5G will drive CSPs to adopt a new network architecture, with NFV and SDN as critical aspects

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According to TBR’s 3Q19 NFV/SDN Telecom Market Landscape, 5G will push CSPs to accelerate and broaden their NFV/SDN initiatives. As such, TBR expects NFV/SDN-related spend growth will correlate with 5G deployments. Since CSPs will need to upgrade their networks from an end-to-end perspective to realize the full potential of 5G, this will naturally drive CSPs toward the virtualization and cloudification of their networks. This trend will impact most, if not all, of the major network domains from an NFV/SDN perspective over the next five years. TBR notes that 5G core is inherently virtualized, and that this will also naturally push CSPs deeper into the NFV/SDN space over the next five years as they transition to stand-alone 5G networks.

CSPs are more deeply collaborating with other operators, telecom vendors and other technology providers to reap the full benefits offered by NFV and SDN. In particular, the technology industry is becoming more willing to work with open-source groups such as Airship and the O-RAN Alliance to develop open infrastructure that is interoperable across multiple vendors. CSPs such as AT&T and Colt Technology Services are also collaborating to advance the development of intercarrier virtualized network solutions, which will particularly benefit multinational businesses requiring connectivity from multiple service providers within their global footprint.

TBR’s NFV/SDN 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. TBR’s NFV and SDN research encompasses the internal (i.e., network operations) and external (e.g., SD-WAN and other virtual network functions [VNFs] sold to end users such as enterprises) NFV- and SDN-related initiatives of communication service providers (CSPs).

For additional information about this research or to arrange a one-on-one analyst briefing, please contact Dan Demers at +1 603.929.1166 or [email protected].

Transform at the intersect: NIIT Technologies and the near future of digital and post-digital transformation

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NIIT Technologies gets closer to buyers to provide deeper support in an evolving digital and post-digital market  

Opening the event, NIIT Technologies CEO Sudhir Singh described his efforts to recraft the company as a “post-digital firm,” including making cognitive a part of every NIIT Technologies engagement. He further declared NIIT Technologies had transitioned from being a vendor that works for clients to being a services vendor that works with clients and technology partners. Across the three-day event, multiple NIIT Technologies leaders and professionals echoed this sentiment around the shift from “work for” to “work with.” Clients also repeated versions of this message, indicative of the traction it has gained within NIIT Technologies’ ecosystem. At a strategic level, Sudhir Singh said his company intended to “move the center of gravity to the markets,” putting NIIT Technologies’ people where the company’s clients are. In that effort, NIIT Technologies over the last 18 months has opened new centers in Atlanta and Augusta, Ga.; Las Vegas; Princeton, N.J.; and Boise, Idaho. At the same time, Sudhir Singh reiterated an NIIT Technologies characteristic which TBR highlighted last year: staying focused on doing a few things exceptionally well. Now and going into next year, this approach includes limiting industries served, remaining selective in partnerships and identifying a limited number of emerging technology areas where NIIT Technologies can excel. Sudhir Singh said (and multiple discussions with NIIT Technologies professionals and clients confirmed) that banking, insurance, travel and retail/media make up the vast majority of NIIT Technologies’ clients, and one of NIIT Technologies’ strengths is a “hyper-specialization” within these industries. Matrixed across those four industries, NIIT Technologies delivers services in four technology areas: cognitive, data analytics, automation/integration and cloud. Staying within its core “swim lane” is the right approach as, according to TBR’s Digital Transformation Insights research, buyers often expect vendors to bring forward pointed, purpose-driven solutions rather than “blue sky” transformational ideas during workshops discussions.

Turning to the overall IT services market, Sudhir Singh focused on three main trends. First, “technology spend is increasingly nondiscretionary,” resulting in less worry on NIIT Technologies’ part about clients’ year-to-year IT budgets and a greater emphasis on long-term relationships and fully leveraging emerging technologies. Second, at a third or more of NIIT Technologies’ clients, the COO also acts as the CIO, furthering a trend toward digital readiness and adoption across all leadership levels within an enterprise. (Note: TBR’s Digital Transformation Insights Report: Voice of the Customer from earlier this year confirms these two trends.) Lastly, Sudhir Singh said that with cognitive being the “X factor” in IT services going forward, fully connecting the front, middle and back office while continuing to get customer experience right will drive most enterprises’ digital and post-digital transformation in the near term.

