Services weekly preview: Nov. 5-9, 2018

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Well into the third quarter of industry earnings and our periodic assessments of IT services vendors, TBR’s analysts this week will also share their semiannual analysis on vendors in the management consulting space

Monday: In 3Q18 Infosys signed 12 large deals with a total contract value over $2 billion, but the company’s delivery framework remains fragile as Infosys maintains its margin-first culture. In our full report on Infosys, Senior Analyst Boz Hristov notes that open-source solutions will support Infosys’ efforts to compete on price as it morphs its value proposition toward becoming a platform-based company. Returning to sustainable double-digit revenue growth will remain a mirage in the next two years.

Tuesday: Senior Analyst Jen Hamel’s initial take on IBM Services’ 3Q18 earnings performance noted that while internal transformation efforts expanded margins, stalled revenue growth shows the company’s work is far from over. The full report expands upon the implications of IBM’s ongoing transformation, including the recent announcement of plans to acquire Red Hat, for IBM Services’ future as a leading IT services vendor.

Wednesday:

  • Analyst Kevin Collupy’s initial report on DXC Technology’s (DXC) quarterly earnings will explore the company’s approach to software and partnerships and its continued use of acquisitions to fill talent and portfolio gaps. We expect tepid growth through the remainder of the year and likely modest organic year-to-year declines, highlighting the importance of strategic acquisitions.
  • In the last edition of the McKinsey & Co. Management Consulting Benchmark profile, I anticipated a slowdown in the firm’s acquisition pace and questioned whether McKinsey could assimilate new capabilities and roll out new offerings, especially around digital, design and analytics. This profile publishing this week will detail how McKinsey performed through the start of this year and how the firm has positioned itself well to benefit from competitors preparing the market for digital transformation.

Thursday: Analyst John Caucis’ initial response to DXC’s earnings and the fiscal performance of the company’s healthcare IT services (HITS) business will cover a mix of positive and negative developments in the fiscal quarters ended 2Q18 and 3Q18 (semiannual report). DXC continues to execute strongly in APAC, particularly in Australia, but indications of difficulties in Europe began to surface in 3Q18. Meanwhile in DXC’s core U.S. market, disruptions appear to be lingering from the spin-merge with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Enterprise Services, delaying a rebound in healthcare IT services growth.

Friday: In this edition of the semiannual look at Accenture’s management consulting practice, Boz will note that the company will rely on patented, artificial intelligence-enhanced solutions to maintain revenue growth momentum and withstand threats from the Big Four and IBM. However, adding tech-centric offerings and engineering-trained resources may pressure its management consulting brand, while a potential large-scale management consulting acquisition could help the company address buyers’ perception.

Voice assistant volume is increasing

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A survey conducted by Adobe Analytics found that 32% of U.S. consumers owned a smart speaker in September 2018, compared to 28% in December 2017. The report also projected that near half of the U.S. consumer base could own one by the end of December 2018, supported by Adobe Analytics’ finding that nearly 80% of smart speaker sales occur during the holiday season. It is just one study, and there are more conservative studies out there ― but even if the data isn’t completely on the mark, it does uncover the trend of voice-controlled devices gaining ground inside consumers’ households despite use cases and monetization still being blurry.

I own four Amazon Alexa-enabled devices myself: two Echo Dot smart speakers and two Fire TVs. Of the Echo Dots, one was given to me by a colleague to play around with, and another I bought for about one-third the list price from acquaintances who had received it as a gift from their extended family and left it unopened because they felt it was “too creepy.” In our household, the Echo Dots have been used as glorified hands-free music players in our kitchen and one of our bathrooms. The Fire TVs are used as media players first and foremost. Sometimes, we try some of the new skills Amazon sends along in update emails as a fun diversion, but usually that is a one-off activity. I am deeply invested in the Amazon ecosystem, having been a Prime member since its debut and a fan of Prime Video, but it is still challenging to find ways to use Alexa smart-home devices to enhance my other Prime benefits or drive me to Amazon’s e-commerce business.

Adobe’s research seems to align with my anecdotal experience, noting that among the most common voice activities* are asking for music (70% of respondents) and asking fun questions (53% of respondents). The only other activity above 50% is asking about the weather (64% of respondents). So yes, people are using them, but these are not skills that require much depth or complexity or that drive additional revenue for Amazon.

Therein lies the problem for voice-platform providers such as Amazon and Google (Microsoft and Apple are also players, but I don’t believe they are as developed as Amazon and Google are in the smart speaker and voice assistant space). In an ideal world, voice assistants would provide platform companies with a wealth of consumer data as users query the devices about their everyday needs. Also, voice assistants can be a new conduit to monetization through new applications or — especially in Amazon’s case — to lowering barriers to the purchase of goods. However, most complex tasks, such as ordering a ticket for the movie you’d like to see tonight, finding out when the beach is open, or buying an outfit for an upcoming wedding, are still much easier via a smartphone or laptop interface. The Adobe study found that of the 32% of respondents with a smart speaker, only 35% and 30% used voice interfaces for basic research or shopping, respectively.

