Hybrid, cloud-native and open source define Cloudera’s 3-pronged approach, post-merger

Cloud-native and open source are top of mind in Cloudera’s post-merger product portfolio

One of the key highlights of the event was the launch of Cloudera Data Platform (CDP), an open-source, hybrid cloud platform that includes Cloudera Data Warehouse, Cloudera Machine Learning and Cloudera Data Hub services. CDP is currently available on Amazon Web Services (AWS; Nasdaq: AMZN); however Cloudera hopes to provide customers with a broader range of IaaS providers as the company announced plans to bring CDP to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in the coming months. While Cloudera is taking a calculated risk by pushing customers to competing services, TBR believes the benefits will outweigh the costs due to the vendor’s increased exposure to a large customer base. The launch of CDP highlights the company’s cloud-native play but also aligns with Cloudera’s intent to offer customers more deployment options. TBR notes that many vendors still perceive the data center as a legacy standard; however, Cloudera is attempting to view it as a gateway to creating a hybrid instance, exemplified by its forthcoming launch of an on-premises version of CDP, dubbed CDP Data Center. This offering will be especially appealing to “lift and shift” customers who have large data sets on-premises and wish to migrate to the cloud.

Relying on security and governance for differentiation

Leveraging open-source technology to deliver solutions to customers regardless of deployment method is rapidly gaining acceptance in the market and therefore has forced Cloudera to explore new avenues for differentiation. TBR believes the vendor is attempting to achieve this through its enterprise-grade security and data governance solution, Cloudera SDX (Shared Data Experience). As a single management plane, SDX separates the data layer from the compute layer to provide automated security and compliance across platforms to help reduce costs and mitigate risk. Cloudera works its SDX offering into the rest of its portfolio, including its recently launched CDP offering, to secure data lakes and centrally manage large amounts of data. VP of Product Management Fred Koopmans and VP of Engineering Ram Venkatesh highlighted the negative effects shadow IT vendors are having on customers’ data privacy as a lack of interconnectivity between platforms hinders fraud detection and data repurposing.

Additionally, shadow IT causes dispersed data, which will inevitably require more labor resources and thus only increase the burden on customers that are likely operating on a shortage of sufficient IT skills. Findings from TBR’s 1H19 Cloud Applications Customer Research indicate that shadow IT is being eliminated while increasingly consolidated purchasing is leading lines of business to report greater autonomy when it comes to making IT decisions. As a result of these trends, we believe Cloudera is taking the right approach by strengthening SDX integrations to provide customers with greater autonomy and centralized data, making app developers, data engineers, business intelligence (BI) analysts and data scientists far more likely to adopt CDP or similar platforms.

In September Cloudera hosted its annual Cloudera Analyst Day, where analysts gained insights during breakout sessions, product demonstrations, keynotes and detailed one-on-one talks with company executives, customers and partners. Key talks included product demonstrations from Cloudera’s recently appointed CEO Marty Cole, Chief Marketing Officer Mick Hollison and Chief Product Officer Arun Murthy, along with a presentation from IBM’s General Manager of Data and AI Rob Thomas. Founded in 2008, Cloudera operates in 85 countries and has approximately 3,000 employees and over 2,000 customers.

Arriving at the edge of cloud computing

The cloud reimagined by edge computing and influenced by IoT

Cloud computing can be best described as a centralized data center remotely running thousands of physical servers. All devices that need to access this data or use applications associated with it first must connect to the cloud. Since everything is centralized, the cloud is generally easy to secure and control while still allowing for reliable remote access.

As IoT devices become more common and require more processing power, an increasing amount of data is being generated on what is referred to as the edge of distributed computing networks. By sending only the most important and least time-sensitive information to the cloud, as opposed to raw streams of it, edge computing eases the burden on the cloud and reduces costs. Put simply, edge computing delivers the decentralized complement to today’s core centralized and hyperscale cloud and legacy data centers.

The edge and the cloud do not compete with one another, and emphasizing edge or cloud computing is not an “either/or” choice, but rather, the adoption model can be viewed as a “1+1=3” opportunity. The relatively distributed nature of cloud and access to scalable compute resources is augmented by the real-time data gathering potential of the edge, reducing efficiency and latency concerns. These latency requirements vary by device and are highly situational depending on the need for real-time analytics and response versus transactional or business intelligence analytics.

