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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Deloitte’s Legal Business Services: A bridge for value creation

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TBR perspective

For decades, the legal services market has been perceived as a lawyers-only type of club with a high barrier to entry, with admission requiring many years of school, tremendous amounts of debt and passing of a bar exam. While lawyers remain at the forefront of providing legal advice, law services, like most industries, have not been spared by the advent of disruptive technologies, which have enabled a new set of contenders to enter the space of alternative legal services. Technology-enabled legal services providers such as LegalZoom and Divorceify have begun to carve a niche in the business-to-customer space over the past several years; the Big Four firms are now trying to open the door even wider in the business-to-business world, with Deloitte, in particular, looking at the big picture and trying to establish a beachhead in what could be become the next frontier for technology-enabled managed services.

Deloitte’s launch of its Legal Business Services in the U.S. in July comes as the firm has been making unorthodox investments steadily for the past several years, with technology, in TBR’s view, at the center of diversifying its portfolio offerings and increasing client stickiness. Deloitte’s core consulting value proposition, which relies on the firm’s trust across the C-Suite buyer, will again be tested as enterprise buyers seek optimization of the last piece of the back office, the legal department. Utilizing management consulting and advisory services at the front end, enabled by the company’s Chief Legal Office program, Deloitte’s specialized expertise targets chief compliance, chief legal officers, and heads of legal operations who are grappling with everyday challenges including cost savings and customer experience.

As Deloitte evolves its brand to become a solutions partner, the firm’s investments in Legal Business Services not only add another tool in the consultant’s tool box but also could help the firm build a backup bridge to maintain access and relationships with clients seeking compliance advice. These steps taken now to expand business could be strategically critical to the overall firm in the future.      

In a recent discussion with Deloitte Discovery practice and Legal Business Services practice Lead Bryan Foster and Deloitte Tax LLP’s Legal Business Services Principal Mark Ross, Technology Business Research Inc. (TBR) gained deeper insights into the firm’s recently launched Legal Business Services practice in the U.S., which TBR believes could help Deloitte increase client stickiness and capture technology-enabled managed services opportunities.

Atos gains AI consulting expertise through the Miner & Kasch acquisition to enable digital transformations

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Miner & Kasch’s deep AI expertise in North America helps Atos extend global reach and scale

According to Atos SVP of Big Data & Security Jerome Sandrini, Miner & Kasch’s appeal included raw talent — “pure data scientists, real PhDs, not citizen data scientists” — and reusable components, particularly assets that will work with Atos’ Edge servers. Listening to Miner & Kasch co-founder Niels Kasch walk through several use cases, TBR understood both of Sandrini’s points, as the technical expertise was matched with examples of applying distinct approaches and solutions across multiple industries. Sandrini also noted Atos’ commitment to ensuring Miner & Kasch is integrated fully into the larger Atos but not diluted, retaining its agility and culture. Miner & Kasch resources were merged with resources gained from the zData acquisition in 2017. The Miner & Kasch acquisition accelerates Atos’ Data Science as a Service offering and improves the company’s ability to deploy edge and next-generation data science platforms for industry solutions.

Since the beginning of 2019, Atos has been following a bolt-on acquisitions approach to gain capabilities and intellectual property and support its expansion in areas with growth potential. In 2019 Atos made two purchases with 100 employees each, IDnomic in identity and access management and X-perion Consulting in energy and utilities consulting. In 2020 Atos announced six acquisitions, three in the U.S. and three in France, ranging from 50 to 800 employees, targeting new areas of expansion for Atos and offering small-scale capabilities with IP: Maven Wave (U.S.) in Google Cloud; Miner & Kasch (U.S.) in AI and data science; Paladion (U.S.) in AI-driven cybersecurity and risk analytics; AliA Consulting (France) for SAP S/4 HANA; EcoAct (France) in decarbonization; and digital.security (France) in cybersecurity services.

In April Atos announced the acquisition of Maryland-based data analytics consulting boutique Miner & Kasch, folding it into Atos’ zData business group to create a team of more than 100 AI consultants. TBR spoke with Miner & Kasch co-founders Donald Miner and Niels Kasch, zData CEO Dan Feldhusen, and Atos SVP of Big Data & Security Jerome Sandrini about Atos’ strategy behind the acquisition and expectations for the zData business group heading into 2021.