Improving the use cases, or “skills,” of voice assistants will be critical for platform vendors to increase the use of these devices for complex tasks and to elevate smart speakers from smart radios and novelties to gleaming data gems. TBR expects this to be the major battleground between voice assistant and smart speaker providers moving forward as the form factor has been relatively proved. TBR believes Google has a slight advantage due to its heritage in data mining behind the façade of services as well as its Android and Chrome cross-platform tie-ins (a lot of relevant user data is already in Google, such as contacts, schedules, and often email). Amazon is no slouch either due to its investment spend, growing media empire and robust e-commerce platform, which Google lacks. Apple could be a dark horse; however, its Siri is still weaker on an artificial intelligence (AI) basis and the HomePod’s pricing makes it an unlikely easy gift.

The next frontier for all of these platform providers is in the commercial space, an area we may see Microsoft put much of its effort into while leaving the consumer space for better-suited peers. In fact, collaboration between Microsoft and Amazon on voice and smart speakers may confirm this. Using voice assistants and smart speakers to query analytics or gain business insights or employing them as a “smart secretary” in conference rooms are areas TBR sees as avenues for commercial expansion. TBR has seen slightly different approaches from Amazon and Google in the commercial space. Amazon, likely with Microsoft support, focuses on the office with Alexa for Business, while Google seems to be positioning its voice AI and smart speaker technology to serve as an interface for a business’s customers.

However, as with the consumer space, the use case must be proved, the skills must be ironed out, and existing commercial infrastructure must be modified to support voice assistants and smart speakers. And despite furious investment in these possibilities by the major platform players, TBR doesn’t expect to see Alexa widely adopted in the boardroom for at least another two to three years. For now, I believe smart speakers will continue to find their way into homes as a novelty or curiosity for tech-excited people and early adopters, contributing to slow but steady growth, or as an easy, cost-effective tech-based gift, driving additional bursts of increased unit sales during the holidays.

*Voice activity data includes devices that are not smart speakers, such as smartphones.

Big Blue opens its arms, and its wallet, to Red Hat

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Red Hat’s projected growth is enough to justify the hefty purchase price

On Oct. 28, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) executives announced a proposed acquisition ― one that will be the industry’s third-largest acquisition should it gain approval. The deal, valued at $34 billion, would bring Red Hat into IBM’s hybrid cloud team, in its Technology Services and Cloud Platforms (TS&CP) group, where its IaaS (formerly SoftLayer), PaaS (formerly Bluemix) and hybrid management capabilities reside.

While the sheer magnitude of the deal may surprise some, the underlying reasons do not. IBM’s cloud strategy was sorely due for a boost, and Red Hat has been looking for a potential buyer for quite some time. Stefanie Chiras, a 17-year IBM vet, joined Red Hat as the VP and general manager of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) business unit in July, likely to lead that group through the planned acquisition. The potential acquisition would also be aided by portfolio synergies around Linux on IBM hardware and Kubernetes. Additionally, IBM is pervasive in the large enterprise market while much of Red Hat’s revenue is channel-led.

What’s most important is that IBM listened to its stakeholders and the broader market, realizing that while its cloud business was growing consistently at around 20% to 25% year-to-year on a quarterly basis, that was not enough to move the needle materially to more effectively compete in cloud. The company’s recognition that it should not always promote all-IBM solutions is a noteworthy shift. Though IBM has had technology partnerships for some time, there was always the underlying perception that it would push its own solutions ahead of others, regardless of customer needs. Its recent and ongoing focus on hybrid IT enablement has changed this; and now, bringing on an open-source company could change the game for IBM.

Sticker shock fades once you factor in the rest of the numbers

Historically, initial public offerings (IPOs) and sales of more traditional technology and software companies have been valued at around 5x their annual revenue. However, in recent years, as more cloud-native companies with subscription-based business models go public or get acquired, this multiple has steadily shifted upward. As a rather extreme example, Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) bought AppDynamics for $3.7 billion, a valuation of nearly 16x AppDynamics’ annual revenue, even though in the week prior to the purchase AppDynamics had been valued at $1.9 billion on an annual revenue of approximately $220 million as the company readied for its IPO.
Much of the speculation around this monstrous deal relates to how IBM can and will fund such a hefty purchase. To put this massive $34 billion figure into perspective, Red Hat’s trailing 12-month revenue for the four quarters ended Aug. 31, 2018, was just shy of $3.1 billion, indicating the deal is valued at 11x Red Hat’s annual revenue. If Red Hat were to stay on its double-digit growth pattern and trajectory*, its revenue and operating income would be projected to more than double by the close of 2021, benefiting from access to IBM’s vast enterprise customer base.

These projections help IBM justify the large purchase price. Additionally, it is likely that the purchase price per share was set at least a few weeks ago, when there were more Red Hat shares available and at a higher price. On Oct. 1, Red Hat was trading at $133 a share, compared to the $117 per share price it was trading at on Oct. 26.

