TBR releases exclusive webinar content from July 2021

Technology Business Research, Inc. (TBR) announces on-demand availability of its July 2021 webinars for market intelligence and competitive intelligence teams. July webinars include a demonstration of TBR’s new data visualization tool and a look at how management consultancies are adjusting to post-pandemic challenges around ways of working.

TBR Insight Center™: An overview

Senior Data Analyst Matt Bowden and Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing Dan Demers demonstrate TBR’s new digital platform, TBR Insight Center. TBR Insight Center™ is a powerful data visualization tool that allows clients to configure and curate analysis customized to their needs using a simple and intuitive interface.

Innovation requires in-person: Digital transformation consulting in a post-pandemic world

Principal Analyst and Practice Manager Patrick Heffernan, Senior Analyst Kelly Lesiczka and Analyst John Croll discuss how management consultancies have adjusted to post-pandemic challenges around hybrid and in-person innovation sessions, digital burnout and shifting client needs, particularly regarding technology and strategy consulting. 

TBR webinars are typically held Wednesdays at 1 p.m. EST and include a 15-minute Q&A following the main presentation. To find out what we are discussing next month, check out the Webinars page of our website.

TBR releases exclusive webinar content from August 2021

Technology Business Research, Inc. (TBR) announces on-demand availability of its August 2021 webinars for market intelligence and competitive intelligence teams. August webinars feature top trends in the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market and IT services and digital transformation markets.

Speed of HCI market evolution accelerates due to COVID-19

Principal Analyst and Practice Manager Angela Lambert sheds light on how HCI purchasing fits into broader IT environment investment plans and key use cases being targeted.

Digital transformation amplifies IT services market trends

Principal Analyst and Practice Manager Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst Boz Hristov, Senior Analyst Elitsa Bakalova, Senior Analyst Kelly Lesiczka and Analyst John Croll discuss recent performances of the leading 30 IT services providers and enterprise buyers’ priorities as they accelerate their digital transformation programs. 

TBR webinars are typically held Wednesdays at 1 p.m. EST and include a 15-minute Q&A following the main presentation. To find out what we are discussing next month, check out the Webinars page of our website.

Innovation and transformation centers: 4Q21 insights from TBR’s IT Services team

The silver lining of downward pressures that innovation and transformation centers are facing

Join Practice Manager and Principal Analyst Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst Boz Hristov, Senior Analyst Elitsa Bakalova and Senior Analyst Kelly Lesiczka Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2021, for an in-depth discussion on innovation and transformation centers, those places where IT services vendors and consultancies collaborate with clients and technology partners to create new business models and deploy emerging technologies to disrupt the market.

Don’t miss

  • Silver linings of all the downward pressures on in-person innovation sessions and physical centers
  • How these centers have evolved through the pandemic and what we can expect in 2022
  • Specific examples from vendors, including traditional strategy houses like McKinsey & Co. and Boston Consulting Group as well as Big Four firms, consulting-centric IT services vendors, tech-centric vendors and India-centric vendors

Register today to reserve your space

TBR webinars are held typically on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. ET and include a 15-minute Q&A session following the main presentation. Previous webinars can be viewed anytime on TBR’s Webinar Portal.

For additional information or to arrange a briefing with our analysts, please contact TBR at [email protected].

WEBINAR FAQS

Junction accelerates Deals’ clients’ time to value and PwC’s shift to platforms

PwC looks at the market and listens to customers to envision what comes next

TBR met with PwC’s Colin McIntyre in May to discuss PwC’s Deals practice, prompted in part by the changing market landscape as pandemic fears and headwinds in the U.S. and Europe appeared to be abating, accelerating interest in merger, acquisition and divestiture activities. McIntyre started the discussion by noting the firm views the emerging post-pandemic market as a key time to accelerate the digital transformation of its Deals practice in concert with changes happening across PwC’s enterprise clients. He noted that new drivers and trends in M&A include the nature of capital, geopolitical and regulatory changes, changing demographics, technology innovations and transformations, and shifting industry opportunities. In this volatile market, PwC sees opportunities to create value around strategic repositioning, performance improvement and asset optimization.

Beyond that fairly straightforward assessment, PwC formed its emerging views around the deals landscape through both in-depth “voice of the customer” research and the firm’s ongoing — and increasing frequency of — Deals engagements. Further, PwC has recognized that clients’ expectations around data sets have shifted from data as an underlying component to wanting insights and data-backed decision making much earlier in the deal’s process. Not data for data’s sake but, in McIntyre’s phrasing, “Take insight and data and be part of the journey … what does that data mean to the client.”

If post-pandemic realities have reordered what is important to customers in looking for acquisitions, PwC’s digitization of its Deals support process is certainly fortuitous. In TBR’s view, PwC’s re-evaluation of the post-pandemic deals market, with an emphasis on data and analysis and a recognition that uncertainty persists, reinforces the firm’s core offerings to help clients stabilize, reposition, acquire and reinvest. Not surprisingly, given the shifts within PwC that TBR has discussed in special reports over the past few years, those core offerings have been bolstered through a digital platform.

Harvesting data for deals, getting to value quickly and delivering differently

PwC describes the relatively new Junction platform as “the digital connectivity point for Deals, providing an enriched, web-based platform for our clients to engage with the team’s insights and analysis. For our people, it creates a digital link between execution and delivery, automating manual processes and streamlining how we ‘report.’” In McIntyre’s more colorful words, Junction is a cloud-based “harvesting machine” for helping clients generate insights and allows PwC to link and talk with clients about their key investment thesis, rather than just keeping the various commercial, compliance and risk pieces in separate silos. The ability to pull together data and insights across an organization’s entire market landscape allows for more collaborative and connected engagements.

As McIntyre explained, “Tax structures, supply chain, risk with controls and all these different pieces of the firm [can be brought] together in a way to work seamlessly. Starts the focus on client’s deal hypothesis, the value drivers, and brings the insights and analysis to support the client’s hypothesis.” He added that Junction allows “clients to comment on the insights and scenario plan and be more collaborative and interactive throughout the deal lifecycle.” In addition, for clients unprepared for a cloud-based and deeply digital experience, PwC tackles change management and training, including “giving the clients the coverage to think differently.” Junction, then, helps PwC focus on value levers and value creation. As McIntyre added, “Value is the currency people understand, as it either goes up or it goes down.”

What happened to smart cities?

COVID-19 and cloud have overrun smart cities, for now

A question from a client spurred an internal discussion among TBR’s Professional Services, IT Services and Digital Transformation Services Team around smart cities and what the vendors we cover had been doing lately to advance what had been one of the hottest topics in 2017, 2018, 2019 and right up until March 2020 — when the pandemic and cloud seemingly drowned out smart cities.

But maybe not. Maybe smart cities just splintered into component parts until municipalities and sponsoring larger government entities can get back to large-scale, transformative projects not directly tied to public health. Maybe the underpinning technologies continued to mature, in both capabilities and adoption, so that the next couple of years will see a resurgence in smart city solutions. Maybe track-and-trace programs and vaccine rollouts have provided the test beds and built the relationships needed for investments to flow again toward smart cities. Maybe. Here’s what TBR’s Services team sees as the current state of play and what may come next:

The components never went away

If the smart cities umbrella faded as the pandemic surged, the technology components and services around them did not. IT services vendors and management consultancies continued to invest in and develop capabilities around analytics, edge computing, 5G and IoT — all key components in the smart cities ecosystem. TBR’s May 2020 Digital Transformation Insights Report: Emerging Technology, 5G described investments by Accenture, Infosys, Tata Consulting Services, Capgemini, IBM and Nokia, among others, while noting that engagement “opportunities centered on speed, connectivity and reliability help elevate 5G’s position in the crowded emerging tech market, but only if vendors can demonstrate the ecosystem will remain navigable.”

A similar report, TBR’s February 2020 Digital Transformation Insights Report: Emerging Technologies, Edge Computing — built upon three separate TBR market landscape reports covering telecom edge compute, 5G telecom and commercial IoT — commented that “embracing collaborative, edge-enabled digital transformation will benefit all parties if risk and responsibilities are shared,” reinforcing the sentiment across nearly all of TBR’s research into various technologies that ecosystem plays provided the greatest opportunities. Components, in other words, remained essential, but needed other components to be truly critical to harnessing digital transformation.  

Green trends, red tape and politics

As the pandemic fades, sustainability and standardization may provide levers to bring smart cities back to the forefront for IT services vendors and management consultancies. The Brooklyn Bridge has a new bike lane. New York City has new regulations around carbon emissions and commercial real estate. Municipalities faced with renewed interests in greening their infrastructure will look for consultancies and technology companies for help. And as federal dollars flow toward all infrastructure — brown and green — cities will look to consultancies with deep expertise in risk and compliance for assistance with standardization around what is and is not permissible around emerging technologies. One substantial caution: Priorities around which initiatives to pursue, even and maybe especially ones rooted in sustainability and standardization, remain political decisions typically disconnected from technology. Smart cities require political will, not just budgets and IT architecture.

TBR’s May 2021 Digital Transformation: Blockchain Market Landscape highlighted this confluence of political will and integrating technology components: “Contributing to the muted adoption of blockchain are many factors, including but not limited to: the outbreak of COVID-19, requiring customers to reprioritize budgets to maintain business continuity; the presence of blockchain alternatives that complement, rather than replace, existing IT environments; and a general lack of knowledge in the market, given the hype surrounding cryptocurrencies today. That being said, as consultancies continue to embark on their shepherding role to lead and manage community participants, they also must consider factors that are influencing buyers’ decisions to invest and/or purchase a blockchain solution, including: 1) solution feasibility, 2) solution integrability into existing IT environment and 3) solution accuracy.”

As always, data at the center

And then there is data, an obstacle even larger than political will but also a massive opportunity for IT services vendors and management consultancies that have been honing their capabilities around data collection, orchestration, distribution and security. Here, the pandemic may have provided technology test beds and relationship building for the vendors that participated in track-and-trace and/or vaccine rollout engagements with states and federal governments, building use cases for technology deployments within the public sector — that is, gateways to smart cities.

In 2022 TBR expects to see more announcements around smart cities, beyond the high-profile greenfield opportunities of brand-new cities or untested technologies. We anticipate vendors such as Accenture, PwC, DXC Technology and Infosys will return to investing in and marketing their smart cities portfolios, pulling together capabilities around cloud, IoT, 5G and analytics while emphasizing their roles within the larger ecosystem of connectivity, cloud and software vendors.

TBR will cover those developments across multiple reports, including our digital transformation insights reports, various telecom and cloud benchmarks and market landscapes, and sustained quarterly analysis of the most dynamic IT services vendors and management consultancies.