Delivering Digital Transformation & GenAI Solutions via Partners, Alliances & Ecosystems: Predictions for 2025 and Beyond

TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
Delivering Digital Transformation & GenAI Solutions via Partners, Alliances & Ecosystems: Predictions for 2025 and Beyond
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In this episode of TBR Talks, TBR Principal Analyst Bozhidar Hristov and TBR Analyst Alex Demeule join Patrick for a discussion on partnership predictions for 2025. Boz and Alex share insights into the partnerships between cloud vendors and software vendors as well as with their systems integrator partners, including the increase in collaboration to deliver modernization, cloud migration and GenAI solutions to the world’s leading enterprises. Alliance highlights in this episode include Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and Accenture.

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Edited by Haley Demers

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Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

Delivering Digital Transformation & GenAI Solutions via Partners, Alliances & Ecosystems: Predictions for 2025 and Beyond

TBR Talks Host Patrick Heffernan: Welcome to TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms, where we talk business model disruption in the broad technology ecosystem, from management consultancies to systems integrators, hyperscalers to independent software vendors, telecom operators to network and infrastructure vendors and chip manufacturers to value added resellers. We’ll be answering some of the key intelligence questions we’ve heard from executives and business unit leaders among the leading professional IT services and telecom vendors.

I’m Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst, and today we’ll be talking about 2025 predictions for Digital Transformation and Ecosystems with Boz Hristov, Principal Analyst for TBR Digital Transformation practice, and Alex Demeule, Analyst for TBR Cloud and Software practice.

Boz and Alex, welcome back to the podcast, season three. Good to have you guys back. 

Alex Demeule, TBR Analyst: Season three. Wow. 

Bozhidar Hristov, TBR Principal Analyst: Yeah. Time flies when you have fun.

What drives ecosystem alliances

Patrick: Season three. Wow. Yeah I know I don’t know how many episodes we’ve done so far. By the time this drops, it’ll probably be over 40 at least. I mean, it’s been really kind of amazing. And, what we wanted to talk about today. We were going to look at our predictions, from the end of last year, heading into this year around digital transformation, around ecosystems, around sort of the bigger picture because you guys are coming to this space, Boz you’re our lead on digital transformation. You’re also the lead on a number of IT services companies and consultancies. And, Alex, you’re in the cloud and software space looking at a number of those cloud and software players. And together you collaborate very closely on the ecosystems report. So, that’s actually where I want to start with what’s happening in the ecosystems.

So, when you think about what’s new in the ecosystem now and how important ecosystem intelligence is, that is not just competitive intelligence, not just market intelligence, but ecosystem intelligence. One of the questions that we hear again and again is that companies, whether it’s a hyperscaler or whether it’s a Big Four consultancy, don’t know what the others want from them. They’re unsure what their ecosystem partners want, and they’re unsure that they’re communicating to their ecosystem partners what it is that’s going to actually drive their business. So, Alex, from your perspective, what is it that the cloud players, the software players, when they look across the ecosystem, what drives their ecosystem alliances, what are they trying to get out of their ecosystem partners?

Alex: Yeah, absolutely, and before I kind of even approach that question, you know, just a note on the importance of ecosystem intelligence. When we look across the cloud applications vendors, it’s pretty unanimous that everybody is looking at the ecosystem as a major part of their go to market strategy. And obviously, you know, this has been something that’s been going on for a long time. But the prioritization and, you know, how heavily they’re leaning on their ecosystem, this is growing. This is something that is becoming more important and will be more important in the future and that just raises the value of strong ecosystem intelligence as you put more weight behind the ecosystem as a core part of your sales engine. So, it really can’t be understated. 

When I look at, to get back to the real question, what do the cloud application vendors want? You know, when we talk about the different vendors, everyone’s going to have sort of their unique take, you know, but obviously the phrase that we can get away from, GenAI, and kind of where that aligns with priorities. When Microsoft’s partner chief got on stage at Ignite, the first priority she mentioned was Copilot adoption. So, you know, bringing this technology to the enterprise and facilitating their adoption, it’s the number one priority for the cloud applications vendors and the thing that really matters for these cloud apps, and there’s actually- there’s two things that I want to touch on that really matters in sort of facilitating this GenAI go to market for the cloud apps. The first that I was going to mention is change management, and this is something I’ve talked about a few times recently and just how important it is. Adopting this new technology at the user level is proving to be very difficult. We had a customer conversation just a month ago where they talked about Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption being like rolling out a new ERP platform, and that really surprised me.

Patrick: Seriously?

Alex: Yeah, that really surprised me. You know, that seems a bit aggressive. And I’m not necessarily convinced that it’s an apples-to-apples comparison, but just the fact that an IT leader would go out and say that, just kind of tells you that it’s difficult. It’s probably hyperbole, but this is a challenge. And, you know, Microsoft 365 Copilot, that should be one of the easier tools to get your employees using because the level of complexity just goes up from here. You know, Salesforce is on my mind today. And when I look at their Agentforce, platform, which is where they’re putting a lot of their attention, the complication and the complexity of building these agents around business use cases is really hard. And it’s something that when you go through and do the channel check that comes up time after time, you know, like they talk about obviously, in the relation to RPA and flow with Salesforce and much greater magnitude of difficulty with building an agent versus building a flow and a traditional RPA. So there’s a lot of handholding that I think has to go on between the services partners and the enterprise and a lot of training, kind of, between the services partner and the end user to sort of create this environment where the users are able to adopt this technology and get the most out of it. You know, like those same channel checks, they always talk about Agentforce being a highly capable platform and a platform that has a lot of future potential. But it’s just- it’s a difficult thing to be able to go in and start building on top of. And so being the change management enabler is something that really matters to Salesforce.

And I’ve been talking a lot already, but the last thing I will mention just quickly is that they want pre-built agents, you know, part of the agent building, like and this comes from the Voice of the Partner, and we look at what do cloud vendors want. They want services partners in their partner ecosystem building IP on top of the platforms that they’re coming to market with. And so, there’s a lot of domain expertise that the services partners have. And they want that domain expertise to come through in pre-built agents a little bit easier to adopt instead of building one from scratch. So, it’s this building on top of and also change management at the customer level and helping them, you know, understand what needs to happen. It’s the skill sets that need to be in place for them to get the most out of this technology. 

Change management

Patrick: Yeah. That’s fantastic. And I can see just looking at Boz like the wheels, like spinning faster and faster the more times you say change management. I want to ask you, I want to focus in on three things. You’ve touched on two of them, and I want to make it really explicit. So, we heard recently, an executive at one of the largest software companies in the world say that the three things they look for from their services partners and their consultancy partners are know the portfolio, co-innovate with us, innovate co-innovate with us, and industry expertise. So, you mentioned domain expertise at the end. And when you talked about build agents with us, well that’s co innovation. But I’m curious the portfolio- because if adopting Copilot is, I mean I thought that was going to be as easy as you know sort of using ChatGPT, if it’s harder than that, what does that say about how little the IT services companies and the consultancies know about Microsoft’s roadmap for where Copilot is heading? Is that a missing piece right there that they don’t know the portfolio well enough?