Synergies make the acquisition possible; success will come down to execution

Organizational structure

The proposed acquisition poses significant integration challenges for IBM if approved. Though the company has been successful in the past with integrating software acquisitions, it has yet to make a purchase this large, and this is the first major software acquisition since the company reorganized and brought software subgroups across its various business units a couple of years ago, eliminating a dedicated software business unit. Additionally, none of the formerly acquired companies have run as stand-alone units as Red Hat is expected to be.

Red Hat’s proposed position as a stand-alone unit in TS&CP could have varying results. IBM Services’ culture and cumbersome processes could stifle Red Hat’s software-led mindset, culture and innovation. Alternatively, Red Hat’s products could be pulled through in an unprecedented number of Services engagements the company has yet to see due to its much smaller size and scale. This second scenario, however, would only be possible if IBM Services and consultants can differentiate from Red Hat’s existing systems integration partners to maintain IBM’s status as the largest services provider around Red Hat and Linux. Whether or not those partnerships will stay at the strategic levels they are at today, or at all, remains unclear.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst would report to IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. While it is very likely he would stay with IBM for the year or so required and then retire, there is the possibility, and this is pure speculation, that IBM could be priming him to be a contender for the position of IBM CEO should Rometty look to retire soon.

Go to market

Undoubtedly, IBM has set its sights on reaching more midmarket customers as its large enterprise customer base is slower and more resistant to move to cloud. Red Hat’s prevalence in the midmarket will surely help open the doors to cross-sell IBM solutions and services to these companies, if pricing is adjusted for smaller companies. Additionally, IBM will gain access to a Red Hat developer community of more than 8 million. On the other side of this, Red Hat also can bring its solutions upmarket to IBM’s largest enterprise customers.

Much of IBM’s focus as of late has been on helping customers link on- and off-premises environments and sharing data across truly hybrid environments. Its large Services arm and broad portfolio set have helped offset some legacy software and services revenue erosion in past quarters. While Linux is already relatively pervasive across the market and OpenStack has yet to garner significant demand or traction, Kubernetes is the open-source solution of choice at the moment and will be in coming quarters. IBM continues to update its IBM Cloud Private portfolio centered on Kubernetes, which can also run on OpenShift, presenting an area of immediate portfolio synergy between the two companies. The incorporation of additional open-source technologies into the mix as well as Red Hat’s interoperability with third-party cloud and software solutions only help position IBM as an increasingly technology-agnostic hybrid enabler.

Peer implications

Despite the size of the acquisition and the attention it is garnering, IBM’s cloud competitors will not face substantially altered challenges should the deal go through. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) will continue to dominate the public cloud IaaS and PaaS market. The two have increasingly embraced open-source technology integrations in their proprietary ecosystems, only enabling them to get bigger as they can also work with RHEL customers.

We believe that if this acquisition were to materially impact any single company, it could be Google (Nasdaq: GOOGL) and/or Oracle (NYSE: ORCL). Google struggles to compete at scale with AWS and Microsoft and does not yet have the same permission to play in the large enterprise segment. With IBM, Red Hat would gain that permission almost immediately. Oracle’s Linux offerings are based on RHEL, which could complicate a competitive relationship between IBM and Oracle. While Oracle may have more pressing areas to focus on and invest in, such as Kubernetes in tandem with its peers, the company could, should it choose not to work closely with IBM when Red Hat is integrated, look to acquire another Red Hat-like company with expertise and capabilities in open source and Linux in particular, such as Canonical or SUSE, which was just sold by Micro Focus (NYSE: MFGP) to private equity firm EQT for $2.5 billion.

Whether by R&D or acquisition, money can’t buy SaaS performance

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The SaaS market appears to provide an easy opportunity for vendors to garner significant revenue and growth. SaaS is the largest segment of the cloud market — bigger than the IaaS space, which draws so much attention due to leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The SaaS market is also much more fragmented, littered with thousands of providers, which would seem to imply that consolidation is a foregone conclusion. However, even for three of the largest leading SaaS providers, the investment level required to compete in the space remains high, and even spending billions of dollars in R&D and acquisitions does not guarantee success.

This is not to say that these billions of investment dollars are all for naught. Despite being around for more than a decade, the SaaS space remains quite immature. Customers are still figuring out which of their applications can be moved to cloud delivery, and how, when and with which vendors those moves can take place. Until a longer track record exists for making these decisions and vendors consolidate disparate offerings into packages more closely resembling integrated solutions, the market remains very much in flux. It’s not the functionality holding back the adoption of hybrid solutions, it’s the difficulty of integrating and managing the multicloud and multivendor solutions. In the meantime, vendors such as Oracle, SAP and Workday have no other choice but to continue accelerating their investments. Their dollars will not buy SaaS performance in the short term, but this is the only way these vendors have a shot as the SaaS space becomes more predictable.

