In an unlikely pairing, Oracle backs TikTok to drive OCI business and intimidate IaaS competitors

/by

Acquisition turned partnership: Oracle bands together with TikTok

Oracle’s presence in TikTok-related news — from competitive bid to strategic partnership to now minority stakeholder — has raised eyebrows from the beginning, given the company’s complete detachment from the social media business. Oracle executives have not been shy about expressing their support for the current White House administration, nor for their plans to take IaaS share from Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT).

In fact, Microsoft, which showed great interest in TikTok initially, had far more to gain from a potential deal. However, regardless of how Oracle was brought into consideration, the agreement has the potential to benefit Oracle in several ways, including stronger governmental ties, gaining a win over Microsoft, onboarding a new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) customer, owning a stake in a profitable company, and lastly, earning the chance to convince the market that Oracle is evolving from an old-school software company to an adaptive cloud vendor that has ties with an up-and-coming generation.  

What does this mean for Oracle’s cloud business?

Big logos give Oracle a confidence boost in chasing competitors, with AWS as leading target

In many ways, TikTok is just another name Oracle can add to its roster of recent high-profile OCI wins, including Zoom and 8×8. Despite the attention that was given to these deals amid COVID-19, Zoom still runs most of its workloads on AWS or in its own data centers. This latest win follows a similar trend, as TikTok is in the middle of a three-year agreement with Google Cloud (Nasdaq: GOOGL), promising to buy over $800 million in cloud services.

However, as part of Oracle’s 12.5% stake in the new company, TikTok will also run on OCI. While this allows Oracle to boast a win over Microsoft and Google Cloud, IaaS incumbent AWS remains the company’s primary target. Recent updates, such as a cost-analysis tool, plans to scale to 36 live public cloud regions by mid-2021, and strategic technology partnerships with Microsoft and VMware (NYSE: VMW) are just a few ways Oracle will continue to apply the pressure.

After months of deliberation on the fate of TikTok — a social media application owned by China-based internet technology company ByteDance — due to security concerns raised by the Trump administration, the U.S. government and involved parties came to a tentative agreement on Sept. 19.

Per the agreement, TikTok will transition to a publicly traded U.S. company, with Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and Walmart (NYSE: WMT) as initial stakeholders. Under the new deal, ByteDance will hold an 80% stake in the new company, dubbed TikTok Global, which is scheduled to hit the market through an initial public offering in less than one year. Combined, Oracle and Walmart will hold the remaining 20% stake, leveraging data to improve their respective positions in technology and retail. While TikTok will maintain control of its algorithms, the deal will still bring TikTok under U.S. financial law and subject it to security oversight by Oracle as a vested technology partner.

Enterprise edge compute sees opportunity in COVID-19 economy as new use cases emerge

/by

COVID-19 increases demand for edge installments

Despite some challenges and resistance to adoption, the opportunity at the enterprise edge is vast, as edge workloads present a key solution to many of the new problems that have popped up due to COVID-19. For example, brick-and-mortar shopping was once seen as a leisure activity and has now become a front line from which a virus can spread. While retail is a key vertical with much to gain from edge workloads in the era of COVID-19, it is not the only one. Manufacturing floors now require social distancing of workers, which slows down production, and technicians cannot go on-site to fix malfunctioning hardware. The edge is the solution to many of these problems, with use cases including contact tracing, temperature-monitoring cameras, and AI-enabled surveillance to monitor for adequate social distancing and mask wearing.

TBR’s Enterprise Edge Compute Market Landscape, which is global in scope, details edge compute trends among both vendors and their customers. Vendor coverage includes: Amazon Web Services, Atos, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Digital Realty, Equinix, Huawei, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Lenovo and Microsoft. This research includes current-year market sizing and a five-year forecast.