Alex: Possibly. I think that it’s, you know, maybe you’re talking about it, and I agree. You’re both surprised to hear that Microsoft 365 Copilot was a challenge to adopt. So, maybe it’s just necessarily underestimating the role of change management within GenAI, you know, and I feel like, you know, coming into it I think there was a pretty good understanding that this was something that change management was going to be important for. But maybe it’s just that it’s such an imperative and maybe it was a little bit understated.

Patrick: Yeah. Boz, have we ever heard of change management being understated? That’s never happened, right?

Boz: I was just thinking about it, I mean, you said it better than I would. I would say this is sabotaging. 

Patrick: Yeah.

Boz: On the- potentially, you know, I mean, if you think about the people, the employees that are being impacted by any AI, GenAI kind of a tool, why would they rush to adopt a tool that might replace them. You know, obviously there’s a bigger discussion about that whole topic, so, another opportunity of being- change management being approached through a different lens rather than it just being here’s another tool for you. But I think what Alex was talking about, one thing that struck me, he kind of like in the beginning of his remarks and at the end, almost felt like Microsoft or any of the software companies, they have a self-serving message. No surprise. Everyone does. Right. 

Patrick: Sell more of my stuff. 

Boz: Yeah. Sell more of my stuff, which I think it was very clear when we did the Voice of the Partner over the summer, the misalignment in priorities between the three groups of vendors, that came loud and clear. When we asked the OEM providers, cloud providers and service providers, what are your top priorities for the next two years?  Kind of like a short to mid-term revenue growth, and there was not a single one that aligned between the three. And the top three were completely like, what works for me. So that’s where I think the big gap is. I think that’s where we may talk about the expectations of each other. But at the same time, unless those companies don’t sit across the table and align those priorities, could it be the application led? Could it be the change management led? Could it be sell more boxes, if you are OEM provider, you name it. That’s where, you know, that’s where I think that the big disconnect becomes, you know, and I think that requires more executive alignment, you know, having the vision, you know, having more of the co-investment part of it, understanding, like who are your top partners? Everyone wants to partner with everybody. But that then diminishes differentiation. So, pick and choose your top five, top seven, top ten partners and go deep with them and really focus on the knowledge management. So, I think that’s the big gap, that misalignment in priority when you start to peel back, you know, I think there’s so many other pieces that nobody’s addressing at scale at this point. 

What do partners want?

Patrick: So, you brought up two things I want to come back to. One differentiation and the other sort of picking strategic partners. But I wonder if you could frame out in the same way that Alex and I talked about, this is what the hyperscalers and the software vendors want from IT services companies and consultancies. When you talk to the KPMG’s, Deloitte’s, and Accenture’s, and PwC’s of the world, what do they say they want from their technology partners?

Boz: Number one, simplicity. Make your portfolio as simple as possible. I think this is, you know, because technology vendors are notorious for adding more features and speeds and feeds. Right. 

Patrick: So let me stop you right there. Is there anybody that’s good at that? 

Boz: Nope.

Patrick: Alex, do you think anybody is good at that?

Alex: Not in my portfolio.

Patrick: Okay. Fair Enough. So. All right, what’s next? That was number one. Number two. 

Boz: Simplicity from technology. Simplicity from a commercial model as well. Meaning, you know, trying to be a little bit more direct about and, you know, all these different tiers of selling t-shirts size kind of apps and, you know, and subscription base and all that stuff. Try to be a little bit more clear about it. Now it’s moving towards outcomes. That’s what the services companies are talking about and trying to be a little bit more focused on outcomes. So, we have not heard of any software or application vendor selling their portfolio outcome based. 

Patrick: Yeah.

Boz: So, there’s a big opportunity there. And that simplicity around commercial model alignment might be tied to outcomes. We’ll see who’s going to be the first one to see. 

And the third one is really about training. I think that’s a big piece of it because essentially, that’s where a lot of the trust, both because if it’s not SAP or Oracle or Salesforce at the table, the client wants to know that the services provider, could be KPMG or PwC or Accenture, it doesn’t matter. They are equally trained. They have the same technology depth because they’re on the hook and there’s a risk component associated if you are implementing certain technology or managing certain technology. So, if you’re not providing enough training, if you’re not investing in training, the resources, certifications, are something that, you know, can be overlooked and can backfire on both sides of the house.

Determining priority partners in 2025

Patrick: And that’s a perfect segue into, how do you determine who your priority partners are. Maybe a big part of it is the simplicity in portfolio, the simplicity in commercial model. Those are the two really hard ones to tackle. But training ought to be simple and you ought to be able to determine who do I need to have my people trained on. And the reverse should be true too. When you’re a hyperscaler or a software vendor, you should be able to look at the consultancies and the SIs and say, who’s really invested in training. So, if training is one component to bridging that gap between them, and simplicity isn’t going to happen, is differentiation around the industry part of it? Where? How? 

Let me rephrase this whole thing, because I want to come at it from the most useful way possible. How does a relationship between a hardware – not a hardware I don’t want to get into that – a software vendor or a cloud provider and an IT services company or consultancy, how does it change in 2025 for the better? What are the levers, the most efficient levers that can be pulled right now?

Boz: I mean, you start with the industry. I think it’s an important piece. But it’s less so at the overarching industry, I think it’s sub-industry, subsector, sub, you know, function area that actually, aligns with the depth to a particular technology component that may be available. And that ties back into strategic partners, because those strategic partners, while they are providing a good opportunity for scale, you also need to be maybe more aligned with those strategic partners in particular industry areas. You know, sub industry cloud, industry clouds and whatnot. So, that’s I think it has been discussed it’s not a new thing. That’s the part of it, that’s not, and it feels like it comes and goes and comes and goes in terms of like, you know, the discussion and the, you know, essentially clients leaving the industry, right? And the line of business manager or director, you know, they are having their particular bubble that they that they operate in. Right? So, rarely, rarely enterprises procure services from one vendor and technology from one vendor. 

Patrick: Right.

Boz: So, you need to figure out, you know, it’s yeah, of course you want to have as much as much as possible exposure and footprint and enterprise level. Of course everyone does. But you’ve got to be realistic about where do you see yourself being, you know, very strong.