NIIT Technologies gathered roughly 170 clients, technology partners, industry experts, analysts and NIIT Tech professionals, for two days of discussions and informal meetings in Miami. The setting fostered casual conversations among clients and other attendees, with clients surprisingly receptive to TBR’s questions. NIIT Technologies had only one main stage presentation, an opening address by the CEO, with clients and industry experts driving the rest of the panel discussions and main stage presentations. 

Hybrid, cloud-native and open source define Cloudera’s 3-pronged approach, post-merger

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Cloud-native and open source are top of mind in Cloudera’s post-merger product portfolio

One of the key highlights of the event was the launch of Cloudera Data Platform (CDP), an open-source, hybrid cloud platform that includes Cloudera Data Warehouse, Cloudera Machine Learning and Cloudera Data Hub services. CDP is currently available on Amazon Web Services (AWS; Nasdaq: AMZN); however Cloudera hopes to provide customers with a broader range of IaaS providers as the company announced plans to bring CDP to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in the coming months. While Cloudera is taking a calculated risk by pushing customers to competing services, TBR believes the benefits will outweigh the costs due to the vendor’s increased exposure to a large customer base. The launch of CDP highlights the company’s cloud-native play but also aligns with Cloudera’s intent to offer customers more deployment options. TBR notes that many vendors still perceive the data center as a legacy standard; however, Cloudera is attempting to view it as a gateway to creating a hybrid instance, exemplified by its forthcoming launch of an on-premises version of CDP, dubbed CDP Data Center. This offering will be especially appealing to “lift and shift” customers who have large data sets on-premises and wish to migrate to the cloud.

Relying on security and governance for differentiation

Leveraging open-source technology to deliver solutions to customers regardless of deployment method is rapidly gaining acceptance in the market and therefore has forced Cloudera to explore new avenues for differentiation. TBR believes the vendor is attempting to achieve this through its enterprise-grade security and data governance solution, Cloudera SDX (Shared Data Experience). As a single management plane, SDX separates the data layer from the compute layer to provide automated security and compliance across platforms to help reduce costs and mitigate risk. Cloudera works its SDX offering into the rest of its portfolio, including its recently launched CDP offering, to secure data lakes and centrally manage large amounts of data. VP of Product Management Fred Koopmans and VP of Engineering Ram Venkatesh highlighted the negative effects shadow IT vendors are having on customers’ data privacy as a lack of interconnectivity between platforms hinders fraud detection and data repurposing.

Additionally, shadow IT causes dispersed data, which will inevitably require more labor resources and thus only increase the burden on customers that are likely operating on a shortage of sufficient IT skills. Findings from TBR’s 1H19 Cloud Applications Customer Research indicate that shadow IT is being eliminated while increasingly consolidated purchasing is leading lines of business to report greater autonomy when it comes to making IT decisions. As a result of these trends, we believe Cloudera is taking the right approach by strengthening SDX integrations to provide customers with greater autonomy and centralized data, making app developers, data engineers, business intelligence (BI) analysts and data scientists far more likely to adopt CDP or similar platforms.

In September Cloudera hosted its annual Cloudera Analyst Day, where analysts gained insights during breakout sessions, product demonstrations, keynotes and detailed one-on-one talks with company executives, customers and partners. Key talks included product demonstrations from Cloudera’s recently appointed CEO Marty Cole, Chief Marketing Officer Mick Hollison and Chief Product Officer Arun Murthy, along with a presentation from IBM’s General Manager of Data and AI Rob Thomas. Founded in 2008, Cloudera operates in 85 countries and has approximately 3,000 employees and over 2,000 customers.

Arriving at the edge of cloud computing

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The cloud reimagined by edge computing and influenced by IoT

Cloud computing can be best described as a centralized data center remotely running thousands of physical servers. All devices that need to access this data or use applications associated with it first must connect to the cloud. Since everything is centralized, the cloud is generally easy to secure and control while still allowing for reliable remote access.

As IoT devices become more common and require more processing power, an increasing amount of data is being generated on what is referred to as the edge of distributed computing networks. By sending only the most important and least time-sensitive information to the cloud, as opposed to raw streams of it, edge computing eases the burden on the cloud and reduces costs. Put simply, edge computing delivers the decentralized complement to today’s core centralized and hyperscale cloud and legacy data centers.