PwC’s design of a Central Lending Platform concept for Singapore: Acceleration and digitization for struggling SMEs

/by

A pandemic-induced national problem with a PwC-designed solution

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic fallout, Singapore’s government sought to bolster the SME market, which employs 70% of the city-state’s workforce and generates 50% of its gross domestic product (GDP), in part through a risk-sharing program for loans to eligible SMEs. Early efforts attracted only 2% of the SMEs to apply for loans, which PwC attributed in part to lengthy loan application and approval processes exacerbated by the COVID-19 lockdown. The gap due to surge in demand and reduced supply provided an opportunity for PwC to design a Central Lending Platform to simplify the loan process, quickly connect SMEs to multiple banks in one single platform, facilitate faster access to capital, and provide Singapore’s government with analytics and data surrounding the SME sector and associated market share, including delivering insight into industry competitiveness to guide quicker and more meaningful policy decisions.

A platform to benefit Singapore’s banks and SMEs

PwC’s design of a Central Lending Platform provides a number of essential benefits for SMEs, Singapore banks and Singapore’s government, including the minimization of human efforts and errors in loan applications and processing; always-on, always available services; and the collection and assembly of previously uncollected data in a single, digital place.

According to PwC, banks prepared to loan to SMEs will rely on the platform for an “immediate eligibility assessment” of whether an SME meets the criteria developed by Singapore’s government. The digital platform will eliminate the need for banks’ loan relationship managers to check the completeness of documents, a process that PwC noted contributed to a 6- to 10-week waiting time from application submission to access to capital. Within three days of an SME’s application, banks will submit loan terms and conditions, although banks can submit loan terms and conditions ahead of the three-day window, and the applying SME can compare and evaluate. In addition, the platform should help banks more efficiently penetrate the SME market as well as accelerate the digitalization of Singapore’s banking sector.

In late August, PwC announced an initiative that can complement the Singapore government’s efforts to facilitate bank loans to small and midsize enterprises (SMEs). Given the confluence of technology, consulting and PwC’s continually evolving business model, TBR requested a discussion with the firm’s leaders working on this initiative. On Sept. 2, TBR spoke with Irene Liu, PwC’s Government and Public Services Co-Lead; Charles Loh, PwC Singapore Consulting Leader; Shierly Mondianti, PwC Southeast Asia Risk & Regulatory Consulting Manager; Andy Goldin, Southeast Asia Head of Advanced Analytics; and Lincoln Yin, CEO of Singapore-based financial technology (fintech) company RootAnt. This special report reflects the discussion and TBR’s ongoing analysis of PwC and its management consulting peers.

Remote work requirements will accelerate cloud adoption road maps, fueling public cloud growth

/by

With Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google and Alibaba established as the IaaS cloud market leaders, Technology Business Research, Inc. (TBR) has noted an increase in partner ecosystem activity, particularly among IT services vendors, such as Accenture, Infosys and Cognizant, that are vying for a share of cloud services like migration and implementation.

Consolidation will accelerate as leaders embrace coopetition, evidenced by activity from Microsoft and Oracle that allied to target AWS’ dominance in the IaaS space. This trend will further separate the leaders from the rest of the pack while creating an adjacent opportunity as customers deploy multivendor and hybrid cloud environments — which bodes well for infrastructure specialists such as IBM’s Red Hat and VMware, particularly as the latter maintains its emphasis on being vendor agnostic. Further, TBR expects rising enterprise appetites around technologies like containerized applications will facilitate PaaS market momentum in the near term as customers develop and test the application frameworks internally before making them live on their hybrid architectures.

Overall Forecast

Though the COVID-19 outbreak is impacting the public cloud market, benchmarked vendors with the largest market share are positioned to protect their leadership, as a diverse install base buffers spending slowdowns in industries such as hospitality. Other vendors are relying on strategic investments in areas like data integration and multicloud management to carve footholds in PaaS and become more attractive among infrastructure leaders that are increasingly embracing vendor agnosticism to expand their IaaS addressable market.

Public cloud remains the largest and fastest growing segment of the cloud market. The outbreak of COVID-19 has forced enterprise customers to increase their usage of cloud infrastructure and solutions, a trend that will benefit leading cloud providers and lead to further consolidation in areas such as IaaS and PaaS through the current forecast period. The Public Cloud Market Forecast details how hybrid deployments, new use cases for enterprise apps, and trends in emerging technology will make public cloud even more relevant in the future.