A good example right now comes to mind, the recent contract we saw from Telstra. So, there was a major consolidation in terms of the vendors that they were using. You know, now they go to Accenture on the AI side, there was like 18 other vendors, you know, in this major consolidation. Telstra did a major consolidation of their IT operations, and now they’re down to using Infosys and Cognizant. So, there’s that understanding because those companies are starting to build those pillars around depth in particular function delivery area that they’re known for. So rather than just say we can do it all, try to find- and partners will be a big part of that discussion, because you need to know what are your SAP strengths at the function level and at the industry level. And what does SAP think that’s your industry knowledge and, you cannot do equally well in SAP in 19 industries. But maybe 4 or 5. But that’s-

Patrick: And that seems to be the hardest thing for the IT services vendors and IT services companies and consultancies to understand is what do the software vendors and the hyperscalers actually think about them? Not what do they tell them in terms of, you know, the marketing level at the top, and not simply the relationship based on dollars, but how do they actually tell the difference between any of the Big Four? 

I do want to pivot to another prediction that was around transformation. But, Alex, any other last thoughts on sort of ecosystem intelligence? I’m glad you started off by saying, look, this is a massive strategic priority and it’s a boardroom level issue now. But any other thoughts you have before we close out on ecosystems? 

Alex: No, I mean, I’ll just reiterate when we look at these GenAI go to markets, they’re so heavily skewed towards the ecosystem. You know Microsoft’s, their majority of their GenAI strategy, their GenAI go to market, is through the ecosystem, Salesforce is through the ecosystem. It’s really- we’re living in an ecosystem led world now, and that just continues to raise the importance there. So, I’ll just reiterate that I guess. 

Patrick: Yeah. And that’s important because the mindset from the hyperscalers and the software companies is that ecosystem driven way and the mindset from the IT services companies and the consultancies is very much an industry kind of way. That’s- they live in the same way that their clients live in it. And so it’s coming together there. 

Digital transformation is not dead

Patrick: So, for transformation, I want to just tell a quick story because I think it sort of illustrates where we are, with transformation now. So digital transformation has been a buzzword. It’s been out there for forever. We talked, Boz and I, wrote stuff years ago saying digital transformation is dead. And then last year, a little more than a year ago this time, I was on stage down in Orlando, Florida, at a sales kickoff for SoftwareOne, and was waiting to give my part of the presentation and their CEO went first and in my notes it said digital transformation is dead. It’s all about optimization. It’s all about run the business. It’s all, you know, it’s not transformation. It’s optimization. Their CEO got up and twice in his presentation behind him in huge letters was the word transformation. So, I’m sitting there changing my notes frantically before I go up on stage. Because he didn’t think transformation was dead. And I don’t either now. 

And I think a big part of it is that we’re seeing the investment by the IT services companies and the consultancies in that business model reinvention. KPMG had a term for it last week. I can’t remember what it was, but-

Boz: Transaction to transformation.

Patrick: Transaction to transformation. So, they’re explicitly using that word transformation. And a lot of that is because, we’re beyond the hangover of enterprises adopting cloud heavily post-pandemic or during the pandemic. And the bills, their cloud spend was a lot higher than they thought it would be. We heard the other day somebody talking about Microsoft, you know, their Microsoft bill was half of their IT spend. So, the hyperscalers and the software vendors have captured a massive amount of the spend, more so than I think enterprises thought they were going to when they were going to go to the cloud. That optimization has not necessarily meant a reduction in costs. So now we need to move to the transformation phase, which is I’ve invested all this money in my core IT, I’ve invested all this money in how I’m going to run my IT. Now I need to transform my business and actually change the business model. 

Who is positioned well?

Patrick: So, the question I have for you guys then is, Boz are there certain companies you think are, I already mentioned a couple, but that are in a really good position to take advantage of that new enterprise interest in transformation? The SoftwareOne guy apparently was right. Are there companies that are sort of ready for that? 

And then, Alex, what does it mean for the hyperscalers and the software companies if that fatigue around spending so much on, ERP, spending so much on cloud and then looking at SAP and saying, oh, I have to go to S4 or else, you know, by 2027 or I’m in trouble. What does that mean for their ability to continue to grow beyond the upgrades and beyond the modernization and the migration. Is there still room for the cloud and the software vendors to grow the size of their footprint within IT? 

But Boz, I’ll let you go first on which companies are sort of ready to take advantage of a resurgence around transformation.

Boz: I don’t think there’s a single company that will tell you otherwise that they’re not. 

Patrick: Okay, fair. 

Boz: But I think the challenge with most of the companies we track and we research and we talk to is it’s just a matter of business goals. Right? They want to grow the business, but they also understand there’s some foundational work that needs to keep the lights on. Right. And that’s the same true with their clients, the enterprises. So, in a way, it is- all the companies that we cover have offerings in digital, in AI, we’ve heard them investing $1, $2 $3 billion in AI in the last two/three- two and a half years. We’ve heard the same thing in cloud before. We heard a lot of them investing in interactive services, in product engineering services in some of them, even blockchain, you know, and everyone’s tried to make sure that they have the skills, the portfolio, the positioning, the partners when it comes to when clients are ready. The readiness on the vendor side is less of an issue. 

It’s about how they message and how transparent they are with themselves, with their stakeholders, meaning, you know, how much they want to focus on, lets make sure we keep running. And that boils down to culture, right? So, there are companies that are a little bit more aggressive on the innovative side, and they are able to balance securing the core and expanding on the innovative areas and drive transformation discussions with their clients. Others are a little bit more, let’s make sure we wait for the market and then we’re going to react. So, it’s like split into two camps, proactive and reactive companies. Right? But even in both camps, they’re all going to say we can, you know, do it all, but in reality the culture prevents them to be a little bit more, you know, aggressive when it comes to executing the transformation. 

So, you mentioned a couple of names. Obviously, the consultancies are always trying to find ways to drive new conversations, to expand a wallet share. There’s new ways now that they’re to come up with, you know, using managed services as a door opener to drive consulting and more transformation because they can see it as a way to, we know your IT infrastructure and all your business process optimization. So now there’s ways we can actually introduce our consultants to drive to see what next can be. So that optimization transformation takes a new angle essentially for those companies. 

You know, we’ve seen some of the more traditional IT outsourcing companies continue to capture a large amount of business, on the traditional IT outsourcing side, on the managed services side, mega deals, large outsourcing deals, And there’s nothing wrong with that because those are keeping the lights on and that buys them time to make a pivot. 

Patrick: Right.

Boz: Make a pivot along with their clients. And if we had to take a step back and clients are in the same boat, sure, US clients may be a little bit more further ahead in digitization. They are a little bit more prepared, but there’s still pockets in the US like insurance and public sector, they’re a little bit slower to move along the way. In Europe, another 3 to 5 years to wherever the US clients are and how they think about transformation. I think there’s so much more on cost optimization and efficiency that’s actually presenting, forcing, I should say, the vendors to approach those clients in a little bit more traditional way. And we saw that in our latest research, in the Voice of the Customer. A new wave of lagging enterprises entering the market, trying to start their transformation programs, and again, it presents a good opportunity for the vendors that have the chops, have the experience, have the lessons learned how to best approach it. The challenge now with those laggards is that also have to think about AI and GenAI. It may be something their counterparts don’t have to worry about 5/10 years ago, when it was all about cloud, right. Maybe they can now leapfrog and catch up quickly with AI, but that presents new opportunity for the vendors themselves. So, it’s I think again, proactive versus reactive companies and wrapped around company culture. 