Oracle is in too far to turn back now

By virtue of its long legacy in a diverse field of software, Oracle finds itself in a unique position with cloud solutions. Aside from databases, Oracle is a company built on acquisitions, and that approach holds true with its expansion in cloud. After first downplaying the overall concept of cloud delivery, even while acquiring cloud assets, the vendor recently quickly shifted its messaging and doubled down on internal- and external-driven innovation. The results from a dollar perspective are laid out in Figure 1, representing a steady and significant stream of acquisitions focused on building out mainly SaaS offerings and R&D that funds cloud solutions across the spectrum of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. The significant amount of Oracle’s investments is undeniable, but the returns are far from overwhelming. The downfall of Oracle’s SaaS investment plans played out quite publicly, as the company first bet it would become the first SaaS/PaaS vendor to achieve a $10 billion run rate, then recently changed its reporting structure midyear to blur the actual results.

 

Oracle maintains worse performance than SAP and Workday for the return on its acquisition and R&D investments, spending more on these investments than the company generated in total cloud revenue during 2016, 2017 and 2018 (estimated). That does not mean Oracle is without successes, however, as the purchase of NetSuite, reflected in Oracle’s large acquisition expense in 2016, contributes to revenue growth and complements the organic development of Fusion Cloud ERP. A lot of Oracle’s struggles in cloud come from organic initiatives, such as its PaaS and IaaS services, which have not taken root with customers despite aggressive sales tactics. Those categories of services account for a significant portion of Oracle’s R&D investments over the past three years, but still generate relatively small revenue streams for the vendor. Nevertheless, despite the investment outweighing the associated revenue contributions, we believe Oracle will and should remain committed to its current cloud strategy. It may not pay off in the near term, but these investments are the best shot for Oracle to execute a longer-term cloud turnaround.

SAP is making all the right financial decisions, but still falling short

Though still acquisitive, SAP’s cloud strategy has been more focused on internal innovation compared with Oracle. A more even mix of R&D and acquisition investments, combined with an earlier commitment to cloud delivery, is producing a better rate of revenue return for SAP, as shown in the graph below. SAP ranks fairly close to Oracle in total cloud revenue but is achieving those run rates after incurring significantly fewer R&D and acquisition expenses. TBR estimates SAP’s combined R&D and acquisition investments for cloud were $6 billion for the past three years, compared with more than $21 billion for Oracle over the same time period.

Despite the comparatively positive financial returns for SAP in cloud, the vendor is still struggling with multiple elements of its portfolio. After allowing Salesforce to capitalize on the shift to moving front-office apps to cloud, SAP recently started circling back to carve out territory in that domain. Through multiple acquisitions in the customer experience space and new messaging, SAP is making a concerted push, but it faces an uphill battle winning more market share in that space. Furthermore, SAP’s effort with SAP Business Suite 4 HANA is a long-term one, and in the meantime, assets such as SAP Cloud Platform are underrepresented in the platform space. The net is that SAP has managed investments well and grown revenue in cloud but is still not achieving at a scale that ensures the vendor’s leadership in the SaaS space.

Workday is opening its wallet after trying the DIY route

Historically, Workday has been more reliant on internal R&D as the sole means of advancing its cloud strategy compared with Oracle and SAP. That certainly does not mean the company was shy about entering new markets or delivering new products, as Workday has rapidly increased its activities in both regards over the past three years. The addition of student, financial and now platform offerings illustrates how broadly Workday has expanded its portfolio beyond core human capital management (HCM) offerings. Part of Workday’s reliance on R&D comes from its core focus on a “single line of code,” which provides simplicity and consistency in the vendor’s offerings to customers. Integrating multiple offerings and services is part of the challenge with acquisitions, which Oracle and SAP know all too well. Workday’s past acquisitions have always been functionality-focused and intermittent. The company’s three acquisitions in 2Q18, including its $1.55 billion purchase of Adaptive Insights, is a departure from that strategy but is likely not indicative of broader plans to acquire more fully baked applications. Workday Cloud Platform will allow Workday to leverage partner-developed, inherently integrated technology to expand portfolio breadth.

 

The assumption that Workday’s acquisition-lite approach to investment would be advantageous is not necessarily true. Even without significant acquisitions, Workday’s investment ratio (R&D + Acquisitions/Cloud Revenue) is higher than SAP’s for the three years from 2016 to 2018. Workday had a lower ratio than Oracle, which is spending aggressively on acquisitions, but Workday ranked above SAP in internal R&D investment level proportional to revenue. Additionally, Workday’s streamlined “single line of code” approach is not guaranteeing success in new product categories. HCM revenue growth remains strong, but Workday’s new expansions in Financials and Student are not seeing accelerated early revenue growth. The new offerings are certainly growing, but not at the rate one would expect given the strong HCM base into which they can be cross-sold. The large acquisition of Adaptive Insights could be part of a change in strategy to add inorganic revenue and could lead to greater cross-selling possibilities for the Financials business.

