Semiconductors featured prominently on the consulting industry’s agenda this past week. Cadence, the Nasdaq-listed EDA provider, announced a new initiative to provide professional services for automakers. Qualcomm gained chip consulting expertise through its latest acquisition. Plus, Publicis Groupe and IBM spinoff Kyndryl introduced new services.

The big story: Steve Brown, Cadence’s director of strategic marketing, briefed Boardroom Insight on the new chip consulting services that the firm plans to provide for automakers. The focus is on helping clients develop vehicle chips based on Arm’s Zena CSS product suite. It’s a collection of pre-integrated chip modules that spares customers the hassle of linking together a car computer’s various components.

Publicis Groupe has a new AI center of excellence. The marketing services giant is launching the hub in partnership with Sapient, its IT consulting arm, and Nvidia. The center of excellence will help clients develop “AI factories,” on-premise server clusters optimized to run deep learning models It will also support Publicis’ internal AI projects.

PwC US is refreshing its organizational structure. The firm’s advisory practice currently comprises four business units. PwC executives plan to divide one of those units, the technology transformation group, into five different businesses. Each one will provide a different mix of consulting packages and managed services. 

Kyndryl will help clients move their mainframe workloads to the cloud. The IBM spinoff has introduced a suite of services focused on porting mainframe applications and their data to Amazon Web Services. The offering will make use of AWS Transform, an AI service designed to speed up software modernization initiatives. 

Grant Thornton UK has expanded its partner roster. Klaas de Vries is now a partner in the firm’s financial services advisory group, which works with organizations such as insurers and banks. The executive, who joined Grant Thornton UK in 2022, brings more than 25 years of experience to the role.

Technology corner 

Qualcomm is spending $2.4 billion to acquire British semiconductor vendor Alphawave Semi. The deal will give it access to a portfolio of chip parts that ease tasks such as building server processors. Notably, Qualcomm is also set to absorb Alphawave’s semiconductor consulting business. The unit helps clients with tasks such as designing custom chips and picking manufacturing processes.

Image courtesy of Nvidia