More than a decade after the initial transition to the cloud forever expanded the limitations of physical and on-premises storage and compute options, we’ve reached quite literally, the edge of a new era of cloud. Organizations in industries such as telco and manufacturing, among others, will increasingly rely on edge computing to provide a suitable infrastructure and to complement the ongoing adoption of related technologies such as machine intelligence and IoT. The edge should not be viewed as a threat to cloud computing, but rather as the next phase in the evolution, driving increased adoption of the cloud into the next decade.

Timely clearance of mid-band spectrum is essential for U.S. to remain at forefront of global 5G race

TBR perspective

Significant progress has been made on 5G ecosystem development since the 2018 5G Americas Analyst Forum held last October, as commercial mobile 5G services have been launched by the four U.S. Tier 1 operators, as well as in Uruguay by state-run operator ANTEL, over the past year. However, the infancy of the 5G era in the Americas has been somewhat underwhelming due to tepid smartphone adoption, the limited range of service on millimeter wave spectrum, and lack of coverage outside major metro areas.

The U.S. is at risk of falling behind other countries, especially South Korea and China, in the global 5G race. 5G adoption is growing at a more accelerated rate in South Korea, as the country gained 2 million 5G subscribers within the first four months of commercial services being offered and reached 3 million 5G subscribers as of September. South Korea’s rapid growth is being driven by its widespread 5G coverage, which is expected to reach 80% of the population by the end of 2019, as well as operators heavily subsidizing 5G devices to offset high smartphone prices. Conversely, China will make a strong entrance into the 5G market by launching commercial services in 50 major cities in the beginning of October, with plans to deploy 100,000 5G sites by the end of 2019.

The greatest barrier to the U.S. competing at the forefront of the global 5G race is its current lack of mid-band spectrum as global operators across all major regions have already been allocated a significant amount of mid-band licenses to support initial deployments. Offering 5G services across a mix of low-band, mid-band and high-band spectrum is critical to provide optimal coverage. Though deploying services on millimeter wave spectrum is necessary for U.S. operators to realize the fastest 5G speeds, the licenses are limited by the short range of coverage they provide.

Conversely, low-band spectrum will provide the coverage range necessary for operators including AT&T (NYSE: T) and T-Mobile (Nasdaq: TMUS) to deploy nationwide 5G services in 2020, but the spectrum will not yield significantly faster speeds compared to LTE. Mid-band spectrum provides the best of both worlds, speed and range of coverage, and the acquisition of mid-band licenses will play a pivotal role in the Americas’ position in the global 5G market as well as how individual operators compete for 5G market share in their respective countries.

Nearly 200 industry analysts and representatives from well-known telecom operators and vendors convened at the 2019 5G Americas Analyst Forum to discuss the state of the developing 5G market in North America and Latin America. The event featured an opening presentation from T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray regarding 5G leadership in the Americas, a fireside chat with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, and a choice of 26 roundtable discussions focused on key 5G topics including IoT, edge computing, 5G network infrastructure and technologies, regulatory considerations, and private cellular networks. 

Tear down those paywalls: A better solution is possible

Paywalls are going up all over the internet, hurting both publishers and readers. A better solution is possible, but no one is offering it. TBR can describe the solution but cannot explain why the market is not working to produce it.

The internet is smothering publishing

Online reading is harming both print and online newspapers and magazines, reducing the number of journalists and the available volume of news and analysis. Online advertising revenue is increasing, but most of the increase is going to a small number of social media companies. The remainder is going to content-creation companies, that is to say publishers, but to a decreasing number of them, all large successful sites such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

This leaves smaller publishers — whether local, regional or specialized — in an increasingly difficult position. For years, small publishers have been reducing costs by cutting back on writers, but this makes their content less desirable, consequently reducing readership and thereby revenue. To compensate, these publishers have allowed an ever-expanding volume of increasingly obtrusive advertisements to be placed on their pages, reducing usability and consumption. This is a vicious cycle. Publishers have tried to attract new readers by allowing their content to be used on social media sites, but most readers simply consume the content on the social sites and do not follow the articles back to their sources.

Publishers are building walls

Increasingly, especially in 2019, content-creation sites have erected paywalls, requiring paid subscriptions to consume their content. This works well for large, popular sites, bringing in additional revenue and creating a relationship with readers. However, paywalls are a forbidding barrier to entry for smaller, more specialized publishers, as occasional readers often choose to skip reading the content that would otherwise have brought them to the site.