The edge and the cloud do not compete with one another, and emphasizing edge or cloud computing is not an “either/or” choice, but rather, the adoption model can be viewed as a “1+1=3” opportunity. The relatively distributed nature of cloud and access to scalable compute resources is augmented by the real-time data gathering potential of the edge, reducing efficiency and latency concerns. These latency requirements vary by device and are highly situational depending on the need for real-time analytics and response versus transactional or business intelligence analytics.

More than a decade after the initial transition to the cloud forever expanded the limitations of physical and on-premises storage and compute options, we’ve reached quite literally, the edge of a new era of cloud. Organizations in industries such as telco and manufacturing, among others, will increasingly rely on edge computing to provide a suitable infrastructure and to complement the ongoing adoption of related technologies such as machine intelligence and IoT. The edge should not be viewed as a threat to cloud computing, but rather as the next phase in the evolution, driving increased adoption of the cloud into the next decade.

Timely clearance of mid-band spectrum is essential for U.S. to remain at forefront of global 5G race

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TBR perspective

Significant progress has been made on 5G ecosystem development since the 2018 5G Americas Analyst Forum held last October, as commercial mobile 5G services have been launched by the four U.S. Tier 1 operators, as well as in Uruguay by state-run operator ANTEL, over the past year. However, the infancy of the 5G era in the Americas has been somewhat underwhelming due to tepid smartphone adoption, the limited range of service on millimeter wave spectrum, and lack of coverage outside major metro areas.

The U.S. is at risk of falling behind other countries, especially South Korea and China, in the global 5G race. 5G adoption is growing at a more accelerated rate in South Korea, as the country gained 2 million 5G subscribers within the first four months of commercial services being offered and reached 3 million 5G subscribers as of September. South Korea’s rapid growth is being driven by its widespread 5G coverage, which is expected to reach 80% of the population by the end of 2019, as well as operators heavily subsidizing 5G devices to offset high smartphone prices. Conversely, China will make a strong entrance into the 5G market by launching commercial services in 50 major cities in the beginning of October, with plans to deploy 100,000 5G sites by the end of 2019.

The greatest barrier to the U.S. competing at the forefront of the global 5G race is its current lack of mid-band spectrum as global operators across all major regions have already been allocated a significant amount of mid-band licenses to support initial deployments. Offering 5G services across a mix of low-band, mid-band and high-band spectrum is critical to provide optimal coverage. Though deploying services on millimeter wave spectrum is necessary for U.S. operators to realize the fastest 5G speeds, the licenses are limited by the short range of coverage they provide.

Conversely, low-band spectrum will provide the coverage range necessary for operators including AT&T (NYSE: T) and T-Mobile (Nasdaq: TMUS) to deploy nationwide 5G services in 2020, but the spectrum will not yield significantly faster speeds compared to LTE. Mid-band spectrum provides the best of both worlds, speed and range of coverage, and the acquisition of mid-band licenses will play a pivotal role in the Americas’ position in the global 5G market as well as how individual operators compete for 5G market share in their respective countries.

Nearly 200 industry analysts and representatives from well-known telecom operators and vendors convened at the 2019 5G Americas Analyst Forum to discuss the state of the developing 5G market in North America and Latin America. The event featured an opening presentation from T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray regarding 5G leadership in the Americas, a fireside chat with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, and a choice of 26 roundtable discussions focused on key 5G topics including IoT, edge computing, 5G network infrastructure and technologies, regulatory considerations, and private cellular networks. 

Industry 4.0 will bolster IoT connection growth for global CSPs

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Industry 4.0 will contribute to a surge in IoT connection additions between 2022 and 2025

TBR expects Industry 4.0 to drive a renaissance in new, commercially viable use cases for the network between 2022 and 2025, which will spur revenue-generation opportunities for communication service providers (CSPs) that deliver the connectivity layer and value-added services to businesses. Industry 4.0 will bolster IoT connection growth for CSPs as they target large contract wins in areas including transportation, smart cities, smart factories and healthcare, which are expected to integrate a massive number of IoT devices to enhance operations.

