a career in thought leadership, what are the positives—“if you like doing X, Y, and Z, you’ll love it”—and what are the negatives?

Euan: If you love reading and writing and have a naturally inquisitive, probing mind, you’ll love this role. My Forrester boss Andrew Parker used to say, “think in ink.” Writing is a powerful, logical way to express an idea. You can shuffle decks forever and never achieve the flow you get from crafting a narrative on paper or a laptop. Those three attributes—reading, writing, and constant questioning—are vital to success in thought leadership.

On the flip side: if you struggle with other people’s egos or can’t take constructive feedback, that’s a problem. And if you’re not keen to embrace technology, it will be difficult. You can’t do thought leadership today without new tools. Research that once took weeks can be done in minutes. If you’re anti‑AI and can’t see the benefits it brings, this probably isn’t the right field—though a healthy caution about accuracy is wise. These tools will shape how our grandkids work. The human spark still matters, but the tools are here to stay.

Advice for Thought Leadership Professionals

Bob: Final question: what three pieces of advice would you give to people entering thought leadership—or those 10–15 years in who want to advance?

Euan:

1) Find a mentor. They may be inside or outside your company, but you need someone to bounce ideas off and draw inspiration from.

2) Keep writing. Write every day or every week—even if it’s not for work. I keep a private journal on topics I find interesting—Greek philosophy, beer brewing, education and how we’re preparing kids for the next wave of work. Stay open‑minded and keep writing.

3) Network. Inside your company, find your band of brothers and sisters—the people who round out your thinking, supplement it, and open new ideas.

Bob: That resonates—finding your tribe for thought‑leadership research.

Euan: Spending half my career as an analyst gave me a strong foundation. You learn to tap‑dance across topics and present to senior people while you’re still junior. Presentation training helped: my first talk at IDC was meant to be 40 minutes and I finished in 10—a car crash. You need reps. Present whenever you can; practice helps.

Don’t be afraid to have a point of view, even if it’s counterintuitive. Say, “This doesn’t seem right; we should look at this instead.” People pause and respond because they don’t want to blindly follow.

Bob: So in thought leadership you need an opinion—and the confidence to share it—while giving people time to absorb and push back.

Euan: Yes. An example: I’ve written about how the Greeks framed time—Chronos (chronological time) and Kairos (the opportune moment). Chronos is the ticking clock and deadlines; Kairos is choosing the right moment to act, such as when to ask for a thought‑leadership position. Writing helps sort logic in your head. When your boss asks, you have a coherent answer and can tie concepts together. That’s storytelling—and thought leadership.

Bob: I love your emphasis on writing. When I write, I often turn something incoherent in my head into a coherent argument I didn’t know I could make until I started typing.

Euan: Exactly. Writing is mental labor—like going to the gym. The first five minutes can be hard, but then you hit a flow state and start pulling strands together. If you can write, your opinions are more fully formed than if you just blurt them out in a meeting.

Bob: On LinkedIn, one great person to follow for technique is Dave Ulrich, a longtime CHRO advisor and former University of Michigan professor. He has 300,000+ followers and is prolific—posting articles and engaging constructively in others’ threads. The CHRO community knows and values him because he weighs in weekly on issues they face.

Euan: I bet he’s invited to many talks and conferences. I’ve seen similar effects in my industry. HFS, for example, advances clear points of view and explores culture and the future of culture. I find that fascinating because corporate cultures are shifting as more people work from home. I worry about the next generation choosing to stay home and the cultural impact.

LinkedIn is rich with strands you can pick up for thought leadership. I save posts all the time—tangential ideas I can reframe for what I want to write about.