Patrick: Yeah. I think I’d love to have another longer conversation on the whole managed services as a way, a back door, into consulting and what that means for the labor pyramid and all that. And I think that if anyone ever can come to me with a case of where a company actually leapfrogged, that would be fantastic. I think everybody talks about it and it almost never happens.

Challenges ahead

Patrick: But what you said there at the end about the laggards, that to me, Alex, sort of well, maybe that’s the sweet spot for growth for the hyperscalers and the software companies is that enterprises that have been behind, been slower to adopt, now see they need to make this transformation and they’re going to need a whole lot of tech thrown at them in order to make it happen. So where do you see the challenges maybe for the hyperscalers and the software companies in this, in 2025, based on all the things that we’ve been talking about?

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we talk about cloud rationalization versus investing and innovation. And you know, there’s always going to be an ebb and flow component to that. I think that I don’t know, I don’t see it in terms of laggards versus leaders. I think that when we do our cloud customer research, one of the biggest impetuses to move toward the cloud and invest in cloud technology is positioning the business for access to innovation. And I think that, you know, it’s not just the laggards that are moving towards the cloud for access to innovation. I think that the people that have already made the move, you know, they’re rationalizing. They’re looking at where can I reduce cloud spend, where am I doing things incorrectly and inefficiently, you know, going back to their IT teams to make sure that a lot of these consumption-based platforms aren’t being managed poorly. 

So, they want to look at how they’re spending and what they’ve already invested in. And make sure that that they’re doing that right. But there’s still this sense of access to innovation. I think that we live in a very, you know, it’s a very dynamic world, and you don’t even have to just talk about AI when we’re talking about changing environments. You know, sustainability is still on the docket, you know, changing political environment, maybe changing sustainable- regardless. You know, when we look at SAP, for example, you know, there’s interest in green ledger. You know, there’s because of the regulatory environment that’s shifting in the EU. So, it’s not even necessarily that it’s just that are laggards that are showing and trying to do catch up. But the people that are already there are interested in these technology solutions to new problems and to navigating through those problems.

And, you know, GenAI obviously is a part of that conversation as well. I think that we’re still in an experimentation phase with GenAI and AI broadly and agenetic AI, all the different subsets, but I think there’s still pretty strong interest. I don’t see, you know, much around people completely abandoning AI strategies. You know, when we think about operational change, there’s some companies out there that are really looking at how can I stretch my human workforce by bringing in a digital workforce. And, you know, a lot of the cloud application vendors are playing customers zero there. Like I said, Salesforce is on my mind. They’re not going to hire any developers this year because of the productivity improvements that they have seen within their developer force. 

Patrick: Right.

Alex: And, you know, that was something that really surprised me hearing that on the earnings call, because it’s such a dynamic stage for AI. But, you know, looking at the margin consideration, it’s something that makes sense for the company right now. And so, I think there’s a lot of companies out there that are looking, and understanding that maybe AI isn’t going to be something that’s a revolutionary part of my business in the year ahead. But when you stretch that timeline into the not so distant future, it is something that is going to have operational impacts and be a part of how these enterprises are thinking about the organizations and they want to be a part of that conversation, investing, so that they can be in the right position to be a part of that change.

Patrick: Yeah, that’s a super helpful way to frame it out. And, I really didn’t think about sort of the optimization continues and that’s still the opportunity for the cloud and software vendors to sell more and do more with their clients. And as you’re optimizing doesn’t always mean you’re sort of cutting. Oftentimes it can mean, like you said, innovating and finding new ways to change the business, maybe a little bit more piece by piece rather than that sort of revolution, transformative change. And everything you said about digital workers, we’re going to come back. That’s going to be our opening episode for season four in the fall, I’ll have you two guys come back and we’ll talk about whether digital workers was the thing we talked about most over the summer. 

Final thoughts

I want to end with this because I’ve asked this question a few times now of folks that have been on the podcast. So, I guess this my season three theme, I used to talk about food a lot. Now we’re talking about jobs. What was your first job? Well, your first actual had to, you know, go and get a paycheck job. Boz? 

Boz: I was an entrepreneur to start with. 

Patrick: Wow. 

Boz: I had my own ice cream cart, I was scooping ice cream, but it was, I mean, my parents obviously helped me. I was 13 years old, but that was me running it, you know, dealing with suppliers, you know.

Patrick: Nice.

Boz: Yes. 

Patrick: Okay.

Alex: I mean, I was mowing lawns and getting paid cash. My first W-2 job, though, I was a ski instructor at Ski Bradford. 

Patrick: No kidding. All right. Fantastic. Moguls? High jump or like, ski jump?

Alex: I was like, you know, teaching little kids. 

Patrick: Teaching little kids. Yeah. Excellent. 

All right, gentlemen, thanks so much. Ice cream cones and ski jumps and all that. And we’ll come back to this again at the opening of season four. Thanks. 

Boz: Thank you.

Patrick: Next week, I’ll be speaking with TBR Principal Analyst Chris Antlitz about his 2025 predictions for 6G.

Don’t forget to send us your key intelligence questions on business strategy, ecosystems, and management consulting through the form in the show notes below. Visit tbri.com to learn how we help tech companies large and small answer these questions with the research, data and analysis my guests bring to this conversation every week.

Once again, I’m your host Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst at TBR. Thanks for joining us and see you next week.

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TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
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TBR Talks host Patrick Heffernan began his professional career in diplomacy, with Middle East postings as a foreign service officer with the State Department and counterterrorism assignments with the National Security Council and the U.S. Department of the Treasury. In this bonus episode of TBR Talks, Patrick gives his unique perspective on the impact of Saudi Arabia’s recent decision regarding PwC and on consulting and IT services firms. Patrick will also share insights into how Saudi Arabia may be changing the way in which it operates with global firms.

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Submit your Key Intelligence Questions for Patrick and his guests

Learn more about TBR at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tbri.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠

TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.

Edited by Haley Demers

Music by Burty Sounds via Pixabay

Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

TBR Talks Bonus Episode: Saudi Arabia & PwC: What does this mean for Advisory Services?

Saudia Arabia, IT services firms and consultancies: What’s next?

TBR Talks Host Patrick Heffernan: Hi, this is Patrick Heffernan from Technology Business Research with a special episode of the podcast because it’s not too often that my former career and my current career come together as much as they have just recently. If you looked on LinkedIn, you’ll know that I was with the federal government for 13 years, serving as a diplomat, including four years living in the Middle East. I also traveled to Saudi Arabia so many times people thought I actually lived there. 