Private 5G networks will play a pivotal role in advancing Industry 4.0 as these networks will provide the security and precision needed to support mission-critical workloads such as in manufacturing. The current, widespread availability of mid-band spectrum in EMEA and APAC markets will provide CSPs in those regions a time-to-market advantage in deploying private 5G networks as U.S. operators wait for the regulatory clearance of CBRS and C-Band spectrum over the next several years.

Enterprises will turn to private 5G networks due to their enhanced security and reduced latency

TBR believes private cellular networks will be a predominant initial 5G use case as enterprises will increasingly opt for 5G connectivity due to its ultra-low latency and enhanced security. Manufacturing plants will be an ideal environment for private 5G networks as the ultra-low latency and minimal jitter provided by 5G will enable connected devices such as robots and other manufacturing equipment to more effectively meet production quotas on the assembly line.

TBR’s Telecom IoT Market Landscape, takes a deep dive into the commercial cellular IoT-related initiatives of global stakeholders in the telecom market, including telecom operators, cable operators and vendors that supply the telecom market. The research includes key findings, market size, regional summaries, technology trends, use cases, verticals, operator and vendor positioning and strategies, acquisition and alliance strategies, and opportunities that are specific to the telecom industry.

Total benchmarked security revenue increased 13.7% year-to-year to $13.7B in 1H19

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Security growth is in early stages as organizations continue to digitize and increase the amount of information put into the cloud

The security market remains in a state of rapid growth as the rise in the amount of data and the increased likelihood of cyber hacks and threats create high demand for security solutions built to protect enterprises and their customers. With rapid growth comes increased competition and M&A activity as vendors consolidate either to improve offerings or to expand into new geographic markets. As companies continue to execute on digital transformation initiatives, cloud security offerings and other managed security portfolios are being sought to address potential threats.

To stay on top of the latest security threats, vendors are continually improving their portfolios through launches of new products and updates to existing solutions. TBR’s benchmark captures these moves, along with other ongoing industry trends and emerging opportunities. In the 1H19 publication, TBR also looks ahead to future security topics, including emerging areas such as quantum security and commercial IoT security trends.

Acquisitions continue to reshape the security landscape, with nontraditional vendors making a larger splash in 2019

The security industry continues to undergo major consolidation as vendors target select security companies to enhance portfolios or expand security offerings into new segments. This rapid M&A activity has been a trend over the past few years, though companies that do not already specialize in enterprise security have become more involved on the acquisition front in 2019. This trend is illustrated by major announcements such as Broadcom’s plans to purchase Symantec’s enterprise security assets or VMware’s plans to spend almost $5 billion to acquire Carbon Black and Pivotal. HP Inc. even announced plans to acquire endpoint security company Bromium in 2H19, as the company looks to improve the security of its device portfolio.

The exponential growth in enterprise data as companies execute digital transformation strategies leads to a rise in demand for data protection solutions

The rise of data in the workplace is causing data security solutions to become more valuable heading into 2020. The rate of new data generated across a multitude of verticals and industries will continue to grow rapidly as AI and machine learning technologies improve. The need to protect this enterprise data from security hacks will continue to increase, opening additional revenue streams for security companies to capitalize on. IBM, Dell Technologies and Symantec are among the vendors already well positioned with established data protection portfolios. TBR expects vendors to emphasize this segment over the next few years, including through targeted M&A and solution enhancements.

TBR’s Security Benchmark is a semiannual publication that analyzes the enterprise cybersecurity market and provides insights around security revenue breakdowns, go-to-market trends and strategies, resource management investments, industry acquisitions and additional M&A activity. The benchmark covers 25 industry security vendors including IBM, Symantec, Check Point, Cisco and Palo Alto Networks, across eight security segments and three global regions.

Telecom vendor partners and CSP customers have nothing to fear from an IBM-owned Red Hat

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TBR perspective

Red Hat emphasized that its culture and approach to product development will not change with its acquisition by IBM. Red Hat underscored that it operates independently and continues to stress an open-source approach to management, application development and the strategic direction of the company. The open-source community, to which Red Hat and its employees are major contributors, will remain the primary influence on Red Hat’s product road map.