Some publishers allow readers to view a limited amount of their content through a free subscription, enabling them to connect with readers while still controlling their access. This also imposes a barrier to potential readers, albeit a much lower one, as many readers choose not to create another new account, manage another new password, and deal with more promotional email.

TBR believes paywalls will hurt most publishing sites and their potential readers. The vicious cycle will spin faster.

A solution is possible

What can be done? A solution, or at least a partial solution, is available. It would benefit publishers, readers and, most important, the business that creates the solution. TBR can find no evidence that anyone is pursuing the solution, and the reason for this failure of the market is not apparent.

The solution could be described as pay-per-view option for published content. Readers would each have a single paid account across all member publishers, with a balance to which they could contribute, and publishers would offer content for which users could choose to pay, on a per-item or per-issue basis, with the cost debited to their account. Dave Winer, a software and internet giant, likened such a system to E-ZPass, where drivers can pay tolls across the interstate system from a single account.

In addition to enabling payment for content, such a system would allow publishers to get to know their readers and offer attractive packages that would increase both readership and consumption, including subscriptions. The business running the pay-per-view system would collect a fee for each view or subscription and would manage the entire process. TBR believes consumers are already experiencing subscription fatigue from online publications and over-the-top (OTT) video services. A single point of contact for at least a subset of their content providers would lower this barrier to increased consumption.

It is not clear why such a service has not emerged. Content bundling is common in video OTT services, but the patchwork of offered content is frustrating to users. Apple acquired a text content consolidation service, Texture, last year, and is now offering it as News Plus. This is similar to video OTT services in that the bundle is not comprehensive and that the revenue to the individual publishers is necessarily small, as the total monthly fee is only $9.99. In addition, the content is isolated from internet links and searches and is not available on Windows.

The pay-per-view content system would not be a bundle; it would not provide unlimited access to a collection of publications, but available content would be constrained to the member publishers. For publishers, however, there would be no visible downside. They would set the prices, so the system would not cannibalize subscriptions. It would not be exclusive, so that publishers’ content could be distributed through other consolidators and, at their discretion, through social media. There would also be little downside for subscribers to the service. It is likely that the service would use a “freemium” method to attract users, and increments to user accounts could be used for a variety of online incentive programs.

There would be a cost to starting up the service, and any system involving financial transactions and user accounts requires strong security. User privacy is also a concern. These problems are well understood at this point in the evolution of the internet. The service would have to create a critical mass of both content providers and users before it started generating revenue and profit, but much higher startup costs are typical in the current business climate. Once a service is established, potential competitors would be challenged to sign up already satisfied readers and publishers.

A pay-per-view system could be set up by an independent startup, but it could also be established as part of an existing business. Companies with many individual publications, like Condé Nast, could begin by offering their own publications and expand the offering to others. Bundling companies like Apple that already have relationships with many publishers could add the pay-per-view system to their offerings. Large publishers like The New York Times could also create such a system, demonstrating that they do not fear it would cannibalize their thriving subscription business. Lastly, large online retailers like Amazon could leverage their large user bases with pay-per-view content offerings.

Similar solutions have been tried and failed

When the internet first became available to the general public, several companies attempted to address the issue of pay-per-view content through what was known as micro-payments. IBM created IBM Micro Payments in 1999, but it was never made generally available. iPIN was a 1998 startup that intended to add charges to user’ ISP bills; it never made it to market. Millicent (a pun: milli-cent) was a Digital Equipment Corporation project that also did not reach the market. NetBill was a project at Carnegie Mellon University that had user accounts like the solution proposed here. It eventually became part of PayPal’s portfolio, and PayPal does support relatively small payments, but not as small as is necessary for content distribution.

TBR believes these systems failed because they were too ambitious. They aspired to support very small payments, or they were intended to be open to buyers and sellers without establishing accounts. For most of them, the point of failure was the connection to existing payment systems, where individual transaction costs were too high for very small transactions. The pay-per-view system described here suffers none of these handicaps.

Summing up

The diminishment and consolidation of publishing is a problem, and a solution is available that would at least reduce the size of the problem. TBR hopes the market acts to deliver the solution soon.

