“Business first” is the resounding message from Oracle regarding IoT. The company leaps over the technical morass and ecosystem complexities, which often bog down any digital transformation discussion, and instead starts with the business discussion: What is your pain point? Oracle has deep relationships with a wide customer base due to its legacy solutions, including ERP and supply chain management. Oracle leverages this vendor standing to start discussions with VPs and line-of-business (LOB) managers on how Oracle can improve the client’s business outcomes. Once a set of KPIs are agreed on, Oracle and its partners work backward with operational technology (OT) and IT teams to reach the business outcome.

TBR believes Oracle has made great strides with its business outcomes focus. The first time we talked to company executives, in September 2017, they seemed to be following the traditional route of going through IT, as IT vendors tend to do. However, the company faced similar roadblocks to its peers. Tribalism inside the organization — OT versus IT versus C-Suite — made collaboration inside a customer organization difficult. Oracle found itself selling to customer IT, with customer IT having to sell to management, and Oracle admits this approach was not working. And the issue was not just with the audience; what Oracle was selling — IoT capabilities and solutions — was also an issue. Now, the company is upselling features attached to existing products.

Oracle retooled its IoT go-to-market strategy to focus heavily on selling business outcomes and making its platform accessible to the business user. Below, we outline a few important steps Oracle has taken.

Portfolio simplification

Figuring out IoT is difficult for customers. It is not always clear which direction to go in, which use case to chase or how technologies will benefit the business. Ultimately, the number of paths to follow can lead to choice paralysis. Oracle addressed this with a narrower (but not less impactful) portfolio with five primary applications, or packaged solutions, aimed at specific business goals:

• Asset monitoring: Focuses on asset health, utilization, availability and predictive maintenance
• Production monitoring: Manufacturing equipment and production line monitoring and prognostics
• Fleet monitoring: Monitors shipments, fleet vehicles, driver behavior and costs
• Connected worker: Focuses on worker safety by monitoring workers and their environments
• Service monitoring for connected assets: Allows customers to engage in value-added services to their end customers through incorporating asset monitoring and manipulation capabilities into products

EY lays out its digital blueprint as ‘now, next and beyond’ with blockchain use cases easily fitting into the construct

This fundamental playbook repeated in many of the use cases discussed in breakout sessions at EY Global Blockchain Summit:

• Early efforts focus on cross-collaborative business entities establishing business rules.
• The rules become the digital contracts.
• The first use case is either low-dollar-value or intracompany; the sponsoring enterprise working with EY becomes “customer zero.”
• Once fully operationalized, EY and the client partner look for ways to enroll additional participants to:
  • Broaden the use case into an industry utility
  • Extend the underpinning business logic into adjacent industries for the repeatable capability to build out industry utilities

Gaming: The editors for the EY-Microsoft playbook

Much of the content shared at the 2018 event revolved around EY’s ongoing collaboration with Microsoft to deliver a blockchain royalty payment system to track developer community activities in the gaming space. This year, EY and Microsoft touted the collaboration on many different levels that easily fit into the “now, next and beyond” construct.

EY Tesseract: A clear view not to be confused with a short distance

The Tesseract-like aspirational objective is autonomous vehicles; period. To achieve the objective requires prototyping the IoT sensoring and business rules ahead of when specific technologies and revised public policy regulations have been hardened. Interim steps revolve around building out the ecosystem participants required to allow autonomous vehicles to be serviced absent human accompaniment as the vehicles course through the physical world based on their digital instructions.

The third annual EY Global Blockchain Summit gave an indication of the rapid acceleration in adoption that had EY describing this as “Year 0.” With hockey stick charts for the number of proof of concepts (POCs) and live applications, blockchain appears poised to deliver on its anticipated promises to transform business interactions and greatly reduce operating expenses while creating new business services networks. The event was held at 32 Old Slip in the heart of New York’s financial district with several hundred attendees and 28 breakout sessions organized in four tracks consisting of blockchain business applications (where TBR spent most of its time); blockchain assurance, tax & compliance implications; financial services and the token economy (where TBR attended a session on decentralized finance); and blockchain technology.

TBR perspective

Norman Lonergan, EY global vice chair, Advisory, opened the EY 2019 Global Analyst Summit with an outline for a new strategy called Now. Next. Beyond. Having executed extremely well against its earlier strategy, EY needed to raise its own bar. In a way, it is adhering to a strategy that it likewise seeks to use to assist its key clients in adopting and leveraging technology to enter the digital economy as a stronger and more vibrant operating business.

Achieving these objectives does not happen overnight, nor will it occur without false starts and shelved proof of concept trials. From TBR’s perspective, Now. Next. Beyond. broadly translates into the following:

• Now: The point in time where the heavy advisory lifting takes place to establish the foundational business rules required for further automation on the way to becoming a truly digital business.
• Next: Obtainment of the low-hanging fruit in quick operational enhancements to cut costs (and prove value) and to enhance the overall customer experience. This phase likewise lays the foundation with anchor ecosystem participants to harden the automated or smart contract pieces necessary for the network effect at scale.
• Beyond: The aspirational objective that in some ways could be entirely different business models made possible through atypical partnerships with business entrants from radically different business domains.
  