Turning the corner from crisis response to client recovery and renovation: CY2Q20 federal IT COVID-19 roundup

/by

The impact of COVID-19 on revenue, profitability and award activity was material but also erratic and inconsistent across vendors

Federal IT vendors tracked in TBR’s Public Sector IT Services Benchmark generally reported at least some erosion of top-line growth or profitability in CY2Q20 that was directly or indirectly attributable to the pandemic. Many providers were compelled to revise downward revenue or margin guidance for their current fiscal year, though for some, the COVID-19 impacts during the quarter were less substantial than originally expected. In an early response to the coronavirus outbreak, vendors quickly shifted their focus to operational stability, cash preservation and maintaining program delivery.

Among the contractor set TBR follows, the vendor bookends for CY2Q20 fiscal performance were Maximus (NYSE: MMS) and General Dynamics IT (GDIT) (NYSE: GD). Maximus’ sales rose more than 23% year-to-year as the company fully leverages the citizen engagement centers it purchased from GDIT in late CY18. Maximus’ 2020 Census contract, which is expected to generate $360 million in revenue during the company’s FY20 (ending Sept. 30), continues to ramp up to full operations, providing most of Maximus’ federal segment growth in CY2Q20.

Also of note was ManTech (Nasdaq: MANT), which also appeared to fully elude the pandemic by posting 17.8% year-to-year growth (16.4% on an organic basis) in CY2Q20 and continued hiring aggressively to quickly scale new engagements and execute on key classified contracts. Conversely, GDIT suffered a 12.7% year-to-year decline in sales in CY2Q20, the fifth straight quarter of revenue contraction since the company completed the CSRA acquisition and sold its call center business to Maximus. COVID-19 drove a slowdown in award activity in CY2Q20, worsening delayed contracting actions GDIT has struggled with since late CY19. GDIT project teams were often unable to enter customer work sites, dampening sales (and margins) in CY2Q20, while the company has yet to replace revenue lost by the completion of several legacy programs in CY19. While growth at many of the remaining federal IT competitors TBR tracks was tempered in CY2Q20, most delivered at least marginal top-line growth while deflecting, to varying degrees, pandemic-related profit pressures.

New projects to aid the federal COVID-19 response did provide a handful of vendors with new revenue streams, but classified programs (particularly in the intelligence space) were a commonly cited challenge area. Many classified clients closed their sites to all but mission-critical employees during CY2Q20, generating growth and margin pressures that varied according to a vendor’s exposure to the classified arena.

The process for getting employees cleared for new classified projects or for simply getting clearances for new employees was also made more difficult by the pandemic, keeping some vendors from generating new revenue from some recent awards. Deploying project teams to nonclassified defense and civilian programs was also problematic, causing significant portions of vendor workforces to remain idle or underutilized and deferring revenue recognition, though this trend was less intense outside the classified space. Still, the federal government remained open during the early months of the pandemic, and most programs remain fully funded even as the coronavirus created a government shutdown of a different sort with effects that are and will remain unpredictable, even into CY21.

While the coronavirus hit during CY1Q20, the bulk of the pandemic-related turmoil in relation to program delivery, business development and operations was expected during CY2Q20. Federal IT vendors adapted quickly to manage the direct impacts of COVID-19 by shifting large swaths of their workforces to telework, activating new incident response protocols, and rolling out new virtual collaboration tools to maintain communication with clients and project teams. The resiliency of the federal IT market and proactive response to the crisis to ensure service continuity offset some of the headwinds to vendor fiscal performance, but uncertainty about the continued impact of the pandemic remains.