Industry 4.0 will bolster IoT connection growth for global CSPs

Industry 4.0 will contribute to a surge in IoT connection additions between 2022 and 2025

TBR expects Industry 4.0 to drive a renaissance in new, commercially viable use cases for the network between 2022 and 2025, which will spur revenue-generation opportunities for communication service providers (CSPs) that deliver the connectivity layer and value-added services to businesses. Industry 4.0 will bolster IoT connection growth for CSPs as they target large contract wins in areas including transportation, smart cities, smart factories and healthcare, which are expected to integrate a massive number of IoT devices to enhance operations.

Private 5G networks will play a pivotal role in advancing Industry 4.0 as these networks will provide the security and precision needed to support mission-critical workloads such as in manufacturing. The current, widespread availability of mid-band spectrum in EMEA and APAC markets will provide CSPs in those regions a time-to-market advantage in deploying private 5G networks as U.S. operators wait for the regulatory clearance of CBRS and C-Band spectrum over the next several years.

Enterprises will turn to private 5G networks due to their enhanced security and reduced latency

TBR believes private cellular networks will be a predominant initial 5G use case as enterprises will increasingly opt for 5G connectivity due to its ultra-low latency and enhanced security. Manufacturing plants will be an ideal environment for private 5G networks as the ultra-low latency and minimal jitter provided by 5G will enable connected devices such as robots and other manufacturing equipment to more effectively meet production quotas on the assembly line.

TBR’s Telecom IoT Market Landscape, takes a deep dive into the commercial cellular IoT-related initiatives of global stakeholders in the telecom market, including telecom operators, cable operators and vendors that supply the telecom market. The research includes key findings, market size, regional summaries, technology trends, use cases, verticals, operator and vendor positioning and strategies, acquisition and alliance strategies, and opportunities that are specific to the telecom industry.

Total benchmarked security revenue increased 13.7% year-to-year to $13.7B in 1H19

Security growth is in early stages as organizations continue to digitize and increase the amount of information put into the cloud

The security market remains in a state of rapid growth as the rise in the amount of data and the increased likelihood of cyber hacks and threats create high demand for security solutions built to protect enterprises and their customers. With rapid growth comes increased competition and M&A activity as vendors consolidate either to improve offerings or to expand into new geographic markets. As companies continue to execute on digital transformation initiatives, cloud security offerings and other managed security portfolios are being sought to address potential threats.

To stay on top of the latest security threats, vendors are continually improving their portfolios through launches of new products and updates to existing solutions. TBR’s benchmark captures these moves, along with other ongoing industry trends and emerging opportunities. In the 1H19 publication, TBR also looks ahead to future security topics, including emerging areas such as quantum security and commercial IoT security trends.

Acquisitions continue to reshape the security landscape, with nontraditional vendors making a larger splash in 2019

The security industry continues to undergo major consolidation as vendors target select security companies to enhance portfolios or expand security offerings into new segments. This rapid M&A activity has been a trend over the past few years, though companies that do not already specialize in enterprise security have become more involved on the acquisition front in 2019. This trend is illustrated by major announcements such as Broadcom’s plans to purchase Symantec’s enterprise security assets or VMware’s plans to spend almost $5 billion to acquire Carbon Black and Pivotal. HP Inc. even announced plans to acquire endpoint security company Bromium in 2H19, as the company looks to improve the security of its device portfolio.

The exponential growth in enterprise data as companies execute digital transformation strategies leads to a rise in demand for data protection solutions

The rise of data in the workplace is causing data security solutions to become more valuable heading into 2020. The rate of new data generated across a multitude of verticals and industries will continue to grow rapidly as AI and machine learning technologies improve. The need to protect this enterprise data from security hacks will continue to increase, opening additional revenue streams for security companies to capitalize on. IBM, Dell Technologies and Symantec are among the vendors already well positioned with established data protection portfolios. TBR expects vendors to emphasize this segment over the next few years, including through targeted M&A and solution enhancements.

TBR’s Security Benchmark is a semiannual publication that analyzes the enterprise cybersecurity market and provides insights around security revenue breakdowns, go-to-market trends and strategies, resource management investments, industry acquisitions and additional M&A activity. The benchmark covers 25 industry security vendors including IBM, Symantec, Check Point, Cisco and Palo Alto Networks, across eight security segments and three global regions.

Digital Transformation Insights: What do we mean by ‘cross vendor’?

As part of our Digital Transformation Insights portfolio, twice this year we’ve published cross vendor reports, narrowing our analysis down to a few select vendors while staying within the context of digital transformation. In the first report, we put Accenture and IBM side by side — looking at the two companies’ past, present and future — and walked through every way TBR examines these companies, including from a management consulting, cloud, and telecom perspective. Last month, we looked at two categories of digital transformation vendors: the India-centric firms and the management consultancies. Below is the opening of the report.