Global trade and maritime ports: How EY tackles both with digital transformation and data

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Bringing expertise, technology and experience to the business of running a port  

TBR has covered EY extensively, reporting on the firm’s evolution in both technology and global operations, most recently in a special report that noted, “EY has rapidly evolved its technology consulting practice and its overall value to clients around emerging technologies and is now addressing scale, standardization of quality across the globe, and sustained investments in innovation and the ecosystem through its common global strategy and practice architecture.” The wide-ranging discussion with Jonathan Beard and his colleagues reinforced that assessment, particularly in the way EY emphasized its opportunity to apply its industry markets expertise and technology capabilities to an ecosystem in need of rapid digital transformation.

The firm, according to James Wainwright, has been building on its NextWave Global Trade Initiative with its own assets and intellectual property, harnessed to long-developed understandings of the maritime industry, and pulling together its global technology consulting expertise. While the Global Trade Initiative is still a work in progress, EY has clearly made a commitment to play to its own strengths, move rapidly in an evolving market, and become a critical, trusted link within the broader ecosystem. Heading into the latter half of what has been a horrible year for everyone, EY’s specific challenges will reflect the headwinds across the maritime port and supply chain markets overall: coping with the pandemic, growing in a turbulent global macroeconomic climate, and investing in the right technology to solve the knottiest business problems.

To set the stage, Port Optimization solution Lead Wouter van Groenestijn noted that there exist “many suboptimalities in ports” and the operators, port authorities and others in the ecosystem collect vast amounts of data but very rarely tap into it. As an example, EY cited workforce planning — ensuring the right people are on location exactly when needed, based on a ship’s expected arrival — can be enhanced through data management, AI and analytics, provided the data is collected and used properly. With skills and experience combining vast and constantly evolving data sets, EY can play a role in addressing specific run-the-port problems, which span multiple ecosystem players, such as operators, shippers, regulators and freight-forwarding companies, and have a direct impact on operations and profitability.

In addition to providing expertise around data, EY serves as a useful ecosystem hub as it is a trusted partner to all the stakeholders within a port. TBR has heard multiple variations on this idea that maritime ports contain vast complexities with overlapping interests, jurisdictions and business models, reinforcing the need for a neutral party to handle shared concerns such as data. Optimizing that data then comes from, in EY’s estimation, knowing what to look for, which only comes through experience working with maritime port clients and their ecosystem clients and partners.

In mid-July TBR continued looking at the digital transformation parallels between maritime ports and smart cities by speaking with a team from EY’s Global Trade Initiative about the firm’s efforts with port authorities and broader port ecosystems. Jonathan Beard, partner, Strategy and Transactions, Hong Kong; James Wainwright, senior manager, Financial Services Advisory, London; Wouter van Groenestijn, associate partner, Strategy and Transactions, Singapore; and Lynn Dike, associate director, Brand, Marketing and Communications, London, described EY’s initiatives and solutions in the context of a wildly uncertain market. The following reflects that discussion and builds on TBR’s previous reporting on this space.

CSPs are advancing network transformation initiatives to realize cost savings and capitalize on digital era use cases

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Network transformation positions CSPs to support advanced use cases

As communication service providers (CSPs) are transforming into digital service providers they are transitioning their networks to a virtualized, container- and microservices-based, cloud-native architecture. This cloud-centric network architecture will enable CSPs to generate value from new technologies, such as 5G and edge computing, and adopt next-generation network operations based on data as well as AI and machine learning for continuous, closed-loop automation.

This new architecture will also enable CSPs to take advantage of network slicing and low latency to more effectively support use cases in areas such as autonomous transportation, video analytics, robotic process automation, AR/VR solutions, advanced healthcare applications and cloud-based gaming.

The NFV/SDN Telecom Market Landscape includes key findings, market size, customer and geographic adoption, operator and vendor positioning and strategies, and acquisition and alliance strategies and opportunities.

Unprecedented levels of government support will help CSPs deploy 5G more quickly and broadly than originally anticipated

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Communication service provider (CSP) spend on 5G infrastructure will scale faster and peak higher than originally anticipated due to the vast amount of support by governments in a range of countries, including but not limited to China, the U.S., the U.K., Japan, South Korea and Singapore. As a result, typical historical deployment curves for cellular technologies will not apply to the 5G market, which is now expected to be widely deployed globally by the middle of this decade instead of in the later years of the decade.

The pull forward and broadening of infrastructure investment are primarily due to attempts by leading countries to support their economies amid the COVID-19 crisis as well as to keep pace with China’s aggressive and broad investment initiative for competitive reasons. Over the past 12 months, 5G has become a highly political issue, and the unprecedented government involvement and funding are being justified on national security, economic competitiveness and public health grounds.

TBR’s 5G Telecom Market Landscape includes key findings, market size, customer adoption, operator positioning and strategies, geographic adoption, vendor positioning and strategies, and acquisition and alliance strategies and opportunities.