Customer preferences are forming around hybrid and shifting around open source as vendors focus on acquisitions

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Prebuilt devices are a ray of clarity amid the fogginess of hybrid

Hybrid can be a difficult thing to define in cloud computing. The term “hybrid” is overused by vendors but underused by customers, causing general confusion over its definition as well as solid examples of hybrid solutions. An area of the market that cuts through those areas of confusion is hybrid cloud integrated systems. These are physical devices (appliances) that are designed to integrate with public cloud services and can be used in customers’ own data centers. The idea that customers can physically touch the box and also integrate with external cloud services makes integrated systems one of the easiest and most obvious hybrid scenarios.

Examples of integrated systems solutions include Azure Stack from Microsoft and its hardware partners and Cloud at Customer from Oracle. While adoption and usage of these hybrid cloud solutions remain limited, the trend is picking up momentum and is prompting vendors such as Amazon and Google to move closer to competing in the space, particularly as customer demand from heavily regulated industries favors local versions of vendor-hosted cloud infrastructure. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are the two front-runners in the race to win the U.S. Department of Defense’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract. While AWS has largely been seen as the overall favorite, its Snowball Edge offering does not meet the same bidirectional synchronization requirement of the tactical edge device that Azure Stack does.

Kubernetes season is in full swing as OpenStack falters

For large enterprise customers, open-source technologies have garnered much interest as part of their cloud strategies. The ability to utilize solutions that provide the same backbone as large cloud providers while maintaining the control associated with open source has been an attractive value proposition for those with the resources to implement and manage them. However, predicting which technologies will be the most commonly adopted has been more challenging, creating uncertainty around frameworks such as OpenStack, which has yet to garner significant momentum in the market.

Compounding the hurdles for OpenStack to overcome continues to be the ongoing explosion in growth among public cloud IaaS front-runners AWS, Google, Microsoft and Alibaba. OpenStack founders and former OpenStack pure plays are making notable shifts toward Kubernetes. The difference, though, is that Canonical and Red Hat are still holding onto OpenStack, while others, such as Rackspace, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and Mirantis, de-emphasize it.

Customers increasingly understand the benefits of containers and container orchestration platforms and embrace the portability and interoperability they provide. According to a recent interview done as part of TBR’s Cloud Customer Research Program, a retail SVP, CIO and CTO said, “You need to make sure there are escape clauses in your contracts in case you need to get out. Once you’re in it, you’re pretty much married, and that divorce is really bad. That’s the reason we have a container. … Because if it starts to get too expensive, we want to pull it off quickly.”

This is just one example of the immediate enterprise benefits of container and container orchestration platforms, which can change the game for enterprises in terms of their cloud adoption road maps and long-term cloud plans.

Hybridization is becoming even more widespread than customers realize

While pre-integrated devices are the most obvious examples of hybrid usage, the vast majority of activity is occurring in more subtle situations. This activity is driven by the desire among vendors to sell broader solutions and the desire among customers to implement services that integrate with existing and other new technologies. The good news for both sides of the market is that there are more capabilities than ever to put those more cohesive, integrated solutions in place.

Salesforce, whose solutions are commonly integrated into hybrid environments, has taken a notable step into the hybrid enablement space by acquiring MuleSoft. The acquisition, which closed on May 1 at the start of Salesforce’s FY2Q19, brings MuleSoft’s well-known integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) solution and services into Salesforce’s arsenal. The implications for Salesforce, its customers and the market are vast, as the company can create connections between its applications and the variety of other cloud and legacy systems residing in customers’ environments. Salesforce quickly leveraged the iPaaS technology, bringing Salesforce Integration Cloud to market within the first few months of having MuleSoft on board, enabling customers to augment their Salesforce applications and derive greater insights from their non-Salesforce data.

ICO as a ‘medicine show’: EY finds abysmal performance in wild west of initial coin offerings

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Last December, EY Global Blockchain Leader Paul Brody recognized the breakout market for initial coin offerings (ICOs) and launched a longitudinal study, centered on class of 2017 companies that is fueled by this new way of raising money for software startups. One year later, as detailed in EY’s report published today, market valuations for the top 10 ICOs were off 55% — abysmal performance by any standard. Buried in the bad news for almost all the companies, one can find a few bits of success, particularly with companies providing blockchain infrastructure. The incredibly poor performance around incubation makes a strong case, to use a “Deadwood” metaphor, that snake oil salesmen made up most of those 2017ers. As this year comes to a close, around one-quarter of the initial ICO-backed companies have a product in the market, further evidence the breakout included a number of outright frauds. In addition, of the 25 companies that had products, seven devalued the use of utility tokens by allowing payment in fiat currency, facing up to enterprises’ persistent reluctance to conduct business transactions in anything but hard currencies. Curiously, paying in tokens, according to Brody in a discussion with TBR prior to today’s announcement, came across as only the second-biggest obstacle to commercial adoption, with the first being the desire for transaction privacy — a desire pure public blockchains cannot satisfy. In EY’s previous report on ICOs, issued last December, the firm anticipated the third-greatest objection, concerns over full regulatory compliance, an insight that tracks closely with EY’s tax and audit credentials.

