Professional Services firm Ernst and Young and technology major IBM have entered into a multi-year deal to help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation goals. As EY and IBM join hands, the duo will leverage each other’s distinctive capabilities to create new business models by solving complex business challenges instigated by the Covid-19 scenario.

The joint offerings, according to the statement released to analysts, will be developed by leveraging the hybrid cloud capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift and the AI prowess of IBM Watson, apart from IBM’s solutions in areas such as Blockchain and 5G and edge networks.

For EY, it will be an opportunity to further diversify its consulting portfolio and aggressively drive large-scale and complex transformation projects for clients by utilizing IBM’s advanced technology. IBM will be hoping to fortify its hybrid-cloud market share and AI powered solutions in the enterprise market and make further headway in a highly competitive IT market. By marrying EY’s developer ecosystem with IBM’s enterprise technologies, both companies will look to drive compelling results for their clients.

Why does this matter?

The widespread impact of the prevalent pandemic has created the urgency for organizations to speed up their digital transformation efforts to support wide-ranging requirements of their own employees as well as clients. Due to the sudden work-from-home transition, which is likely to continue for an unspecified time, organizations are navigating a range of issues around employee and client safety, business continuity, maintaining cash flows, fluctuating business models, and collaborating virtually, among others. As such, they are in a pressing need to innovate and equip themselves with solutions that can help them thrive in the ‘new normal.’

It is interesting to observe that while companies recognize the need for switching to the cloud native applications at large, they still own a major chunk of legacy software running on their data centers due to several security- and compliance-related reasons. Now, with the remote work environment in place, enterprises are setting out on the path to modernize their apps, automate their processes, and move a significant proportion of their data to the cloud. This is where IBM and EY wants to differentiate and be seen as market leaders.

To achieve the above, technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), blockchain, data intelligence, and machine learning (ML) are going to play a pivotal role in analyzing transformed behaviors and create future-forward cloud solutions. Through this collaboration, both EY and IBM will work together to tap into the new opportunities driven by the rapid shift in mindsets, and address the evolving market needs.

The hybrid-cloud pie

“The EY-IBM Alliance is built on providing differentiating and transformational business value for clients. As organizations learn how to adapt to today’s new normal, leveraging the cloud, AI, analytics and other technologies have become increasingly important. IBM is a proven leader in hybrid cloud and AI, and together we’re developing innovative solutions to help provide the sustainability and resiliency that assist clients to operate and lead today, and in the years to come, as they reframe their future amidst an unpredictable and rapidly evolving environment,” Carmine Di Sibio, EY Global Chairman and CEO, said in a joint statement.

IBM has a big focus on hybrid-cloud and since its acquisition of Red Hat, has entered into several strategic partnerships to extend its foothold in the enterprise market. The technology major has also recently formed a strategic partnership with Adobe to help accelerate digital transformation and strengthen real-time data security for regulated industries such as banking and healthcare using hybrid cloud solutions.

“Expanding this global alliance bolsters our ability to bring our hybrid cloud and AI capabilities to clients. The EY organization is a leader in driving large and complex client transformations. Combining EY teams’ breadth of industry and regulatory knowledge, technology capabilities and longstanding strategy and business consulting leadership, with IBM’s powerful technology and Red Hat OpenShift’s open hybrid cloud portfolio, will play a key role in accelerating our clients’ journeys to the cloud,” Arvind Krishna, Chief Executive Officer, IBM, said in the joint statement.

IBM’s Watson technology, for instance, can define large set of unstructured data and provide micro business perspective. EY experts, in turn, can analyze the changed behavior patterns of consumers and employees and recommend best transformation approach to organizations.

The expanded alliance also enables EY professionals get access to the IBM public cloud ecosystem. “The new initiative supports global system integrators and independent software vendors to help their clients modernize and transform mission-critical workloads with RedHat OpenShift for any cloud environment, including IBM public cloud,” the joint statement adds.

Apart from IBM, players like H-P, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, Oracle, and Vmware have also been vying to increase their respective shares in a growing hybrid-cloud market.