And then this past weekend, we got the news that the Saudi Public Investment Fund had essentially frozen out PwC for a year. And so, I got a lot of questions from both my colleagues here at TBR, but then also colleagues I’ve known for a long time, people who I’ve formerly worked with. And they were asking questions about what does this really mean? 

And I think one of the mistakes that’s easy to make is to look at the story and think it’s about PwC, it really isn’t. This is a story about Saudi Arabia and the way I read this, again from my experience, having traveled extensively and having worked and lived in the Middle East, is that this is really an opportunity for the Saudi government to do two things.

One, they’re putting a shot across the bow of all the consultancies, all the others who have been looking to cash in on what seems like an endless flow of Saudi money. The Saudi government can’t simply disrupt everything and start canceling contracts willy nilly, but they can rein in some of that spending on foreign firms, in part by sending a signal that the days of free money, the days of that free cash flow all the time are really over. So essentially, they’re sending a warning to the companies that have been making a lot of money off of Saudi Arabia over the last couple of years.

The second thing is it sends a broader signal to the market and to the globe as a whole, and the investment community as a whole, about what’s happening in Saudi Arabia now around transparency and around accountability. Essentially, the Saudi government is saying we’re holding even these global accounting firms accountable. The good old days of the bazaar is over. We are now a highly functioning, highly modern economy. Now, you can take that all with a grain of salt. Although I am hearing from people in the investment community, in the insurance community, in the banking community, talking about the pressure they’re feeling to bring people to Saudi and to hire people in Saudi Arabia now, to be more local, to be more on the ground.

So clearly, there are a lot of messages that are coming from the Saudis right now. So, the bottom line for me, it’s really a mistake to read this as a simple Saudi Arabia and PwC thing. It really is a warning to all those consultancies and the IT services company that have been pouring investment money into the Middle East, into making bets on the growth of Saudi Arabia and the growth on others. And that warning is that you need to play by the local rules. And if you don’t know the local rules, just simply don’t play.

Final thoughts

So hopefully that’s a little bit of perspective based on all my experience in the Middle East and all my experience looking at big four firms from both a competitive and an ecosystem lens. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. Again, this is Patrick Heffernan with Technology Business Research. Thanks.

TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms

Join TBR Principal Analyst Patrick Heffernan weekly for conversations on disruptions in the broader technology ecosystem and answers to key intelligence questions TBR analysts hear from executives and business unit leaders among top IT professional services firms, IT vendors, and telecom vendors and operators.

“TBR Talks” is available on all major podcast platforms. Subscribe today!

Mainframe Migration and Modernization, Featuring Scott Silk, CEO of Astadia

TBR Talks: Mainframe Migration and Modernization
TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
Mainframe Migration and Modernization, Featuring Scott Silk, CEO of Astadia
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Astadia CEO Scott Silk joins Patrick for a discussion on cloud migration and the mainframe modernization needs of enterprises globally. A recent Amdocs acquisition, Astadia focuses on the mainframe modernization opportunity within the broader digital transformation services space. Scott also shares insights into Astadia’s core partner strategy and how a smaller firm partners with larger hyperscalers, global systems integrators and legacy OEMs.

Listen and learn with TBR Talks!

Submit your Key Intelligence Questions for Patrick and his guests.

Connect with Scott on LinkedIn

TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.

Edited by Haley Demers

Music by Burty Sounds via Pixabay

Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

Mainframe Migration and Modernization

TBR Talks Host Patrick Heffernan: Welcome to TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms, where we talk business model disruption in the broad technology ecosystem, from management consultancies to systems integrators, hyperscalers to independent software vendors, telecom operators to network and infrastructure vendors and chip manufacturers to value added resellers. We’ll be answering some of the key intelligence questions we’ve heard from executives and business unit leaders among the leading professional IT services and telecom vendors.

I’m Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst, and today we’ll be talking about cloud migration and many other technology topics with Scott Silk, chairman and CEO of Astadia: an Amdocs company.

Introducing Astadia CEO Scott Silk

Scott, thank you so much for coming in, and I appreciate you being here on site at the TBR headquarters for this. Great opportunity for us to talk to people who are in the ecosystem that we cover, and in particular the company that you’re with, that you run Astadia, has been acquired by Amdocs. It’s been a client of ours for a long time, so we know Amdocs, but we haven’t known Astadia as much as we really need to. So maybe you give us a little bit of both your background, but then also what the company is doing now and sort of where it’s going.

Astadia CEO Scott Silk: Sounds good. Great to be here with you today, thank you so much for the time. So, my background, I’m a big company dropout. I started ironically selling mainframes at Unisys and kind of went up the management ranks at Unisys. And after 16 years I was voted off the boat and it was time to do startups. So, I did a series of startups ever since. The latest- how I got involved with Astadia was actually quite interesting. I was trying to retire in Naples, Florida, and I wanted to move to Naples because it was an opportunity for real estate appreciation. Because baby boomers retire, they drive property values up. And then after two weeks of retirement, my wife said, go get a job. And, I found Astadia and Astadia was interesting me because a lot of the companies in the mainframe migration space, the companies that would move workloads from mainframes to distributer or mainframes to cloud, had been in the business for over 30 years, but the mainframe never died. And I was just kind of curious that- I’m just wondering if the baby boomers retiring might have been the death of the mainframe. So, about ten years ago, I joined Astadia with the mission to build the greatest mainframe migration company and making a bet that when these boomers retire, the market was going to cooperate, and we could become the market leader. 

Patrick: Yeah, it’s fascinating. And, a couple things. I am also a refugee from the big company’s space. I was actually with the federal government for a while, which is perhaps the biggest employer, and then with Deloitte for a while after that. So, now here at a much smaller firm, it’s fantastic. I’m curious too, because of your background especially with Unisys back in the day and now with Astadia, you’ve seen the way that the ecosystem has changed, not just around mainframes, around everything technology. And so, I’m curious when you think about the way that partnering and alliances and going to market together, how much that’s changed, and sort of how critical an alliance or ecosystem play is for Astadia. 

Co-opetition

Scott: Ecosystems are very important, and we probably drive over 85% of our revenues through partners or with partner assistance, and it’s a delicate balancing act. For starters, our partners tend to fall into three buckets. They tend to be platform players, like IBM and Kyndryl. It could be the big SIs, like Capgemini or Cognizant. And it’s the hyperscalers, AWS, Azure and GCP. 

Patrick: Right.

Scott: But, it is co-opetition because if you think about it, oftentimes we’ll partner with AWS, but they also have a competing product to what we do. So, it’s delicate there. Same with the GSIs. We do a lot with the Capgemini’s, as I mentioned, and the Cognizant’s of the world, but we are now owned by a GSI. So, we have to balance those types of things out. So, it’s co-opetition so everybody wins. And then finally- similar delicate balance with IBM or Kyndryl because we have great technology to move workloads off the mainframe. But in many cases IBM and Kyndryl want to control the speed at which that migration takes place. So, it’s changed a lot because it is co-opetition and it is a delicate balancing act. 