Today’s report includes a few nuggets revealing the depth of EY’s study:

  • “Companies that have made meaningful progress toward working products only increased by 13% in 2018. 71% have no offering in the market at all. Typically, within one year of a traditional venture-backed software startup, you would expect to see a significantly higher percentage of the companies with a functional early stage product.”
  • “Seven out of 25 reviewed projects accept other currencies, rendering utility tokens less valuable. Some projects have altogether dropped their utility tokens to focus on functionality. To become a means of payment, utility tokens have to be stable. If it remains stable, the token is of little interest to speculative investors.”
  • “Globally, sources of funding will likely shift away from retail investors toward entities that can understand and manage the downside risks, such as venture capital and digital asset-focused investment funds.”

Will next year be better? The blockchain infrastructure companies will likely be surpassed by a second wave of ICO-funded companies, with most of these taking an asset-backed approach to token issuance, essentially creating a product that is enterprise-ready at a time when buyers are not convinced of the benefits of placing all their assets on the public blockchain domain. This then raises the question: Do new wave ICO-funded companies need to rip pages from Ethereum’s playbook or simply play within its orbit? Ethereum is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but it certainly provides a solid foundation for many to learn from, especially around its “smart” contact functionality. Further advancing along some of the must-do steps EY pointed out in its December 2017 report, this second wave will more adequately address the need for clear justifications for blockchains and tokens; an ICO process more closely aligned to the initial public offering (IPO) process; enhanced security; and something close to legal compliance, or the regulators will simply begin enforcement substantial enforcement. In short, privacy trumps transactability.

The regulatory aspect piques my interest, in part because of the know-your-customer (KYC) aspects of post-ICO-linked financial transactions and recent efforts of EY, among others, to better incorporate emerging technologies into anti-money-laundering and KYC operations.

In this wild west, with its unregulated moral hazard, where does EY fit in?

My initial thoughts had the consultancy as the “Deadwood” preacher, known to all and trusted, but neither the law nor the bank. My colleagues convinced me EY will be more like the General Store, providing certified, trustworthy services and goods, helping clients mine for gold without shortcuts and faulty equipment that bring down the whole operation. Now imagine artificial-intelligence-enhanced, blockchain-powered resupply brought into Deadwood.

Four by four by four equals four

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Four straight weeks of traveling for work, to four different cities to meet with four different clients, brought out four thoughts about where the IT services and consulting markets stand as we move into the autumn rush of 2018.

First, the next few years will finally bring the shift in the consulting model that we’ve been anticipating for the last decade (when I worked Deloitte and the partners tasked our team with understanding the other Big Four firms’ moves back into consulting). Outcomes-based pricing won’t become the norm because clients want transparency or because consultancies readily put their own fees and reputations at risk, but because the technology around assessing, measuring and even metering outcomes has improved dramatically in the last couple of years. And asset-based consulting will become the norm because consultancies can finally fully marry their intellectual talent to repeatable, scalable, configurable solutions infused with more than just methodologies and industry knowledge.

Second, the word “maturity” has started creeping into conversations about emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, enhanced analytics, Internet of Things and even blockchain. The smart consultancies have recognized the buzz around emerging tech has produced clients that have enough experience, both good and bad, to think of themselves as more than just novices needing consulting help to understand the emerging new-world customer and employee. These clients don’t want to be amazed by cool tech. They want their experience to be acknowledged and built upon, and they want to move faster. Recognizing maturity means talking about deeper, more lasting — and more expensive — engagements, much to the benefit of consultancies.

Third, I anticipate an era of internally splintered consultancies competing with globally managed firms, creating a weird market with nominally global players drifting toward highly localized operations, while a couple of large consultancies maintain centralized, uniform cultures and organizations. Mirroring the political, economic and demographic forces behind the recent rise of populism and nationalism, some global consultancies could see local and regional practices pressured by trends in data sovereignty and cybersecurity, combined with a spillover from political populism and accelerated by agile technologies that can be spread rapidly and customized for micro-differences more quickly than before. If this trend develops, the consultancies opting to go all-in on one approach or the other will succeed. Those slow to decide or trying to muddle through a middle-ground arrangement will see the market surpass them.

And fourth, I come back repeatedly to leadership, a topic I’ve written about extensively in our analysis and in a couple of blog posts and special reports. Leading a consulting or IT innovation or systems implementation team today requires mastering new technologies, understanding a client’s industry and their position within it, and navigating shifting centers of budget and decision making. None of that differs greatly from previous generations of IT, except that today the diversity of talent demands more capable leaders and the speed of technological change demands increased humility and adaptability, plus a greater willingness to form, manage and lead flexible teams. Companies I see that recognize the talent shift, including changes brought on by millennials, and understand the impact on their leaders — and the company’s imperative to train and equip those leaders — repeatedly stand apart from the pack.