This is evident in the company’s open hybrid cloud strategy, whereby Red Hat products support hybrid cloud infrastructure from a host of strategic partners, with Red Hat adhering to a principle of partner agnosticism: No one partner is favored over another. Tellingly, during one executive’s presentation, a slide showcased six large customers that Red Hat supported in their migrations to hybrid cloud infrastructures, and the executive could not name the cloud service provider partner. It did not matter, because Red Hat integrates with them all.

This approach will serve Red Hat well as it continues to penetrate the telecom market. Red Hat’s long-standing open-source principles are finally gaining traction among telecom operators and their suppliers as networks become software-defined and virtualized. Operators are increasingly demanding open and interoperable solutions from their vendor partners, and Red Hat is top of mind in procuring these solutions. Rakuten, which is building the first greenfield, cloud-native, virtualized network, is leveraging Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage. TBR expects incumbent operators to emulate Rakuten’s procurement and architecture once the concept is proved. 

Red Hat hosted several dozen industry analysts at its Open Innovation Lab and Executive Briefing Center in Boston. Red Hat executives, including its chief marketing and technology officers, delivered insights on Red Hat’s market position and opportunity as the company carefully manages its integration with IBM (NYSE: IBM), which acquired the open-source company in July. Several products were highlighted — namely OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform — and a Red Hat travel pricing data customer delved into how Red Hat is enabling its IT transformation, all of which drove home the idea that Red Hat encourages, supports and shepherds adoption of open hybrid cloud.

Oracle sheds bright red branding but maintains database narrative and competitor assault at OpenWorld

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A rebranded Oracle aims to improve interactions with customers and partners, but not AWS

At Oracle OpenWorld, the similarities between the renovations to the venue and to Oracle’s brand were undeniable. The Moscone Conference Center, which has been home to Oracle’s annual event for years, underwent remodeling to improve traffic flow and implement modernizations that Oracle used to showcase its own updated user flow and look. Underneath these branding and operational changes, much of the core building blocks remained the same, with some expansions and evolutions.

A new Oracle: Rebranding and partnerships

The most obvious updates came in the form of the company’s new Redwood brand identity, which consists of a more diverse color palette, including an updated shade of Oracle Red, as well as customized Oracle font, textures, illustrations and other visual elements. The intent of the design element changes was to portray a more modern, diverse and ultimately repositioned Oracle experience. The key phrase Oracle employees used to summarize this shift was “more human,” with clear acknowledgement of not only the long-standing negative perception around the Oracle customer experience but also the many operational changes being made behind the visual rebrand to support a change in engagement. Core to this shift are the new Oracle mission statement and an even greater focus on customer successes stories to frame Oracle’s new approach. These stories were most evident in the solution keynotes and marketing investments, such as advertisement takeovers on The Wall Street Journal and Forbes websites, among other mediums.

Arguably part of this rebrand, and definitely part of the change in how Oracle is engaging across the customer and partner landscapes, was the emphasis with which Oracle announced deeper engagements with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), VMware (NYSE: VMW) and the ISV ecosystem as a whole.

  1. Oracle highlighted its June partnership with Microsoft to enable multicloud deployments across both vendors’ cloud services through data-center-specific direct connections. This service was originally made available in Virginia, and availability in London was announced at the conference. The pair intends to further extend these capabilities to U.S. government regions in the Western U.S. as well as in Asia and other European regions in the future. As Oracle workloads had been certified to run on Microsoft Azure in 2014, this expansion enables customers to leverage Azure services while utilizing Oracle’s Autonomous Database. The companies also announced integrations between Microsoft Teams and the new Oracle Digital Assistant, which was developed to support user interaction with business systems that use different language than what is typical for consumer assistants.
  • Additionally, Oracle announced it has partnered with VMware to bring VMware Cloud Foundation to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), similar to VMware’s partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS; Nasdaq: AMZN) and Microsoft Azure, enabling customers to run VMware-based workloads on its bare metal instances. Oracle CTO and Chief Executive Larry Ellison argued the company’s alliance with VMware will enable a truer “lift and shift” of VMware-based workloads from on-premises to OCI with “virtually no change” when the solution becomes available in 4Q19 due to its configuration of bare metal services. The pair also announced unified support for workloads running VMware and Oracle technology together.
  • To better support the ISV ecosystem, Oracle announced the immediate availability of unified billing on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. This addition of a “paid listing” classification goes beyond free listings and Bring Your Own License (BYOL) listings, where the OCI resources were paid separately from free or licensed software, enabling customers to pay for third-party solutions in per-hour increments and using Oracle universal credits. Beyond simplifying customer solutions purchasing, OCI deployment and complete workload billing, enabling the use of Oracle’s universal credits to pay for third-party software positions Oracle’s sales efforts and quotas to support the growing ISV ecosystem.