Patrick: And the co-opetition part requires a different kind of mindset on the part of the people that do- that run alliances. In the past, it was sort of how much are we selling through you, now it’s got to be how are we partnering together to go-to-market. Is it- have you seen like a sort of a change in the way that people at a leadership level appreciate the importance of alliances? 

Scott: Yeah, they’re real business people at this point. Because if you think about it, you need to structure win-win business partnerships. So, if you’re going to partner with one of your competitors, so to speak, it’s got to work for both of you. And that’s why we’re looking for more seasoned business people for these types of roles. 

Astadia’s superpower

Patrick: Okay. Yeah. Makes sense. And then you talk about co-opetition because, what you do, maybe AWS has some of those services as well. So, there’s a company that we worked with a lot that that is really keen on talking about what their superpower is. And so, I’m curious, what is Astadia’s Superpower? Two questions. One. What is it? But then also, how well do you think your alliance partners can articulate that?

Scott: Great question. So, kind of a funny story. We made a decision to get into the refactoring space, which is the software that automates the movement of COBOL to Java or COBOL to C sharp. And we had a choice, do we make it or do we buy it? And we decided to acquire. And my investors at the time said something that I’ll never forget. They said, don’t come back to me in six months and say, “you bought the wrong company.” And I was taken aback by that because I’m thinking, I’m going to be thorough- what are they talking about? But what we found was interesting. We looked at companies like Blue Age and Modern Systems and TSRI and Cisco, ExperSolve, and they were okay. But what we found is five more companies that did refactoring, and then five more and then five more, and we ended up finding 22 companies that we had to go to school on, and we had to be thorough. And it took us the better part of two years to do a thorough evaluation on all 22 companies. So, when you get to superpower, though, here’s the way we looked at it. We wanted the tooling that was the most automated when moving COBOL to Java and C sharp. As close to 100% was the goal. We wanted automated testing because up to 50% of the time and cost of a project can be testing, and if we can automate that, that would really help deliver a great ROI. And probably the third one was enterprise class references. A lot of the people, a lot of these 22 companies we looked at, they were pretty good at POCs or pilots or nibbling around the edge or doing small projects, but we wanted somebody that could do Societe General, Liberty Mutual, AT&T, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, companies like that. And we found a diamond in the rough. We found a company called Anubex Space in Antwerp, Belgium. And they were a classic case of next generation technology, world class references. So automated, it was a generation ahead of anybody else out there. They probably weren’t the best on the go to market side, which allowed us to buy them, we could afford them. 

Patrick: Yeah. So, in your experience, while you’ve worked with big companies and small companies, it sounds like most of your clients though, in your career, have been those larger clients, you’ve been working with enterprise clients. 

Scott: Correct.

Patrick: How much have the buyers’ at those enterprise clients changed in the sense of like the decision makers themselves are so much more technologically savvy, experienced, like you’re not trying to sell them the technology anymore, right?

Scott: Correct. 

Patrick: Yeah. 

Selling business impact

Scott: Correct. We’re selling business impact, business results. 

Patrick: Does that make your job harder that you have to be able to articulate it as business impact instead of “these are the speeds and feeds and what works best.”

Scott: It makes my job so much easier, it’s not funny. 

Patrick: Yeah.

Scott: I’m the least technical person on the planet who’s run tech companies. So anytime I can have the conversation and be technology aware, but turn it a business or ROI discussion. I’m happy doing that. And to your question too, the buyers have changed. I guess I’m going to date myself when I use these terms. But back in the 80s it was the DP director and then the MIS director. Now the CIOs and CTOs that are involved in the decision-making process, they’re pretty business savvy as well. And up through the C-suite from CFO, COO, and CEO. They’re tech savvy. Yeah. So, it has definitely changed where it’s a blend of businesses, roles, technology.

Patrick: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So, at Technology Business Research, one of our- sort of the core way we described our superpower is, we look at companies by looking at their strategy, we look at their financial performance. We say, what should we expect out of that? 

Scott: Yep. 

Patrick: Do they have the right strategies, is their business model put to their strategy. Are they performing the way they should and all of those things together, including how they put it to market. You know, what can we expect out of them? So, when you think about- I know you can’t give me for financials and that’s fine. But when you think about Astadia’s core strategy, how the company/how the firm’s been doing so far and then where you expect it to go, like how would you lay those three things out? 

Scott: Sure. So, when I joined Astadia, we had a little bit of an unfair advantage. And the unfair advantage was time. Nine years ago, ten years ago, baby boomers hadn’t retired in earnest yet. So, it gave us the time to really think about what building the ultimate mainframe migration company would look like. What type of leadership team did we need, what type of technology team did we need, what type of solution offerings and so forth. So, we were very pragmatic when we built it. When we launched our new capability, it worked out really, really well. With the exception of COVID, COVID flattened things out for a couple of years. But the strategy worked really well. And I tell people that it was one of the rarest experiences in my life where we threw up a strategy on the flip chart nine years ago. Bang! It came through. It was almost like we drew it up and 

Patrick: Right.

Scott: You know, when we were acquired by Amdocs in November of last year. We were the largest player in the space, but we were also the fastest growing. We were growing at over 155%. And while our investors like that, I think the most important part was we were pulling away from the pack, which meant we were delivering value to customers. 

Astadia and Amdocs

Patrick: So, it made sense then, I mean, for Amdocs, an incredibly smart play by them to acquire you guys. And again, this is where it’s going to get a little delicate. But, you’ve been through this before. So, what were the things that you expected to be harder about being acquired by Amdocs and it ended up being easier? And what were some of the things that you thought joining at Amdocs would unlock, you know, a certain acceleration for you guys and it wasn’t there. 

Scott: Yeah. Great question. And probably the shock value is a little bit less for me because I’d been in a C-suite in a Fortune 100 company.

Patrick: Right.

Scott: But the rationale behind the merger made really good sense. And that was, let’s say we were walking into a large company and saying it’s a $50 million migration. And they look at us and say, well, you’re only $50 million. You really need the backing of a bigger company. So, Amdocs is a $5 billion company. So having that backing was important. The second thing that Amdocs brought to the table was system integration capability. When we would go into clients and move them from their mainframe to one of the clouds, we’d earn trusted advisor status. And then after that the customer would say, “well, I want to do managed services or I want to do generative AI. I want to do predictive analytics, I want to do DevSecOps,” and we’d have to bring in a partner. And now, while we still have a partner network of GSIs to do that work, if somebody wanted one throat to choke or vertical integration, they can buy it all from one location. And that’s Amdocs.