Postcards from the edge: Complexity is here — wish it were not

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“Analog dollars to digital pennies” is a phrase used to discuss the continued compression on technology price points as Moore’s Law economics, coupled with continued IP abstraction, creates economic trigger events aimed squarely at legacy business model best practices. Recently, I attended analyst events in New York City — one sponsored by Lenovo and one by Canonical — that outline these economic trigger events, albeit from different sides of the same coin.

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth used the term “economic trigger events” often in his opening remarks. The idea is that technologies and new price points create trigger events that result in new economic fundamentals where some participants will be disruptors and some will be disrupted.

The rise in the hype cycle around edge computing as it joins forces with cloud, artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning, and Internet of Things (IoT) creates a veritable Gatling gun of economic trigger events. These events accelerate business model disruption as we pivot to the Business of One era.

The disruption sits atop the continued economic pressure from commoditized hardware. What’s behind it all is that while infrastructure is valuable, it is not valued. In short, the margin moves out of infrastructure and into the business outcome. Technology enablement is less constrained by affordability and more by determining what business value can be derived from the application or use case.

Rather than being the lead decision in business investment decision making, infrastructure acquisition becomes the derived decision. The service attach rate or services drag becomes the fuzzy guide point for new inventions and new business models. Broad, ubiquitous ecosystems become imperative to generating sufficient margin in the digital penny world to justify the ongoing development, monitoring, and maintenance of secure flexible infrastructures that won’t break and will keep data secure and private.

For Canonical, this means focusing on the connection between operating system and cloud control planes to ensure a single code set operates silicon as large as high-performance computers (HPCs) and as small as single-purpose IoT devices. Compute infrastructure is assumed to work, until it breaks, and then users realize just how valuable that hidden infrastructure provisioning is.

As Canonical is hardening the abstraction layer to ensure seamless interoperability, Lenovo (and many other hardware manufacturers) create purpose-built appliances optimized for edge workloads. In some instances, these will be small appliances simply capturing data and routing it back to clouds for ingestion into massive analytics engines. In other situations, it will be very-high-performance compute engines with GPU accelerators in simple, easy-to-operate form factors where AI inference in real time has to be performed at the edge. Here again, the assumption will be that the edge appliance can operate (in a retail convenience store, for example) without the need for any technically savvy personnel to monitor, manage or provision the device on-site.

Look for more detailed special reports from TBR on the Lenovo and Canonical industry events in the next few weeks.

 

As the 2018 finish line nears, will McKinsey continue its breakaway or slip back into the peloton?

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Every six months, we review McKinsey’s performance, analyze its strategy and consider likely scenarios for the firm in the near term

Back in June, we said, “If McKinsey truly gains market permission to take digital transformation from design through execution, its peers will be pressured to emulate the firm.” In advance of the November profile, we’ve considered how the firm performed through the first part of 2018 and put together a couple quick thoughts as the end of the year nears, specifically around some McKinsey moves in France and a potentially pressing market trend.

As part of a burst in recruiting at McKinsey France, three partners with specializations in robotics and automation relocated to the firm’s Paris office, filling in portfolio gaps. McKinsey also launched a high-profile and seemingly civic-minded skills-development program to combat stubbornly high unemployment across France. Along with Bain & Co., Oliver Wyman and others, McKinsey seems to be sensing new growth in the France consulting market, likely driven by Brexit and digital transformation. Brexit’s pending implementation constrains consultants working between the U.K. and members of the European Union, making the French consulting market more congested as well as more lucrative for well-positioned and staffed consultancies. French companies have also accelerated efforts around digitization and digital transformation, driving consultancies such as McKinsey to place more emerging technology resources on the ground in Paris.

Not all will be wine and roses — or champagne and irises — as McKinsey faces a market trending toward transparency even as the firm manages the fallout from several high-profile mistakes (e.g., South Africa, Eskom)

Competitors have always complained about McKinsey’s business practices, and clients have always complained about the firm’s pricing and failure to follow through on implementations. Customers and/or markets emphasizing transparency may be far less forgiving of McKinsey’s methods, and larger consultancies with positive brand strategies and market presence — such as EY, PwC and Deloitte — may be well equipped to displace McKinsey, given the opportunities. Even as McKinsey adopts risk-sharing and outcomes-based pricing for some engagements, tech trends such as cloud, Global Data Protection Regulation compliance, analytics and SaaS, point to increased transparency and visibility into actual results, with clients potentially assessing whether McKinsey’s high consulting fees are justified.

We will be marking all these moves in our upcoming Management Consulting Benchmark, comparing McKinsey against 12 other consultancies across four service lines and countless metrics. In June we quoted a longtime partner at a Big Four firm, who said, “I don’t know what McKinsey will do next. I do know they’ve consistently been a couple steps ahead of us.” Maybe the timing is right for those competitors to catch up.