EY’s Strategy and Transactions practice takes shape amid evolution across the entire firm

/by

A full breadth of services to tackle fundamental capital deployment questions

Setting the stage for EY’s shift from Transaction Advisory Services to Strategy and Transactions, Nadine Mirchandani, deputy global vice chair of Strategy and Transactions at EY, and team noted that as COVID-19 has served as an accelerant to disruptive trends across technology, macroeconomics and even geopolitics, enterprises still struggle with fundamental questions around deploying capital, from acquisitions and mergers to corporate finance and core strategy. While EY has an established track record for working with clients on these issues, the newly formed Strategy and Transactions practice will help the firm build capabilities at scale, allowing EY to better address the full range of facets impacting clients and provide them long-term value, according to Mirchandani. Under the umbrella of Connected Capital Solutions, the firm has developed five distinct service offerings around Strategy, Corporate Finance, Buy and Integrate, Sell and Separate, and Reshaping Results, intended to be both stand-alone offerings and gateways to the rest of the firm’s service lines, such as Tax and Consulting, including technology transformation. In TBR’s view, explicitly delineating between the various challenges of capital deployment, such as separating acquisitions and integration from divestitures, provides clients with clear insight into the breadth of EY’s offerings without diluting the firm’s depth of expertise. 

Filling out the new organizational structure, Julie Hood, EY Strategy and Transactions leader for Europe Middle East, India and Africa, and Tony Qui, Global Innovation Leader who is responsible for innovation strategic direction within the Strategy and Transactions practice, explained that Strategy & Transactions includes three newly created sub-service lines — Transactions & Corporate Finance; EY-Parthenon; and International Tax and Transaction Services (ITTS) — and provided a few details on each:

  • Transaction Diligence, within Transactions & Corporate Finance, is, according to Hood, the “cornerstone” of EY’s practice and where the firm has established the longest and most substantial client relationships.
  • EY-Parthenon, which offers services around strategy consulting, transaction strategy & execution, and turnaround & restructuring strategy, intends to compete directly with EY’s Big Four peers and the leading strategy-centric consultancies, such as McKinsey & Co., Bain & Co. and Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Jim Hsu said EY-Parthenon combines on-the-ground staff — who have multiple touch points with clients locally — with resources across the entire firm such as tax and risk. Hsu added that EY’s clients seek a “holistic approach” to their capital deployment issues, which plays to EY’s strengths in working both globally and across the entire firm.
  • Transfer Pricing, by its inclusion as a component of ITTS, illustrates the firm’s commitment to bringing both industry expertise and technical craft to engagements.

Effective July 1, EY rebranded its Transaction Advisory Services (TAS) as Strategy and Transactions (S&T) and moved the EY-Parthenon group into the new S&T practice. In mid-August, EY leadership, including Nadine Mirchandani, deputy global vice chair, Strategy and Transactions at EY; Julie Hood, EY Strategy and Transactions leader for Europe Middle East, India and Africa; Jim Hsu, Global Strategy lead at EY-Parthenon; and Tony Qui, Global Innovation leader for EY’s Strategy and Transactions practice, briefed TBR on the changes and expectations for the newly formed practice and new service lines and the firm as a whole. This special report reflects both that discussion and TBR’s ongoing analysis of EY.

Know-your-tech strategy could be invaluable as Logicalis aims to disrupt peers in cloud managed services market

/by

TBR perspective

Logicalis’ efforts to optimize its legacy operations while doubling down on key growth areas such as cloud will largely depend on the company’s ability to develop integrated scale to ensure standardized service delivery. Evolving portfolio offerings, including the launch of its Digital Service Platform (DSP), paired with strengthening partner ecosystem relationships, will allow Logicalis to appeal to a broader buyer base and potentially disrupt the engagement model services companies are typically known for by offering digital routes to its services catalog. TBR believes this approach will be particularly applicable as COVID-19 pressures high-touch consulting services. Logicalis’ global scale is just the right size to test such a strategy as the company maintains a diverse mix of midmarket and enterprise clients. While the former group is the prime target for selling and supporting services through a click-to-buy model, many cost-conscious buyers from the latter group are also seeking ways to minimize external spend, providing Logicalis with a strong test bed for its customer experience model. Logicalis is not looking to change its DNA but rather to blend the best of both worlds with minimal disruption — adopting a software company-like sales strategy while maintaining human-delivered, automation-enabled services support to drive recurring (e.g., “as a Service”) revenue at scale. We recognize that this is easier said than done, but at least the company’s leadership appears to have their priorities aligned, which is a good place to start.