GenAI

Patrick: So, I want to come back to GenAI for a minute, but you brought up something that we’ve been fascinated by for the last couple of years, which is the shift in the way that consulting opportunities have emerged or the way that consulting opportunities have come about. And it used to be consultants were the tip of the spear. Right? They would go in and say, here are your problems, we’ll help you solve them, and by the way, there’s going to be some managed services and some other implementation stuff down the line. Now we’re seeing a lot of the managed services providers in the IT- the folks doing the implementation, they’re on the ground, in the thick of it. They know what’s going on, particularly managed services. And they can surface problems that can then bring the consultants in. In your experience so far with Amdocs, are you getting that ability to see with Amdocs’ clients, okay, here are some of the things that are that are surfacing or is Astadia bringing that capability to Amdocs? 

Scott: That’s a great question. And we’re seeing both. It’s kind of the yin and the yang of we bring some, they bring some. We’re approaching them from different places, but that’s been one of the big leverage points of Amdocs. We’ve been super busy. I mean, you come in and, you know, we have more presentations and demonstrations and things like that than we have ever had. So, it’s been a busy time, which is a good thing.

Patrick: Yeah. Excellent. So, let’s wrap up with GenAI, you can’t have a conversation

Scott: Right.

Patrick: In the last two years without talking about generative or artificial intelligence, which is fine. I know it’s part of your business. I know it’s part of Amdocs’ business. But I’m curious if they’re- just to take- you referenced your age and so, I’m old enough too. So, let’s talk the big picture, the sort of grand technology scheme of things, you’ve seen lots of different trends come and go. This one is here now, so, we’re all fixated on it. But are there certain changes you think are going to happen within enterprises around IT because of GenAI that we’re just now beginning to appreciate, and then are there some use cases that you’ve seen that are like “okay, this this is what makes it all click for me.”

Scott: Yeah. It’s so true. There’s not one sales opportunity we can go on without people mentioning GenAI, I think it’s, you know, it’s gone through its hype phase a little bit. When people started talking about it, it was going to put us out of business. And you can migrate a Fortune 100 mainframe in 15 minutes with GenAI. I think it’s kind of off the hype curve right now where people see a role for it, but it’s not going to be ready for prime time probably for 2 or 3 more years. 

Patrick: Yeah. 

Scott: That said, and I’ll go back to our superpower, I mentioned that we’re very automated. We’re more automated than anybody, and we do automated testing. The benefit to the client is we can get you to the cloud faster, more cost effectively, and at less risk. So, while I lot of our competitors will be using GenAI to go for maybe 60% or 70% automation to 100% like automation, like we are. We really can’t use it there

Patrick: Right. 

Scott: Because we’re already that automated. So, we’re looking at complimentary use cases to complement our core highly automated platform. One example might be when you move somebody to Java, and you may want to use GenAI to make it more modernized, more containerized microservices, things of that nature. That’s a wonderful use case. Another use case might be around test case automation, rather than having humans do the building of the test cases, have GenAI use that. So, we at this point see it as more of a complementary strategy to what we do. And then maybe, I mentioned 2 to 3 years, maybe the next generation of these platforms probably will be more GenAI centric. And it can be 2 or 3, if not more, years out. 

Patrick: So, it’s a good accelerant to the automation that you already have in place. But it’s not replacing that. 

Scott: Correct. 

Modernizing the mainframe

Patrick: Right. Yeah, that makes sense. One more question, because just the way you framed that out, especially the thought about migrating to the cloud faster. One thing that we’ve heard in the last year or so, has been a certain fatigue on the part of IT buyers, that they’re saying, look, you sold us on cloud, you sold us on blockchain, you sold us on metaverse, you sold it- you know, you kept selling us on all these things that we had to buy. And so, they’re saying, like, now you’re coming to us with GenAI and now it’s going to cost even more. And there was a little bit of sort of fatigue combined with, take my technology I’ve already got and make it work. So how does Astadia play in that sort of, when you’ve got a client that says, look, take the tech I’ve already got and make it work better for me, is that is that a good opening for you all?

Scott: Yeah. I mentioned our tagline is mainframe to cloud, however, we do that because that’s just a very focused part of the market to capture. There are clients that will say, I want to stay in the mainframe, but swap out Broadcom or CA and just modernize on the mainframe.

Patrick: Right.

Scott: Or, I’ve got a boatload of these x86 servers laying around, can you take workloads off my mainframe and run them on x86. And we can do that as well. But if I can close on kind of a plug for Astadia. 

Patrick: Yeah.

Scott: I mentioned our high degree of automation and I mentioned our automated testing. The biggest benefit to the client is predictability. So, in over 95% of our cases, since we’ve eliminated probably 75% of the humans that have to migrate a mainframe, because the software is doing the work, in 95% of those cases, we go in fixed price and fixed bid. 

Patrick: Yeah.

Scott: We hold the risk. And that’s very refreshing to clients that always are getting billed to death. In our case, if we say the projects $10 million in two years, that’s what it’s going to be. If it’s $12 million, guess what we just lost $2 million.

Patrick: To me, that seems like it’s going to be amazingly compelling for clients where they are right now, which is, the industry told us cloud was going to save us money and in fact, that’s the biggest bill we have now. And the same thing back- like you said, it was going to cost this and now it costs that much more. If you guys are actually coming in saying this is what it actually costs and we’ll take the hit if it doesn’t. That sort of outcomes based pricing is- we think it’s going to increase, it sounds like you guys are already on the front edge of that. 

Scott: Yeah. And our typical customers. I know there’s a lot of people that move to cloud and they’re like, holy smokes. It costs more than it did before. But on average clients save 60 to 80% annual operating cost. So, that’s a good place to be.

Final thoughts

Patrick: Huh. Alright, well thanks so much. We’re going to keep an eye on you guys. 

Scott: Sounds good.

Patrick: As you could imagine and maybe, towards the end of the year, we’ll bring you back in to give us an update on where things are and talk about how GenAI just completely disappeared or whatever the case may be. 

Scott: Sounds good Patrick. 

Patrick: Excellent. Thank you so much.

Scott: I’ll look forward to it. Thank you.

Patrick: Tune in next week for another episode of TBR Talks. Don’t forget to send us your key intelligence questions on business strategy, ecosystems, and management consulting through the form in the show notes below. Visit tbri.com to learn how we help tech companies large and small answer these questions with the research, data, and analysis my guests bring to this conversation every week. Once again, I’m your host, Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst at TBR. Thanks for joining us and see you next week.

TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms

Join TBR Principal Analyst Patrick Heffernan weekly for conversations on disruptions in the broader technology ecosystem and answers to key intelligence questions TBR analysts hear from executives and business unit leaders among top IT professional services firms, IT vendors, and telecom vendors and operators.

“TBR Talks” is available on all major podcast platforms. Subscribe today!

