Kyndryl levels up its advisory services with Consult practice

Kyndryl continues to emerge from IBM’s shadow, doubling down on using its technical capabilities and partner ecosystem to boost customer experience via its Kyndryl Consult offerings. It argues that CIOs, CTOs, and CFOs can trust its consulting services because they are based on three decades of managing mission-critical systems for global businesses and do more than just focus on legacy IBM technologies and services.

In a recent briefing to HFS, Kyndryl articulated its vision of leveraging its heritage to deliver long-term customer value. Adding a consulting service will position it to help customers retain the current value and position themselves to adopt new solutions that are relevant to their business and technology needs. They stressed it doesn’t want to be cast as another managed services provider. It’s investing in partnerships, capabilities, and employees to link the systems and architecture knowledge of running complex, 24/7/365 computing and provisioning systems to the co-innovation services it needs to deliver digital transformation efforts. As Mark Slaga, Global Practice Leader, Kyndryl Consult, aptly states, “We are pragmatic, but don’t skimp on innovation.”

Kyndryl promotes its ability to modernize from mainframe to edge with internal capabilities and differentiates itself with a broad partner ecosystem

Historically, when Kyndryl was IBM Global Business Services (GBS), managed services comprised about 90% of its business. It continues to honor its heritage as a managed services firm, but it is now pursuing various partnerships relevant to the industries and customer domains where it competes. Additionally, it embraces its heritage of mainframe and managed services as the pragmatic cornerstone for helping customers modernize existing investments, build new solutions, and deliver business outcomes.

As Exhibit 1 illustrates, Kyndryl bases its assets and accelerators on six key competency areas. Further, the firm bookends these with the recently announced Kyndryl Vital (its co-creation methodologies) and Kyndryl Bridge (its integration platform) solutions. For enterprise customers, these bookends can elevate Kyndryl from its managed services background by linking technology capabilities with drivers for business transformation.

Exhibit 1: Kyndryl consult links co-creation to integrated delivery across a six-pack of technology services

Source: Kyndryl, 2022

Kyndryl Consult aligns well with market demand for security, AI, and hybrid-cloud services

Kyndryl has developed templated migration programs for lifting and shifting ERP solutions to run complex AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) solutions across hybrid cloud architectures. These solutions might not seem well differentiated against IBM’s Garage and Cloud Paks, but Kyndryl leans on the fact their solutions are different as they remain responsible for running and managing core systems.

It recognizes that its rich history as an architecture and managed services firm lets it leverage its capabilities in monitoring, calculating, and analyzing a business’s costs of running systems, applications, and workloads. It aims to expand upon this history as a trusted technology and business services consultant. For enterprise users to buy into this story, Kyndryl must clearly be able to showcase its real-world proof that it can be a trusted partner outside of mainframe or managed services.

Enterprise buyers are advised to explore these capabilities, see how Kyndryl’s partnerships align with their strategy and explore how Kyndryl Vital can be used to bring decision-makers into the discussions about how their infrastructure needs to evolve to enable secure, data-driven decision-making. Kyndryl is betting Consult will trigger this, but it will need to prove its teams are business outcome-minded over technology outcome driven.

Kyndryl’s three focus areas reflect the investment priorities of businesses and technology leaders HFS recently surveyed as part of our HFS Pulse efforts.

Exhibit 2: Kyndryl’s top three areas for differentiation align well with the latest research about Global 2000 firms’ investment priorities

Sample: HFS Pulse, Q3 2022, n=602
Source: HFS Research, 2022

The vision is there, but the proof (as always) will be in the pudding.

Kyndryl proposes positioning itself to deliver innovative services beyond its historic GBS mandate. However, it still must prove to the market that it can provide solutions that can address its customers’ needs in parallel. Its customers have multiple organizational North Stars, creating dependencies across multiple silos where Kyndryl has built competencies. The Kyndryl Consult team will need to show that, using Bridge, it can link cross-functional teams at Kyndryl into a single delivery team that is genuinely customer-outcome driven.

The Bottom Line: Suddenly, Kyndryl doesn’t look like IBM’s discarded business unit. Instead, its relentless 12 months of partner and customer engagement are shaping it into a potentially valuable partner for its customers across technology and business.

Kyndryl’s enterprise customers can benefit from its ability to offer a broader set of offerings beyond core IBM solutions. With its growing partner network and its new Consult team, we don’t expect it to take on Accenture anytime soon. However, for companies with investments in IBM’s solutions as a core technology – Consult, and its Vital offering shows Kyndryl is committed to providing, implementing, and managing complex solutions across cloud, security, AI, and the workplace.