Brief

The client, who is a software services provider, wanted to understand the impact of the Big 4 consulting companies' impact in the Indian software development ecosystem.

The following was the insights derived from the research. 

Key takeaways

1. The Big Four - Deloitte, KPMG, EY (Ernst & Young), and PWC started off in auditing & accounting services. Over the years, they added services like management consulting, corporate finance, legal etc. Most recently, their biggest expansion and foray has been into technology services.

2. Deloitte & EY each have roughly 1 lakh employees in India - That's a fourth or more of their global employee strength. PWC has 50,000 employees, and KPMG over 40,000.

3. Deloitte says they plan to hire another 50,000 technologists in the next three years.

4. Much of the tech hiring started in the past few years, when the Covid pandemic prompted a surge in tech spending. Currently these 'accounting firms' are directly competing with Indian IT services firms like Accenture, and Capgemini.

Strategy & Roadmap

1. The most common requirement that these firms are catering to these days is business transformation. The Big 4's end up providing an entire business plan, how it can be implemented and work with them end-to-end to make it happen.

2. The tech team primarily advices the client on what systems will add value to the business, after which the process of designing and maintaining those systems begin (this is where a Tech partner or vendor comes into the picture)

3. All these firms employ cloud specialists, application developers, those with expertise in data science, automation, AI, DevOps, and the solutions of SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, etc. 

Indian Focus

1. Both EY and PWC have dedicated teams to work for clients specific in India.

2. EY India also takes care of building the tech stack of EY centers in Philippines, Australia and other locations.

3. EY India has 30,000 people in its tech practice, of which half are tech consultants and the other half are at global delivery centers looking after the requirements of EY firms across the globe.

4. In 2022, PWC India opened 3 new offices in Bhubaneswar, Jaipur, and Noida to focus on hiring local, highly skilled talent. 17,500 techies working only on Indian clients, another 10,000 on international deliveries.

5. For KPMG, the tech momentum accelerated significantly in 2018. Data was a big driver, so was cyber security. firms saw a huge demand for identity management, governance, risk and compliance solutions (mainly in the banking sector)

6. Another big driver was the growing need for customer-facing technology, rather than just back office tech.

Product Development

1. The firms have centers of excellence for product development across multiple Indian cities.

2. PWC has created a 'technology tinkering lab' which is used to incubate new technologies and co-create solutions along with customer, and technology partners.

3. Currently it is focusing on building solutions around Web 3.0, metaverse, 5G, edge computing, and generative AI.

Research Takeaway & Insights - For the past decade or so we've been seeing the convergence of Consulting (Big 4), Design (Ideo, Frog, etc), and Technology firms (ThoughtWorks, Infosys, etc) to find a sweet spot in the area of business/digital transformation where companies want to specialize in one of these areas, but offer all of the above services to its customer. We are now finally seeing it happen. As the Big four venture into technology services, they will require the expert help of Tech companies like Client to supplement its services. Now is the right opportunity to make a concerted effort (Maybe Account Based Marketing) to target these firms for new business.

Outcome

The client was able to craft targeted outreach programs with each of the Big 4 companies to register themselves as a preferred vendor. They were able to make progress in this regard with EY.