Building an Analyst Relations Team, Featuring Dr. Jochen Wolf, Global Head of Industry Analyst Relations for SoftwareOne

TBR Talks: Building an Analyst Relations Team, Featuring Dr. Jochen Wolf of SoftwareOne
TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
Building an Analyst Relations Team, Featuring Dr. Jochen Wolf, Global Head of Industry Analyst Relations for SoftwareOne
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In this episode of TBR Talks, SoftwareOne Global Head of Industry Analyst Relations Dr. Jochen Wolf joins TBR for a discussion on developing a successful career in analyst relations and building an effective analyst relations team. Jochen shares his perspective on how to support executives, sales, partners and the broader market for today’s AR professionals and provides realistic insights into an often overlooked, yet critical role within the technology ecosystem.

Additionally, Jochen speaks with TBR Principal Analyst Allan Krans on the roles, responsibilities and challenges in creating a new analyst relations team for a well-established, rapidly growing cloud and SaaS services & software firm.

Listen and learn with TBR Talks!

Submit your Key Intelligence Questions for Patrick and his guests: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3T9VZek⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Learn more about TBR at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tbri.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
⁠Connect with Allan on LinkedIn⁠: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/allan-krans/⁠⁠

Connect with Jochen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jochenwolf/

TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.

Edited by Haley Demers

Music by Burty Sounds via Pixabay

Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

ManTech & Peraton: How Two Leading Federal Systems Integrators Are Navigating the U.S. Public Sector

TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
ManTech & Peraton: How Two Leading Federal Systems Integrators Are Navigating the U.S. Public Sector



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Securing recompetes and maximizing execution on existing bookings are driving leading federal systems integrators (FSIs) ManTech and Peraton to success. From the challenges of private equity involvement to bidding on key government technology investments, TBR Senior Analyst James Wichert joins Patrick to discusses key trends leading into 2025.  

 

Listen and learn with TBR Talks!

Submit your Key Intelligence Questions for Patrick and his guests: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3T9VZek⁠⁠⁠⁠

Learn more about TBR at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tbri.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠

Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-heffernan-0b90785/⁠⁠⁠⁠

Connect with James on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswichert/

TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.

Edited by Haley Demers

Music by Burty Sounds via Pixabay

Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

The 6G Market Reality: Understanding the path to Monetization

TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
The 6G Market Reality: Understanding the path to Monetization



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In this episode of TBR Talks, Principal Analyst Chris Antlitz details how 6G will be rolled out in light of 5G having not delivered commercialization successes to date. Chris also reviews takeaways from the recent 6G Summit hosted by Nokia and looks at energy and sustainability, funding and commercialization challenges as well as the still unmet expectations of 5G.

Listen and learn with TBR Talks!

Submit your Key Intelligence Questions for Patrick and his guests: ⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3T9VZek⁠⁠⁠

Learn more about TBR at ⁠⁠⁠https://tbri.com/⁠⁠⁠

Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-heffernan-0b90785/⁠⁠⁠

Connect with Chris on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-antlitz-a1541312/⁠⁠⁠

TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.

Edited by Haley Demers

Music by Burty Sounds via Pixabay

Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

Black Friday: Retail Technology and GenAI

TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
Black Friday: Retail Technology and GenAI



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In this episode of TBR Talks, Senior Analyst Ben Carbonneau and Principal Analyst Boz Hristov join Patrick to discuss generative AI (GenAI) use cases in retail. Specifically, Ben outlines applications such as Computer Vision for inventory management, automated check-out systems, customer behavior applications, purchase recommendations and virtual try-ons.

Boz then segues into privacy concerns, providing insights into cybersecurity and what global systems integrators and management consultancies are offering in the retail vertical.

 

Listen and learn with TBR Talks!

Submit your Key Intelligence Questions for Patrick and his guests: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3T9VZek⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Learn more about TBR at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tbri.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-heffernan-0b90785/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Connect with Ben on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-carbonneau/⁠⁠
Connect with Boz on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/boz-hristov-2b0589a/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.

Edited by Haley Demers

Music by Burty Sounds via Pixabay

Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

Oracle Analysis: How the Vendor Has Pivoted and Where It Is Headed

TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
Oracle Analysis: How the Vendor Has Pivoted and Where It Is Headed



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In this episode of TBR Talks, Senior Analyst Catie Merrill shares her takeaways from Oracle CloudWorld 2024. Catie discusses the recent announcement of Oracle’s partnership with Amazon Web Services and how these announcements are reinforcing the vendor’s strategic goals. She also looks at what this strategy means for the future of Oracle and its ecosystem partners.

Listen and learn with TBR Talks!

Submit your Key Intelligence Questions for Patrick and his guests: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3T9VZek⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Learn more about TBR at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tbri.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-heffernan-0b90785/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Connect with Catie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catie-merrill-154899b5/

TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.

Edited by Haley Demers

Music by Burty Sounds via Pixabay

Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

PwC Boston Analyst Summit: Top Takeaways and Event Highlights

TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
PwC Boston Analyst Summit: Top Takeaways and Event Highlights



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In this episode of TBR Talks, TBR’s Bozhidar Hristov, Principal Analyst, and Kelly Lesiczka, Senior Analyst, discuss with Patrick the trio’s recent attendance at PwC’s Boston Analyst Summit. Risk and governance — long a strong suite of PwC’s — were extensively covered during the two-day event, and the TBR team shares their thoughts on what that means for the firm, their strategy and their partners. Additionally, Patrick, Boz and Kelly highlight key takeaways and overall thoughts from the event.

Listen and learn with TBR Talks!

Submit your Key Intelligence Questions for Patrick and his guests: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3T9VZek⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Learn more about TBR at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tbri.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-heffernan-0b90785/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Connect with Kelly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellylesiczka/

Connect with Boz on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/boz-hristov-2b0589a/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.

Edited by Haley Demers

Music by Burty Sounds via Pixabay

Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

Lenovo Tech World: Top Takeaways and Event Highlights

TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe's Top Tech Firms
Lenovo Tech World: Top Takeaways and Event Highlights



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In this episode of TBR Talks, TBR’s Principal Analyst Angela Lambert and Senior Analyst Ben Carbonneau recap Lenovo Tech World 2024. The pair share their perspective on strategy announcements made during the event and discuss the launch of Lenovo’s auto initiative and AI PC. Additionally, Patrick inquiries about Lenovo’s partnerships, within the context of recent ecosystem announcements, including those with NVIDIA, Microsoft and more.

 

Listen and learn with TBR Talks!

Submit your Key Intelligence Questions for Patrick and his guests: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3T9VZek⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Learn more about TBR at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tbri.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-heffernan-0b90785/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Connect with Angela on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelalambert1/

Connect with Ben on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-carbonneau/⁠⁠

TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.

Edited by Haley Demers

Music by Burty Sounds via Pixabay

Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy