Although smaller than the typical IT and professional services firms covered by TBR, Hitachi Digital Services warrants close attention in the coming years. Its distinctive business model, strategic direction and performance — particularly its combination of IT, OT, AI and domain expertise — position Hitachi Digital Services as a potential outlier in the IT services landscape.
Companies keep recruiting, hiring, paying, rewarding, moving, repatriating, retiring and hiring in an endless loop, and EY has capabilities — including consulting, tax and software — that can accelerate movement around that endless loop. EY did not need to say that at the Global Mobility Reimagined conference, as clients understood it already. EY also has a stated ambition to grow People Advisory Services to more than $3 billion by 2031. Absent the worst possible global political and economic scenarios, including a drastic curtailment of global mobility, TBR believes that ambition is perhaps a bit too modest.
Learn how competitors, including IT services companies with consulting capabilities, can calibrate their strategies in the consulting market to take advantage of missteps by the Big Four firms, McKinsey and BCG
TBR has reported extensively on Fujitsu’s evolving AI capabilities and offerings, noting in a special report in May 2024: “TBR appreciates that Fujitsu’s combination of compute power and proven AI expertise makes the company a significant competitor and/or alliance partner for nearly every player fighting to turn GenAI [generative AI] hype into revenue. Second, Fujitsu’s vision of ‘converging technologies’ aligns exceptionally well with the more tectonic trends TBR has been observing in the technology space, indicating that Fujitsu’s market positioning is more strategic than transactional or opportunistic.” Add in Fujitsu’s deepening experience in delivering AI solutions to AI clients, and TBR continues to see tremendous near-term opportunity and growth for Fujitsu and its ecosystem partners.
Trade wars and tariff uncertainties conjure up visions of cargo ships, ports, factories and stacks of goods stranded by economic chaos, not consultants and IT services professionals. Fear, uncertainty and doubt are usually good for the consulting business, while the higher costs of running a business fuel demand for more outsourcing. This time, things might be different. This trade war, even if partially suspended for now, may significantly disrupt professional services, especially if tariffs continue creeping into new areas and the trust deficit continues to grow. Steel now, services later.
One could argue that many of KPMG’s steps, including launching partner-enabled industry IP, reinforcing trust, developing regionally organized operations, outlining a select few strategic partners, and investing in platform-enabled service delivery capabilities, resonate with the moves taken by many of its Big Four and large IT services peers. We see two differences: KPMG is laser-focused on exactly which of the strategies above to amplify, rather than taking a trial-and-error approach, and KPMG has an opportunity to ride the wave of a once-in-a-century professional services market transformation.
The Big Four professional services firms — Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC — have all been undergoing organizational changes in the last couple years. TBR regularly hears five questions about how these firms manage themselves, grow and change. Taking a longitudinal view allows TBR to see that recent restructurings, layoffs and offerings all reflect how these firms are trying to address the following: who gets the best talent, who decides what’s next, who sells, how everyone in a firm knows what everyone else does, and what role will managed services play.
An increasing amount of research and analysis time at TBR is focused on ecosystem intelligence, which applies a set of questions and frameworks to extend traditional market intelligence and competitive intelligence approaches in an effort to better understand a market. Recently, TBR analysts spoke with Informatica’s Richard Ganley, Senior Vice President, Global Partners, and his insights into the actions the company is taking to enhance its alliance relationships with nine key partners stood out to the team.
PwC Middle East’s webcast provides excellent monthly insights into the region’s economies, but it is not the only active Big Four firm. As TBR reported in our Fall 2024 Management Consulting Benchmark, KPMG “announced the opening of Risk Hub in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in collaboration with Microsoft and IBM, paving the way for more in-person, tech-enabled GRC [governance, risk and compliance] discussions with regional clients embarking on their digital transformation programs.” TBR also learned in February that KPMG intends to open a new Ignition Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2025, building on the firm’s global network of innovation and transformation centers.
Leveraging lessons learned from previous engagements and seeing the applicability of digital twins beyond the confines of the physical world, Fujitsu conceived the Policy Twin. Using its Policy Twin, Fujitsu helps public sector clients recreate new policies from policies generated from the clients’ existing policy documents, and, critically, according to Inomata, allows for a “Digital Rehearsal” that can be used to verify the effectiveness and impact of policies in advance, based on real-world data. He added that the policy twin approach helped Fujitsu “solve social challenges … by understanding human behavior and social movements through Social Digital Twin.” Policymakers at any level could, with Fujitsu’s help, test variations of policies and evaluate the outcomes using Policy Twin, calibrating the scenarios based on desired outcomes, all before actually implementing any changes.