Logicalis will rely on strong customer service and repeatable IP to reshuffle the composition of its P&L toward more profitable recurring revenue opportunities

After only two weeks on the job as CEO, Robert Bailkoski, like many of his peers, had to address the global threat COVID-19 posed to the company’s operations, employees and clients. Bailkoski’s tenure with the company as CFO and later as COO had prepared him (as much as anyone could be prepared for a pandemic) not only to handle the situation with minimal disruption but also to ensure he stayed the course on many of the priorities he had set prior to becoming CEO. With Logicalis’ performance deeply rooted in selling both hardware and software products, which combined currently generate about 60% of company’s global revenue, Bailkoski knew he had an uphill battle as these areas are becoming largely commoditized and thus pressuring the company’s top and bottom lines.

In a recent conversation with Robert Bailkoski, Logicalis Group’s newly appointed CEO, as well as Vince DeLuca, Logicalis Group’s customer experience & service transformation officer, TBR had a chance to hear firsthand about the company’s goals and investments as it continues its journey to become a globally integrated solutions provider. TBR appreciated Bailkoski’s and DeLuca’s grounded approach to the company’s transformation, which is not something many newly appointed executives pursue as they often seek to create a name for themselves by making fundamental changes. We believe both Bailkoski’s and DeLuca’s tenure and understanding of the company have provided them with good visibility into Logicalis’ strengths and weakness and a sense of accountability needed to reach the company’s goals.

PwC’s Saratoga, diversity and inclusion challenges amid the shifting landscape of HR management

/by

Beer carts do not lead to promotions  

Prior to the pandemic, companies across all industries marketed their diversity and inclusion scores, rankings and awards, demonstrating to clients, investors and potential recruits their efforts in this area and good corporate citizenship. Combine fewer marketing opportunities with increased scrutiny of what exactly well-run diversity and inclusion programs look like, and the human resources space has become ripe for the same kinds of disruption and digital transformation running through every aspect of large enterprises. In this environment, PwC noted three critical aspects of the current HR landscape.

First, data-focused companies adopt enterprise-changing diversity and inclusion initiatives more rapidly and successfully than companies that continue to focus on softer, less quantifiable actions, such as Friday afternoon beer carts and magazine awards for diversity.

Second, the challenges, risks and opportunities around diversity and inclusion have now reached the senior-most levels at most companies, with issues elevated even beyond the chief human resources officer (as noted in this story, which aired Aug. 17, 2020, on the WBUR radio station in Boston), in addition to being passed to line-of-business leaders and finance and risk officers, all of whom recognize that diversity and inclusion impacts all aspects of the enterprise, including the bottom line.

Third, promotion rates, turnover, performance and hiring remain the biggest and most significant gap for enterprises attempting to assess their performance around diversity and inclusion. Jeffords spoke at length on the challenges of moving minds to accept that awards and external recognition meaningfully address challenges uncovered by examining promotion rates. Most leaders, according to PwC, do not know the data on their own promotion rates nor the benchmarks for top-performing peers. For PwC, the time is ripe for tackling all three of these critical aspects.   

An established tool, Saratoga complements HR consulting

As a well-established product, the Saratoga performs a foundational, yet essential, service for PwC’s clients. Starting with data ingestion and leading to industry comparisons and trends, PwC helps clients understand which internal human resource management levers they can pull to make changes across their organizations. PwC provides fundamental consulting work, with benchmarks and recommendations, backed by massive amounts of client data as well as data PwC has collected from peers over many years.

Following up on our assessment of the newly launched PwC Products, TBR met virtually with two PwC partners to discuss the firm’s Saratoga offering, a long-held human resources management tool that has found renewed importance for enhancing diversity and inclusion efforts within PwC’s clients. Two partners from PwC’s Organization and Workforce Transformation practice — Pam Jeffords, Diversity and Inclusion, and Scott Pollak, People Analytics — along with Michelle Gorman, a marketing director, briefed TBR on trends within HR, especially around diversity and inclusion, and the specifics of the Saratoga product before pivoting to a discussion on the future of diversity efforts across PwC and its clients. This special report reflects the discussion, as well as previous TBR analysis of PwC and the management consulting space.   