  

The EY construct is not necessarily groundbreaking or unique, but it is the strategic framework and corporate language the firm intends to deploy as it moves forward in the industry evangelizing its best practices and promoting the tight working relationships it has built over the past decade with enterprise technology stalwarts such as Microsoft and SAP.

Appropriately, EY hosted its annual Global Analyst Summit at a working cruise terminal at the water’s edge of Boston’s Seaport District, in a facility that served as an EY innovation hub before turning back into the assembly area for an oceangoing cruise ship. The venture-forth vibe in the physical facility amplified the sentiments expressed by EY’s leaders, particularly around making the firm more global, including global engineering across service lines and developing IP in a more industrialized way. As one EY professional explained, “When we solve a problem through applying tech, and thus creating an asset or tool, we want to productize and commercialize and globalize.” Like a ship making course corrections while still navigating toward a desired destination, EY has adjusted its business model, folded asset-based consulting and managed services into traditional consulting, and committed to emerging technology.

Economic advantage is a key, repeatable milestone for quantum computing

TBR defines “economic advantage” as the point at which there is a significant benefit, either in time to insight or the ability to obtain an insight, that makes it cost-effective to pursue a given problem with the help of quantum computing. This does not mean that the benefit needs to be achieved exclusively with a quantum computer. In fact, TBR believes that initial economic advantage will be achieved by disaggregating a complex problem from classical computing to quantum computing and then back to a classical computer to maximize the cost efficiencies of gaining a given insight. Just as quantum computing will hit the market algorithm by algorithm, so will economic advantage.

It is not necessary for quantum computing to reign supreme across the IT space in order for value to be abstracted from the technology. It is also not necessary for quantum computing to take the place of a classical computer in order to provide value. This is a key factor that many vendors in the market are overlooking. Just as cloud is not all or nothing, neither is quantum computing. Cloud, as it currently exists, works in partnership with on-premises environments. In fact, customers prefer the consumption of cloud in this hybrid manner. This is a similar consumption-type model we foresee quantum computing taking, in which classical computing and quantum computing work together to fully harness the power of quantum computing.

As the prevalence of quantum computing continues to increase in the IT realm, there are many different views on the technology. Some believe the technology is so far from being relevant that it is not worth worrying about. Others believe the technology is already here, while still others believe the technology is on our doorstep and the wealth of knowledge it will release for society is almost upon us. Here is one thing we all can agree on: Quantum computing has not achieved quantum supremacy. However, TBR believes there is a far more important metric to concern ourselves with as a society that is much closer than we think: economic advantage.

TBR perspective

With risk permeating every business conversation and PwC accelerating investments in digital-related offerings, including PwC Connected Solutions, which sits within its Risk and Regulatory Platform business, the firm has prepared for the next wave of opportunities. Trading on trust remains at the core, especially as the politics of data continue to disrupt PwC and its clients. Becoming customer zero keeps PwC consistent with peers, while pulling in risk differentiates, particularly against non-Big Four competitors. But the firm creates a good use case for embracing digital when it comes to managing risk. PwC’s broad spectrum of capabilities, including digital risk solutions, internal audit support, cyber and privacy advisory, due diligence, and third-party certification, add necessary dimension to its risk practice. They also help PwC protect its spot in the market as the shift to digital operations elevates the strategic importance of risk and compliance functions.

“By rethinking risk, you create confidence at scale”

Across client panels, which featured risk and IT professionals from various industries and countries, similar themes emerged, including the evolution of understanding the value of smart risk-taking (Being a smarter risk taker through digital transformation, a recent PwC paper). Additionally, panelists, attendees, and PwC risk and consulting specialists spoke of the profound shift from managing and containing risk to leveraging risk processes and profiles to build transparency and confidence in an organization and enhancing trust with customers and partners. The similarities among the professionals’ comments created layers of emphasis, particularly around trust and scale.

One client noted, “Companies that know and manage risk smartly, build trust with their customers [and] move faster themselves.” The client explained that risk management enables his company to build trust with customers faster and react to security issues more quickly than competitors. When a futurist spoke about emerging technologies and their impact on future organizations, he peppered his remarks with comments around the ethics of powerful technologies. The underlying questions: “Is the system trustworthy?” and “Can we trust the people [working those systems?]”

Scale risk management across an organization through developing talent

The PwC client who reintroduced PwC’s tagline, “by rethinking risk, you create confidence at scale” succinctly pulled together two recurring thoughts across this year’s Risk Summit: talent and digital transformation. Multiple clients and PwC professionals spoke of the importance of talent. One client stated, “The first priority is to develop talent,” even as they recognized that decreasing budgets for risk management and increasing competition for skilled IT talent resulted in pressure to expand an appreciation for risk more widely across an organization — or essentially to scale risk management practices through education and analytics-based decision making. Not surprisingly, all of these issues and opportunities fall well within the scope of PwC’s expertise.

For the second year in a row, TBR attended PwC’s annual Risk Summit, a client-centric event geared toward sharing lessons learned among client risk professionals and presenting PwC’s thinking on risk and successes to date to the analyst community. This year the summit featured multiple client panels and created a clear picture of issues most prominent in the Risk space.