“Because technology is composable and easy to consume, businesses can remake core processes to redefine business models, modernize customer engagement, evolve asset management strategies, increase employee productivity or make management decisions. For most management consultancies and India-centric vendors, many of these areas are brownfield opportunities, but with the advent of next-generation technologies, some clients are ready to completely revamp their core businesses to sustain their very existence. Such greenfield opportunities can sometimes catch vendors by surprise, especially if they believe they can do it all on their own. In the long term, partnerships will also evolve, as in their current form, the technology diminishes differentiation among all parties. This evolution could create siloed, federated-like model enterprises, which bring a different set of challenges. However, with the expectations coming from the advent of open data standards amplified through blockchain, such hurdles will supposedly be easy to address.

“Differentiating in such a crowded market will be hard, unless vendors begin to offer outcome-based services contracts where they absorb most of the risk. Vendors’ greatest value will come from technologically combining multiple initiatives and helping clients improve performance against chosen KPIs.

“To understand the current state of digital transformation services and anticipate where the market will head over the next few years, TBR has analyzed these two leading groups of vendors side by side to understand their past strategic decisions and investments, current performance, and near-term expectations. This cross-vendor report utilizes the full range of TBR’s data and understanding of the digital transformation landscape.”

For more from the Digital Transformation Insights portfolio, contact TBR Senior Analyst Bozhidar Hristov or Sales Vice President Dan Demers.

Telecom vendor partners and CSP customers have nothing to fear from an IBM-owned Red Hat

TBR perspective

Red Hat emphasized that its culture and approach to product development will not change with its acquisition by IBM. Red Hat underscored that it operates independently and continues to stress an open-source approach to management, application development and the strategic direction of the company. The open-source community, to which Red Hat and its employees are major contributors, will remain the primary influence on Red Hat’s product road map.

This is evident in the company’s open hybrid cloud strategy, whereby Red Hat products support hybrid cloud infrastructure from a host of strategic partners, with Red Hat adhering to a principle of partner agnosticism: No one partner is favored over another. Tellingly, during one executive’s presentation, a slide showcased six large customers that Red Hat supported in their migrations to hybrid cloud infrastructures, and the executive could not name the cloud service provider partner. It did not matter, because Red Hat integrates with them all.

This approach will serve Red Hat well as it continues to penetrate the telecom market. Red Hat’s long-standing open-source principles are finally gaining traction among telecom operators and their suppliers as networks become software-defined and virtualized. Operators are increasingly demanding open and interoperable solutions from their vendor partners, and Red Hat is top of mind in procuring these solutions. Rakuten, which is building the first greenfield, cloud-native, virtualized network, is leveraging Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage. TBR expects incumbent operators to emulate Rakuten’s procurement and architecture once the concept is proved. 

Red Hat hosted several dozen industry analysts at its Open Innovation Lab and Executive Briefing Center in Boston. Red Hat executives, including its chief marketing and technology officers, delivered insights on Red Hat’s market position and opportunity as the company carefully manages its integration with IBM (NYSE: IBM), which acquired the open-source company in July. Several products were highlighted — namely OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform — and a Red Hat travel pricing data customer delved into how Red Hat is enabling its IT transformation, all of which drove home the idea that Red Hat encourages, supports and shepherds adoption of open hybrid cloud.

Oracle sheds bright red branding but maintains database narrative and competitor assault at OpenWorld

A rebranded Oracle aims to improve interactions with customers and partners, but not AWS

At Oracle OpenWorld, the similarities between the renovations to the venue and to Oracle’s brand were undeniable. The Moscone Conference Center, which has been home to Oracle’s annual event for years, underwent remodeling to improve traffic flow and implement modernizations that Oracle used to showcase its own updated user flow and look. Underneath these branding and operational changes, much of the core building blocks remained the same, with some expansions and evolutions.