Additionally, Oracle and Deloitte announced a new alliance at the conference by launching ELEVATE. The alliance will work to execute the goals of Oracle’s consulting business to automate cloud migrations to Oracle Autonomous Databases and OCI through Oracle Soar, Destination PaaS and IaaS. By leveraging Deloitte’s professional services organization and its cloud discovery and automation platform, Oracle will expedite and smooth migrations to protect, and presumably expand, its existing customer base as customers migrate more critical enterprise workloads to cloud environments.

Family and friends: PwC makes Analyst Day in India all about the clients and their stories

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8 clients with 8 stories and plenty of common themes

Setting the tone for the day, India Advisory Leader, Deepankar Sanwalka explained that the event would be about discussion and about clients and the work PwC is doing with them, with four successive breakout sessions in the morning and four more in the afternoon. The clients — almost all India-based companies or government agencies — spanned the industry spectrum from pharmaceutical to software to manufacturing to municipal authorities. In addition to the common themes that emerged across the day, described below, TBR noted that every client had prepared for the standard analyst question, “Why did you choose PwC?” Notably, half of the clients used a competitive process to select PwC as a vendor, a high percentage in TBR’s experience. Clients said they worked with PwC because the firm:

  • Shared the client’s cultural value for trust and commitment to strict adherence to compliance, even across global operations
  • Understood the client’s customer. Beyond understanding clients’ business, operations and industry, along with the specifics of the India market, one client said PwC demonstrated a deep understanding of the client’s specific target audience and the personas shopping for this client’s specific product. As part of the engagement, and an element the client said was critical to its success, PwC colocated with the client a core team made up of more than 60% strategy, design and marketing consultants, with the remaining professionals handling technology.
  • Possessed “skills, scale and speed.” While other clients cited the first two as PwC strengths, this client explained that “speed” referred to PwC’s ability to keep pace with the client’s accustomed pace of innovation, experimentation, adoption and change.
  • Understood the client’s business with such depth and clarity that PwC could recommend what SAP customizations the client did not need. In TBR’s experience, every consultancy professes to know its clients well. In this case, the client explicitly understood that the long-term benefits from a massive SAP upgrade depended on minimal customizations in order to facilitate easier maintenance and upgrades. Surprisingly, the client went further in saying PwC was able to force the issue around standardizations by making compelling arguments that the client’s needs did not justify the diminished long-term value of customizations — compelling because PwC so fully understood the client’s business.

Also notable was the very presence of eight clients telling their stories — impressive for a one-day analyst event. TBR observed many of the clients attended breakout sessions with other clients, likely providing the firm with further opportunities to increase its footprint. Finally, the clients all told compelling stories, perhaps because the event was adamantly free of PowerPoint presentations (zero slides in 8 hours). Without slides as a crutch, clients (and PwC professionals and analysts) more easily adapted to the friends-and-family feel of the entire event.

With an atmosphere designed for relaxing and sharing stories, PwC’s Analyst Day in India captured the firm’s current position as a global consultancy with intense local client relationships, a well-defined set of offerings across the entire digital transformation landscape, and a solid, sustained, evolutionary framework in BXT (Business-eXperience-Technology). PwC gathered roughly 30 analysts, from Europe, Asia, India, and one from the U.S., for a dinner and then a day of client stories, PwC briefings and informal discussions in the firm’s Gurgaon Experience Center (EC), which was configured for the event to resemble a house, complete with a living room, dining room, garden, play room and kitchen (plus a library, but how many houses today have libraries?). The playful design of this ‘house’ idea was more than just design alone, with a real emphasis on PwC inviting clients and analysts in for the day to discuss, exchange and spend time together, much as one would do at home with friends and family. Over the course of the day, TBR met with PwC clients from across India and with the firm’s global leaders for Clients and Markets and Technology Consulting, as well as PwC partners and professionals responsible for client accounts in India, Japan and the Middle East.