How cloud technology drives digital consultants to become digital partners

The accelerating economy, where businesses leverage the power of the cloud, AI, and human optimization, is driving massive change across industries. This was born from a combination of two events: the pandemic and the growing adoption of cloud technology.

The pandemic has highlighted the need for intertwined technologies and actionable indicators in every industry. Modern cloud-based technology is a game changer in terms of speed, innovation, and how customers meet their customers where and how they want to interact. We see this every day when we talk to CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, and other business leaders, who increasingly require consultants to provide them with people and technology solutions to help them stand out from the competition in an increasingly challenging environment.

This new reality has created an expectation that consultants become partners. not only to identify but also to help solve the organization’s most pressing problems and, more importantly, to build trust and deliver results. lasting results. In retail, for example, businesses looking to capitalize on post-pandemic loyalty face rising digital expectations and need partners who both understand the business but also build it. that will enable them to achieve their goals.

As a digital consulting leader, I feel called to bring more experience and technology to the engagement, instead addressing the underlying business challenge and operating model opportunity. In the journey to becoming a true digital business partner, it is essential to focus on adding significant engineering and engineering talent to the cloud and digital team in the context of existing strengths. industry and commercial models.

Over the past 18 months, as part of this business strategy, The New Equation, my team has completed a number of acquisitions in the cloud space (including EagleDream and ACTS) that have added top talent to our existing team of engineers and experts. Our most recent acquisition is the cloud business of Introverts, a group of enterprise integration, AI and automation specialists using MuleSoft (an integration cloud owned by Salesforce). and other integrated platforms to enable comprehensive, intelligent, and secure multi-cloud solutions. This allows us to build and connect solutions in this new cloud-centric world, where digital integration is the core consulting ability to tie everything together.

To be a digital business partner and not just a digital consultant is to support changing business models by providing insights about the business using data to help create ambitious solutions. Recent Cloud Business research identified a major value gap in how businesses use the cloud with 92% of executives saying they were “all-in” on cloud, but only just over half (53%) saying they had realized substantial value. An engagement that simply migrates a business to the cloud without the broader perspective about a changing business model will simply not address the opportunity and promise that the Acceleration Economy provides.

Being a true digital business partner is all about helping clients create a seamless flow of data and protect that data across their entire cloud ecosystem helping them enable their digital business models, unlock value, and build trust. At its core is the critical notion of a frictionless enterprise and a composable stack of technologies, all in the service of enabling the reinvention of a business model and staying nimble for the future. A future that is cloud-first. For example, because of our recent partnerships, at a large healthcare company in the Midwest we were able to modernize existing architecture, and more importantly, help provide the digital building blocks (APIs) that they can use not only to run more efficiently and securely but to enable future growth with flexibility to adapt to the market using the composable APIs.

Professional service firms as digital business partners working to help clients build trust and deliver sustained outcomes is the new frontier and clients should expect nothing less.