Quite a few consumer brands have consulting arms that help their other subsidiaries and, in some cases, external clients boost operational efficiency. Porsche’s MHP unit, for example, provides strategy and technology support to companies in the auto sector. Boardroom Insight interviewed MHP’s head of market strategy back in July to learn more about its business. For today’s Weekly Briefing, we caught up with the newly appointed head of consulting at Cox Communications’ RapidScale technology services unit. Plus, news from Three Link Solutions, Bluewater Learning, Perficient, Eastwall and MongoDB.

RapidScale appoints a new head of consulting. Chad Duncan has joined the company following a more than 30-year stint at Accenture, where he most recently held the role of managing director. The executive led a team that supported financial sector clients representing over $130 million in annual revenue.

“As I step into the role of Head of Consulting Services at RapidScale, my focus is clear: to lead with purpose, drive scalable growth, and deliver transformative outcomes for our clients,” Duncan told Boardroom Insight. “We’re here to help enterprises modernize infrastructure, retire technical debt, and build cyber-resilient environments that support long-term innovation.”

RapidScale is part of Cox Communications, a major cable TV and home internet provider that is in turn a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises. The latter company ranks as one of the largest privately held businesses in the U.S. It employs tens of thousands of employees across its various subsidiaries.

RapidScale, which joined the company through a 2018 acquisition, has two main focus areas. The first is helping clients with one-time IT projects such as moving a database to Azure or scanning an existing cloud deployment for vulnerabilities. RapidScale also has a sizable managed services business. It can operate various components of an organization’s IT infrastructure on its behalf including disaster recovery systems, Microsoft 365 deployments and other assets. According to Duncan, one of the firm’s differentiators is that it places an emphasis on cyber resilience. That can come quite handy given the various unexpected issues that can crop up in cloud environments. 

“Whether it’s navigating platform shifts like VMware’s evolution, embracing AI for smarter decision-making, or aligning technology with business outcomes, RapidScale delivers bespoke, unbiased strategies tailored to each client’s goals,” Duncan stated. “With embedded cyber resiliency and a full cloud lifecycle approach, we empower organizations to not just adapt but to lead.”

Elsewhere in consulting 

Perficient wins a new vendor accolade. The consulting firm, which went private for $3 billion last year, was recently invited to Microsoft’s 2025-2026 AI Inner Circle program. The program acknowledges consultancies that drive significant sales of the tech giant’s AI services. In addition to raising the participating firms’ profile, the AI Inner Circle provides certain other benefits. Consultancies that make the list can participate in a series of events where their staffers are given access to Microsoft executives. Those executives provide information about the tech giant’s product roadmap and the best practices it recommends for partners.

More consulting options for Workday customers. Three Link Solutions is a Denver-based firm that helps companies set up and maintain deployments of Workday’s cloud platform. The platform focuses on two main use cases: workforce management and accounting tasks such as paying suppliers. Last week, Three Link introduced an implementation service focused on Workday GO. That’s a newly released version of the platform geared toward small and midsize businesses. The offering costs less than Workday’s standard product tier and offers a streamlined deployment workflow. Customers can set it up in 30 days under certain conditions, which is quite fast by enterprise software standards.

A new employee training collaboration. Bluewater Learning is a Texas consultancy that helps companies optimize their employee training programs. It can take over the day-to-day maintenance of an organization’s LMS, the application HR teams use to distribute educational materials. Bluewater can also load that application with custom training courses.

The firm maintains a partnership with Cognota, which offers a cloud service that can speed up corporate training professionals’ day-to-day work. Last week, Bluewater announced that it’s expanding the partnership. The companies will deliver a consulting offering designed to help clients identify areas for improvement in their employee training programs. After Bluewater finds an inefficiency, it can implement a fix. A company could, for example, have Bluewater spruce up the user interface of its employee learning portal or develop a new way of tracking course engagement. 

Eastwall nabs its fifth Azure advanced specialization. An advanced specialization is a partner credential that Microsoft issues to consulting firms. There are more than half a dozen such credentials that each focuses on a different set of technologies. Partners can earn them by meeting certain revenue milestones and securing professional certifications for their employees.

Eastwall’s newest advanced specialization focuses on the Azure VMware Solution. That’s an offering designed to help companies run VMware’s infrastructure management software on Microsoft’s cloud. The software is not strictly necessary to operate Azure environments, but it has one major benefit: many system administrators are already familiar with it. That can simplify recruiting for enterprise IT departments.

Eastwall, a Denver-based consultancy focused solely on Azure projects, says that it earned the specialization by moving thousands of virtual machines to Microsoft’s cloud. The firm previously received specializations in Azure’s data analytics and virtual desktop services. 

Vendor spotlight

More professional services for startups. MongoDB has expanded its MongoDB for Startups program, which supports new businesses that build their tech stacks on its NoSQL database. Participants will receive, among others, professional services that can help them boost performance of their databases and build AI-powered search features. MongoDB will also offer other resources. The company plans to provide credits to its MongoDB Atlas managed database service and its Voyager AI unit’s AI models. On the go-to-market side, participating startups will receive co-marketing support.

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