It’s not unusual for pure-play IT consultancies to enter the pre-packaged software market because it’s a high-margin segment to which their skills naturally apply. Business advisory firms, on the other hand, don’t make the jump nearly as often. That’s why Ducker Carlisle’s launch of an AI automation suite stood out in last week’s consulting news cycle. Elsewhere in the industry, Recovery Point Systems, KPMG and Marvell refreshed their leadership teams. Plus, a supercomputer powered by Nvidia chips came online in the UK.

Exclusive to The Weekly Briefing: Fabien Cros, the chief data and AI officer at Ducker Carlisle, briefed us on the consultancy’s new suite of AI tools. The applications in the bundle automate tasks such as generating requests for proposal and setting product prices.

“Our offering includes eight AI-powered solutions, supported by a ready-to-deploy AI engine that powers and monitors these solutions,” Cros explained. “This engine manages security, alerting systems, modernization capabilities, and user analytics. The AI engine serves as the foundation onto which we bolt these pre-packaged solutions, acting as the code backbone.”

Ducker Carlisle, which helps clients with projects such as corporate acquisitions and supply chain revamps, says its new AI tools are already generating value. It claims to have delivered a $5 million revenue uplift for an auto parts supplier in six weeks. The software has also been adopted by a “$1 billion aerospace client”.

Cros detailed that the AI tools are complemented by Ducker Carlisle’s “proprietary intellectual property – including pre-developed workflows, system and user prompts, specialized training and testing datasets, and a continuous improvement blueprint.”

“Through a comprehensive discovery process, we tailor the backbone code (pre-packaged solutions) to meet each client’s specific needs,” he added. “This approach delivers the cost-effectiveness and speed of pre-packaged solutions while providing fully customized end products that are embraced by users.”

Data protection deep dive: Boardroom Insight heard from Brett Moss, Recovery Point Systems’ new president and chief growth officer, about the state of the data protection landscape. He explained the role of AIOps in disaster recovery programs and why immutable backups aren’t enough on their own to mitigate ransomware. 

KPMG US has refreshed its management team. The Big Four firm’s new roster of national managing partners and national managing principals comprises ten executives. Two of them work at KPMG’s advisory practice, which includes its IT services and management consulting businesses. Patrick Ryan is the national managing partner for advisory strategy and markets, while Scott Buckley is national managing partner for advisory operations. Additionally, KPMG has named finance executive Phil Isom as its new chief strategy officer.

Marvell adds a chip expert to its leadership team. Jim Dworkin is now an associate vice president at the company’s Custom Compute & Storage Business Unit, which develops custom semiconductors for clients. Those clients include some of the world’s largest public cloud operators. Before Marvell, Dworkin headed the data center division of Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group, which sells FPGAs that customers can customize for their applications.

A customer experience consultancy earns a key vendor accolade. Montana-based commonFont has been named as a platinum consulting partner by Qualtrics, a major provider of survey software. Big brands use Qualtrics’s technology to collect data on employee and customer sentiment. If a company is new to the software, it can hire commonFont to help it with the hands-on implementation work. The consultancy also provides employee training services and ongoing support.

Innovation Solutions wants to save time for AWS consulting partners. The New York-based firm, which is itself an AWS consultancy, has launched an AI tool called DarcyIQ. The software is designed to help IT services firms more quickly complete business tasks such as registering deals with AWS. Innovation Solutions says that TD SYNNEX, one of the world’s largest IT product distributors, will offer DarcyIQ through its sales channels. 

Technology corner

The UK’s newest supercomputer came online last Thursday. Isambard-AI, as the system is called, features 5,448 of Nvidia’s GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips. The G200 is not one chip but two: a GPU and a central processing unit linked together by an interconnect. Isambard-AI can provide 21 exaflops of performance for machine learning workloads, which corresponds to 21 quintillion calculations per second. 

Featured image courtesy of Nvidia