 

VMware leans on partners IBM and AWS to go increasingly all-in on cloud

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What’s new from VMworld on the cloud front?

VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas came to a close just a few short weeks ago, but the impact from the slew of cloud-related announcements from VMware and its partners continues to reverberate. After multiple changes in course over the past 10 years as VMware reacted to the shift toward cloud computing, the company has found a strategy that works. VMworld 2018 showed the company doubling down on its partnerships with leading cloud providers and addressing customers’ cloud management pain points.

To extend VMware’s relevance in the cloud management space, the company announced both an acquisition and a host of organic portfolio updates during the conference. Notably, the company announced its intent to acquire CloudHealth Technologies to further its multicloud management and operations capabilities with CloudHealth’s platform and expertise in Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS) clouds.

Portfolio updates were announced across the vendor’s Workspace ONE, VMware Edge, vRealize, vSAN, vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation and vCloud Director portfolios. Additionally, partner program enhancements through the VMware Cloud Provider Program and announcements with key partners AWS and IBM in regard to partner-based cloud solutions were made as well. While the portfolio updates are notable, much of VMware’s relevance in the cloud space as of late is coming from its alliances and partnerships. It took the shutdown of VMware’s own vCloud Air service, but the vendor’s partner-led cloud strategy reinforces the value of VMware in cloud and hybrid environments.

VMware’s alliance with IBM is a decades-long, increasingly strategic partnership that now spans customers’ and cloud data centers as the two companies work together to help enterprises modernize their traditional and virtual environments into truly hybrid environments. VMware and IBM look to optimize customers’ existing IT assets with strategic cloud workloads and functions as well as the help of thousands of VMware specialists within IBM Services. Additionally, their tenured relationship turned even more strategic in 2016 as IBM helped VMware re-enter the public cloud market with IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions. At the conference, the two announced vCloud Availability for vCloud Director on IBM Cloud, a disaster recovery solution for multitenant environments that enables IBM Cloud to serve as a failover for workloads on VMware environments. After the successful migration of a few key legacy applications to VMware HCX on IBM Cloud for American Airlines in recent months, IBM and VMware also unveiled JumpStart enhancements, announced at VMworld, to help customers migrate their existing on-premises VMware workloads to IBM Cloud.

VMware’s partnership with AWS is very well known, in large part due to the number of customers using technologies from each of the two vendors and because of both companies’ former reluctance to address new delivery methods. VMware was very much on-premises focused while AWS was solely public-cloud focused, making the partnership and VMware Cloud on AWS a notable shift for both vendors. At VMworld 2018, the two companies announced the expansion of their relationship, including the global extension of VMware Cloud on AWS into Australia, a Cloud Provider Hub that allows partners to offer VMware Cloud on AWS as a managed service, AWS Relational Database Service on VMware, NSX integrations, price reductions, Log Intelligence for VMware Cloud on AWS, Instant Data Center Evacuation and more.

Let’s dig a little deeper into these two partnerships and solution sets

While much of the focus as of late in terms of VMware Cloud partner developments has been on AWS, VMware’s partnership with IBM has existed for a longer period of time and encompasses more than IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, thus the bulk of the integrations are well established and the two announce new features, integrations and functionality as their portfolios evolve. To note, back in August 2016, VMware announced that IBM would provide the first service offering for VMware Cloud Foundation and also train more than 4,000 services professionals with expertise around VMware solutions.

In line with market trends, VMware is partnering with as many leading vendors in their respective technology markets as possible, ultimately to meet and exceed the demands from its customers for multivendor environments, integrations and interoperability across environments. Each of the aforementioned partnerships fits its own customer set, albeit with slight overlap, and addresses specific customer pain points. VMware and AWS are poised to capitalize on midmarket and small enterprise opportunities, with an emphasis on cloud specifically, while VMware and IBM are poised to capitalize on opportunities in the midsize and large enterprise sectors, with a hybrid IT emphasis, optimizing customers’ blends of cloud and legacy IT assets.

While VMware’s partnerships with IBM and AWS may seem like six of one and half a dozen of the other, the differences themselves when looking at hybrid IT as a whole rather than cloud only, where IBM and VMware naturally have a longer, more strategic relationship that encompasses virtual and cloud environments spanning customer and vendor data centers.

To make this a little easier to digest, we’ve developed a table that includes some key solutions recently announced by VMware and AWS and compares them to existing and new IBM and VMware solutions in regard to how customer pain points can be addressed. While the technical functions available from both VMware partners are aligned, many of the target customers will be different.

 

It is our perception that the VMware and AWS partnership better suits organizations that embrace public cloud, whether for budgetary reasons, risk sharing or lack of IT staff. Alternatively, IBM is the partner of choice for IBM and VMware large enterprise customers. Joint IBM and VMware solutions are tailor-made for organizations with large on-premises data centers that remain fully functional and thus are not yet ready to be shut down in favor of public cloud only, serving instead as a blend between the old and new.

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