PwC’s industry cloud strategy delivers on 3 major cloud trends: Industry customization, collaboration with partners, and services

TBR Special Report – TBR spent an afternoon at PwC’s Boston Seaport offices in late March and came away with a clearer picture of how the firm is centralizing its capabilities into solutions to be utilized in client engagements. It is a strategy that has been developed cautiously and thoughtfully over time, mirroring the firm’s overall evolution of the last few years, which has been both methodical and ambitious. The new Industry Cloud strategy is firmly in line with the company’s DNA but is also aligned with the most current trends in the cloud market, namely services, collaboration with partners, and industry alliances and preconfigured ecosystems.

In this special report, TBR highlights that ‘PwC is tightly integrating services with all the cloud assets being deployed for the firm’s customers, which is an evolution of the long-standing Integrated Solutions program, incorporating the best of PwC’s consulting business across all platforms.’

The report states that, ‘PwC’s Alliance strategy is integral to the Industry Cloud strategy, and through these collaborations, PwC is selecting well accepted and widely adopted cloud technologies to include in the firm’s recommended cloud solution frameworks, then filling the gaps between those individual technologies. The key is not trying to recreate the wheel with technology that already exists but using alliances to bring the leading solutions together across multiple vendors.’

It goes on to say that ‘PwC is not “boiling the ocean” with its approach to Industry Cloud, instead focusing on heavily regulated industries as the firm looks for ways to not only meet regulatory requirements but also leverage investments to competitively differentiate itself with enhanced time to market and ongoing operational excellence, While many vendors on the technology side have taken an even more focused approach to industries, we believe PwC’s strategy is appropriate for the firm, given its partner-driven engagement focus and existing presence within the industries.’ 

In TBR’s view, ‘A key tenet of PwC’s strategy is also to build common cloud services that bring industry and sector-specific practices and prebuilt configurations to accelerate adoption timelines and reduce custom work. For a variety of reasons, customers are looking for diversity in their IT and cloud vendor landscapes, and PwC’s open solution frameworks cater to that desire. Lastly, industry specificity is an emergent trend in cloud. PwC is addressing the industry specialization void in the market by bringing together industry-leading technologies, tying them together with an integration fabric, and filling any gaps with its own services and innovation based on PwC’s deep experience and investments. These solutions can then enable customer business transformation spanning the front, middle and back office.’

Christian Iantoni, Partner and Industry Cloud Leader, PwC U.S. said: “Cloud is the driving force powering digital transformation today and our industry cloud capability is key to accelerating our client’s time to value. Harnessing the cloud in all its forms —whether it’s new digital revenue streams, enabling sustainable competitive differentiation, smarter ways of working, data, microservices, and infrastructure services, or delivering frictionless customer experiences — can be an overwhelming proposition. We start with the business outcome our clients are after and radically rethink how cloud technology can help you get there more quickly, by combining the power of our industry know-how, pre-configured industry-specific software accelerators, robust cloud engineering and managed services capabilities." 

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