A new Oracle: Rebranding and partnerships

The most obvious updates came in the form of the company’s new Redwood brand identity, which consists of a more diverse color palette, including an updated shade of Oracle Red, as well as customized Oracle font, textures, illustrations and other visual elements. The intent of the design element changes was to portray a more modern, diverse and ultimately repositioned Oracle experience. The key phrase Oracle employees used to summarize this shift was “more human,” with clear acknowledgement of not only the long-standing negative perception around the Oracle customer experience but also the many operational changes being made behind the visual rebrand to support a change in engagement. Core to this shift are the new Oracle mission statement and an even greater focus on customer successes stories to frame Oracle’s new approach. These stories were most evident in the solution keynotes and marketing investments, such as advertisement takeovers on The Wall Street Journal and Forbes websites, among other mediums.

Arguably part of this rebrand, and definitely part of the change in how Oracle is engaging across the customer and partner landscapes, was the emphasis with which Oracle announced deeper engagements with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), VMware (NYSE: VMW) and the ISV ecosystem as a whole.

  1. Oracle highlighted its June partnership with Microsoft to enable multicloud deployments across both vendors’ cloud services through data-center-specific direct connections. This service was originally made available in Virginia, and availability in London was announced at the conference. The pair intends to further extend these capabilities to U.S. government regions in the Western U.S. as well as in Asia and other European regions in the future. As Oracle workloads had been certified to run on Microsoft Azure in 2014, this expansion enables customers to leverage Azure services while utilizing Oracle’s Autonomous Database. The companies also announced integrations between Microsoft Teams and the new Oracle Digital Assistant, which was developed to support user interaction with business systems that use different language than what is typical for consumer assistants.
  • Additionally, Oracle announced it has partnered with VMware to bring VMware Cloud Foundation to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), similar to VMware’s partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS; Nasdaq: AMZN) and Microsoft Azure, enabling customers to run VMware-based workloads on its bare metal instances. Oracle CTO and Chief Executive Larry Ellison argued the company’s alliance with VMware will enable a truer “lift and shift” of VMware-based workloads from on-premises to OCI with “virtually no change” when the solution becomes available in 4Q19 due to its configuration of bare metal services. The pair also announced unified support for workloads running VMware and Oracle technology together.
  • To better support the ISV ecosystem, Oracle announced the immediate availability of unified billing on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. This addition of a “paid listing” classification goes beyond free listings and Bring Your Own License (BYOL) listings, where the OCI resources were paid separately from free or licensed software, enabling customers to pay for third-party solutions in per-hour increments and using Oracle universal credits. Beyond simplifying customer solutions purchasing, OCI deployment and complete workload billing, enabling the use of Oracle’s universal credits to pay for third-party software positions Oracle’s sales efforts and quotas to support the growing ISV ecosystem.

Additionally, Oracle and Deloitte announced a new alliance at the conference by launching ELEVATE. The alliance will work to execute the goals of Oracle’s consulting business to automate cloud migrations to Oracle Autonomous Databases and OCI through Oracle Soar, Destination PaaS and IaaS. By leveraging Deloitte’s professional services organization and its cloud discovery and automation platform, Oracle will expedite and smooth migrations to protect, and presumably expand, its existing customer base as customers migrate more critical enterprise workloads to cloud environments.

Top growing consultancies lean into emerging technologies

Twice a year TBR publishes its Management Consulting Benchmark, which provides key service line, regional, vertical and operational data and analysis for 13 leading management consulting vendors. The benchmark also includes deep dives into 11 of the 13 vendors. This week, TBR will publish insights into two of those vendors: IBM and EY.

IBM is using its advisory, digital design and technology expertise to win and execute holistic transformational projects and drive management consulting revenue growth in 2019. Value-led and IBM-asset-powered solutions; collaborative innovation, such as in the IBM Garage facilities; and management consulting expertise and talent, such as in Global Business Services’ Digital Strategy & iX, Cognitive Process Transformation and Cloud Application Innovation segments enable IBM Services to position as a digital reinvention partner for clients’ cognitive enterprise journeys.”
Elitsa Bakalova, Senior Analyst

EY positions for growth using client touchpoints and technology partners, supporting portfolio evolution. Additionally, use of wavespaces and centers throughout Europe creates the opportunity for EY to increase adoption among existing clients, of its blockchain and AI technology, and grows market awareness among nonclients of the breadth of EY’s technology capabilities.” — Kelly Lesiczka, Analyst

Additionally, join TBR’s Professional Services team Oct. 16 for a webinar and Q&A on India-centric vendors, including how they compare to leading IT services vendors and which IT services vendors have the most to lose due to sustained success among those that are India-centric.

Interested in learning more about the Management Consulting Benchmark and accompanying vendor profiles? Contact TBR today!