2Q20 gives cloud vendors hope the worst COVID-19 impacts are over

/by

2Q20 was better than expected and sparks more long-term optimism

Results in 2Q20 reflect a full quarter’s worth of COVID-19 impact, and the sigh of relief from executives at leading cloud providers was almost audible. That is not to say negative impacts were not felt, though. Transactional activity was once a nice growth driver for cloud providers, laying additional revenue on top of the long-term contracts that typically provide the majority of cloud revenue. Those revenue streams have been hardest hit in the cloud space, as businesses across the board initially looked to trim expenses amid pandemic-driven disruption and financial challenges. Some long-term projects have been delayed, particularly among smaller customers that lack the same degree of financial stability their larger counterparts possess to weather challenging times. And lastly, there remains a considerable amount of uncertainty as to how the economy and customer demand will change in 2H20.

Despite these challenges, numerous positives occurred for cloud providers during 2Q20. Those positive elements not only yielded a better-than-feared performance in the quarter but also gave vendors a reason to believe there could be even more improvement in the back half of the year. One factor spurring this optimism is that, for the most part, COVID-19 has accelerated existing trends within the competitive landscape, rather than dramatically altered them. Customers are not scrapping planned cloud investments, although they may be delaying or paring them back temporarily. The largest vendors, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), saw deceleration in their revenue growth rates, but that has been occurring for years. SAP (NYSE: SAP) needed to rely on remote services to take new deployments live, but that too has been a trend for quite some time. Lastly, Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) saw a decline in cloud revenue growth and continues to trail competitors in pace of cloud growth, but that is the latest chapter in an ongoing story.

The silver lining that was consistently reported across 2Q20 earnings calls is that customer demand for cloud solutions long-term is expected to strengthen. Many vendors are looking to endear themselves to customers now by helping customers reduce expenses and by aiding in COVID-19 response. On the pricing front, vendors strategies range from pricing flexibility to discounts to assisting customers in finding efficiencies that reduce costs. To help customers respond to COVID-19, cloud vendors have developed targeted solutions and IP that support shifts in business operations, many of which are being offered free of charge or at a deep discount in the near term. These efforts may dampen some of the short-term growth for cloud solutions. However, cloud vendors have growing reason to believe they will reap the benefits of accelerated cloud investment once the economy and their customers’ businesses improve.

COVID-19 has not impacted all industries equally. Though cloud proved resilient during 1Q20, there was still trepidation about how customers in harder-hit industries like travel, entertainment and transportation would react through the remainder of 2020. Not only were results in 2Q20 stable for leading cloud vendors, there is optimism that demand for cloud technologies will remain robust through year’s end regardless of how other industries and the broader economy perform. 

IoT is helping improve supply chains, smart city infrastructure and healthcare, with growth in energy, public and manufacturing

/by

3Q20 vertical takeaways

Global organizations are battling supply chain issues due to COVID-19. IoT will continue to play a role in enhancing supply chains to help increase long-term resilience in the event of future pandemics or other disruptions. Automation in manufacturing and other verticals continues to be a major trend. Although some companies may have previously been reluctant to use robots due to concerns over the threat to people’s jobs, the pandemic has required businesses to find ways to maintain supply chains and productivity with less human interaction.

The healthcare vertical will continue to rapidly adopt IoT devices and solutions during the pandemic to help medical systems cope with the high volume of patients. Telehealth solutions remain in high demand, as do IoT solutions that are capable of monitoring changes in patient medical data as part of preventive medical treatments and otherwise delivering more efficient patient care.

Smart cities continue to look to IoT to increase public safety and assist with various public operations, including first responders and traffic equipment. However, smart cities increasingly need an overarching main IoT platform to better manage all the IoT sensor and camera deployments, which will help improve the real-time data analysis.

The Commercial IoT Market Landscape delivers overall market and top vertical insights, including identifying key use cases as well as trends in technology and buyer behavior. The landscape also captures the top public deals within those verticals and the lead vendors associated with them.