For the latest installment of the Weekly Briefing, we caught up with two consulting executives to learn about the data management challenges that are keeping their firms busy. West Loop Strategy is moving clients’ analytics workloads to AWS, while Powerhouse Consulting Group is helping field services companies ensure their marketing records are accurate. Plus, insights from Teamup9 Consulting and dbt Labs about their latest business moves.

West Loop Strategy inks a new partnership agreement with Amazon Web Services. The consultancy will help clients move analytics workloads such as data dashboards to Amazon QuickSight, the cloud giant’s managed business intelligence service. The service includes an AI assistant called Amazon Q that automates certain data science tasks for users.

Why move a company’s analytics workloads? West Loop Strategy founding partner Kevin Cummings explained that traditional business intelligence tools often come with significant licensing costs. In some cases, changing the software that powers a company’s analytics workflows can significantly reduce the associated expenses. 

“West Loop Strategy helps organizations dramatically reduce these costs by consolidating reporting and analytics on Amazon QuickSight,” Cummings told Boardroom Insight. “By moving from legacy licenses to a serverless, usage-based model, customers typically achieve 50–70% savings.”

Besides QuickSight, West Loop Strategy also plans to use other technologies in client engagements. The list includes OpenSearch and Amazon Bedrock. OpenSearch is an open-source tool that eases tasks such as sifting through datasets to find the information needed for an analytics project. Bedrock, in turn, is an AWS service that provides access to cloud-hosted AI models.

“Bedrock enables us to embed generative AI directly into analytics workflows—creating conversational interfaces, automating insights, and reducing manual reporting overhead—while avoiding model lock-in by giving access to the most advanced AI models on AWS,” Cummings explained.

A new consulting partnership in the field services market. Powerhouse Consulting Group has teamed up with Scorpion to help trades businesses acquire more customers. They plan to do so using Marketing Pro, a popular marketing automation tool developed by a company called ServiceTitan.

Scorpion staffers will use Marketing Pro to launch marketing campaigns for joint clients. Powerhouse, in turn, will help ensure that the data used in those campaigns meets quality standards.

“We audit ServiceTitan accounts for duplicate customer records, unsold estimates, mis-tagged campaigns and outdated memberships, then clean and configure the system so every campaign starts with reliable data,” Powerhouse Chief Executive Officer Jenny Benbrook told Boardroom Insight.

The ServiceTitan Titanium partner, which helps field service businesses with technology and marketing projects, will also take on other tasks as part of the partnership. Powerhouse can “map workflows and integrated tools, such as schedulers, after-hours call centers and AI agents, ensuring that leads are tracked from the first call through job completion,” Benbrook detailed. “Finally, we provide training and assign internal champions to oversee campaign allocation, reconcile errors and keep reporting accurate over time.”

Teamup9 Consulting joins the Workday partner program. The Dallas-based consulting firm will help clients adopt Workday’s popular cloud applications. “As an official Workday Partner, Teamup9 has access to Workday partner-exclusive resources, templates and tools,” Teamup9 managing director Uwe Reimer told Boardroom Insight.

The partnership encompasses four products. There’s Workforce’s flagship workforce management suite, as well as two applications that companies can use to perform accounting and business planning tasks. Rounding out the lineup is Workday Prism. It’s an analytics tool that can run queries on the financial and HR data an enterprise keeps in Workday. The software thereby removes the need to use an external analytics application, which translates into less work for administrators.

“Teamup9 operates across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific,” Reimer detailed. “Our consultants bring multilingual capabilities and deep regional expertise, ensuring every deployment reflects local business norms and regulatory requirements.”

Teamup9 helps customers set up Workday applications and customize them for their requirements. For example, the consultancy can integrate the software with a firm’s other backend systems. It also helps clients manage their Workday environments after the initial setup is complete. “Our size is our strength—we are nimble, focused, and free from the bureaucracy of large system integrators, allowing us to deliver faster time-to-value and consistent senior-level expertise on every engagement,” Reimer said.

More resources for dbt Labs partners. The company, which recently passed the $100 million annual revenue mark, maintains a popular open-source data science tool. It eases tasks such as removing duplicate records from datasets and spotting errors in SQL queries. Last week, dbt rolled out an upgrade to its partner program that introduces new resources for consultancies and software firms.

“For partners that qualify, we’ll be doing more demand generation, vertical solutions development, joint case studies and events in the field,” a dbt Labs spokesperson told Boardroom Insight.

The company also plans to help partners familiarize their employees with its software. Eligible consulting firms will receive access to “expanded technical enablement includes regular training from our product experts and our pre-sales professionals,” the spokesperson said. “They’ll also get early access to beta releases and will be able to provide input on new features.”

A Boardroom Insight exclusive: A new op-ed from Robert McBlain, the global data protection and AI compliance lead at Thoughtworks, offers advice on how software teams should mitigate machine learning risks. Those risks include not only faulty LLM-generated code but also issues such as model drift and data leaks. McBlain makes the case that enterprises should embed AI champions in their development teams to ensure engineers use the technology responsibly.

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