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.

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.

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.

Market overview

Infrastructure services hosted as single-tenancy offerings remain desirable to customers that are looking to bridge the gap between utilizing public clouds and building their own private clouds on premises. The global COVID-19 outbreak weighed heavily on many IT vendors’ business models during the quarter; however, the hosted private cloud space was less susceptible to the economic impacts of the pandemic given the annuity-based revenue streams gained through cloud sales. Long term, TBR expects the hosted private cloud market to record pockets of growth as we expect COVID-19 to prompt greater cloud usage, and many customers will turn to private cloud solutions as a preliminary step in the digital transformation process. Further, benchmarked vendors will benefit from enterprises’ increasingly hybrid scenarios, which are generally purchased on a workload-by-workload basis.

The Hosted Private Cloud Benchmark analyzes different enterprise use cases and vendor strategies. For example, the benchmark looks at how workloads such as ERP will drive demand for hosted private cloud SaaS due to the mission-critical nature of those services and their associated data.